Join the new world

Hi there, America!

This is going to be the first article I'm publishing in my new country. My country of origin is (e)Germany, which is why my newspaper has a german name - "Edle Tropfen" would be "Noble drops" in english. You may thank Otis84 for his great idea. 😉 Also, if there are major or minor mistakes in my article, I'm thankful if you tell me in the comments.

As you of course all have seen immediately after logging in today, our beloved and kind admins decided to give us more strength! Yay!
The friend bonus and the NE bonus are gone, but who the heck cares if we now can acquire up to 46.8 (45+1,8 average daily bonus) strength each day? That's a Super Soldier medal nearly every 5 days! Awesome!
Of course, you'll have to pay a little fee for being able to feel the awesomeness lying within these updates, but who wouldn't want to pay 80 gold if he can furthermore improve his strength level? Exactly, no one.

Well, the younger and poorer players maybe, but to be honest, who really cares about them? The last update caring for them was the update with the daily and collectable bazooka and energy bar when fulfilling the military unit's daily order. This was, in my opinion, the best update I can remember, maybe except for working in every company in one click - it became quite annoying. However, this update made Battle Hero and even Campaign Hero medals achievable for everyone. If you have enough weapons to perform the 25 kills according to your daily order, you get at least 30k(+7*your hit) of collectable damage each day. Of course, it's still much easier for a stronger player to get his medals, but with a little patience, everyone can get one. This led to quite a lot rage among medalhunting Tanks, but it satisfied a huge lot of younger players who can now wait about a month or so and then start hitting for the battle hero medal like a champ with the bazookas he gathered.

This latest update, however, is again extremely in favor of older and gold-buying players. One could argue that by distributing more strength, the relative distance between the players shrinks, which is a fact - but the reality is of course a lot different. Younger players can't even afford boostering without buying gold, how should they be able to pay 20 or in the end 80 gold just for being able to train as much as the tanks do? It's just impossible. Imagine becoming a new citizen of eRepublik in about 4 months, imagine watching your strength of less than 100 and comparing it to players with more than 20.000 strength (along with the rank of God of War, God of War *, God of War **..), imagine yourself realizing you'll have to buy a pack of gold to invest 80 gold for the training centers upgrades and to invest 3.47 gold more each day for boosting your strength - just to make sure that the distance concerning strength in between you and the tank whose profile you just watched with tears in your eyes will stay at about 20.000 strength and not become even bigger. While not having built one single company yet - but hey, a Q5 tank company will only cost 380g without upgrade discounts! And those 200g for somewhen upgrading it to Q6 really are peanuts.. Now that's a wonderful future to look at. It's quite obvious why an estimate of 90% of all newbies won't make it longer than a week, they just compared a 40k-kill on a battlefield and their own kills with a two-digit influence and thought: Nope, it's pointless.

Of course, this is written from the perspective of a weak player with not even 5k strength, of course there is the other side that players who want to invest real life money (and thereby keeping the game running) have to have significant advantages. But those advantages keep on growing and newbies will only have "a chance" if they immediately purchase a 300g pack and train madly. For myself, when I joined the game, I looked at some profiles and it was quite obvious for me that I'll never really matter on the battlefields, because I refuse to invest real life money. It was and still is okay for me (got even better actually, due to the mentioned bazooka update), but I'm sure not everyone thinks like that. There is also not much else to do, the economy is basically just about building more and more companies and selling more and more stuff (often to the bot) until you're somewhen able to afford the training boosters. The media? Cool, how about getting a Media Mogul medal by participating in a tit for tat subbing game? Politics? Congress votes can be bought, also, the possibilities in the politic module aren't too big. Buy some votes to reach your congress place to finally be able to donate money from the country account (even twice per period!) - isn't that awesome?

So, this was one of the infinite articles crying and bitching about the evil admins trying to make me sleep under a bridge just to boost my strength. But, guess what, complaining won't really change too much. The admins don't need to fulfil the expectations of a bunch of non-gold-buyers, they have to satisfy their customers. As long as they're okay and as long as they keep buying their gold, everything's fine.

Now what remains for the "normal people"? I really have to say I'm having a good time here. And this is for the same reasons as for most of the people, they're here for the community. I found a lot nice people here, and complaining together is much more fun than doing so alone. So, if any younger player may read this: Join a military unit, join a party, make friends, visit the forums (eUSA, military unit, party), join the IRC channels, talk to each other. Train daily, work daily, sell your stuff, reinvest, collect bazookas, run for a battle hero medal, get it "stolen" by a much stronger player, collect bazookas again, try again.. But besides that, try to get involved in the community. The stuff I wrote above had a quite negative touch, but in the end, this game isn't too bad if you play the metagame and make friends instead of just doing your daily clicks and doing what the game itself offers. Write articles and eventually have 20 subscribers enjoying it rather than having a Media Mogul medal without a single article published. Collect your bazookas and get a Battle Hero medal and be happy about it instead of getting two of them each day and thinking "meh, thx for my training gold". If you want to have fun here, you can have fun. It's up to you.

Edelmann