Triumph of idiocity

Day 2,470, 10:15 • Published in Turkey Czech Republic • by Rhual



This is a translation of a Hungarian article, which summarized the game nowadays. A little bit long, but believe me, it deserves to read!



In the first years of this game, at 20-30 strength, each single strenght point counted, but nowadays, the age of the inflated 80-90k strength accounts, that's a thing of the past. And yet strength alone doesn't define potency on the battlefield, but the amount and kind of additional resources that increases damage, EBs, boosters etc. The focus has shifted to pay-to-win with all these resources, instead of just strength. The Energy Bars can be bought by money, the BH, TP, FF medals can be earned by the Energy Bars, which means money. Because of this, the game is already about the money.





I see again lots of parallels with RL. Complete thoughtlessness by the devs characterizes the middle and long term planning of the game (if the planning exists at all and they’re not just improvising ad-hoc). It is very unpleasant to witness how the development of the game has panned out. The daily game is dead and became totally static, leached and castrated in all parts, it’s clear now. This is already the past.

The discounts and events (tournaments, missions) produce the only variety. The planning of these events are always quasi-thoughtless.

The implementation is not just poor, but the standard is catastrophically bad.

I simply don’t understand, how do they allow this boat to wobble so? These events where it was possible to gain enormous rewards very easy has totally upset the game balance (the snowman winter missions were the good example). Later (only afterwards, subsequently) they realized it and the next ones had unbelievably weak rewards, of course the interest was minimal, the activity decreased radically everywhere.

Not so long ago, those who gathered up thousands of winter bars were able to convert them to gold. Thousands of gold were made from thousands of winter bars. Huge properties came into existence, all in all the rich got richer. The boat tilted again.
At the last MU tournament, they weren’t thinking (again), and created an event where the GoW ranked players could have been easily jumped to Titan in no time, the popping bazookas suddenly would have turned into sledge-hammers with nuclear propulsion.

But they intervened and hours after the event started, they suddenly realized their mistake and cut out this opportunity, so the event has been castrated.



I say it once more, they are not thinking, there aren’t any thoughtful events or game planning, and there only recourse is to intervene in the running of events to fix them as they go along, enraging those players willing to invest money, who feel betrayed because of the subsequent alteration of the conditions (note: the price of the bazooka parts have been repaid, but doesn’t make changes in this message).


This is 100% the mistake of the paid employees of the eRepublik. They don’t have any idea what they should do with the dead modules, the dead economy and the thousands of crisis phenomenon. Missions are planned instead of the game getting fixed. They act in haste, make changes retrospectively, quarrel and estrange the active base of players once their payment is received.

It’s not possible to create a working economy, because favouring the small players means hundredfold profit to the big ones. It’s not possible to reward the small ones with EBs, because the big ones get it hundred times in the same event.

In the business model of the free-to-play net games, only 1 kinda resource exist: time. The invested time, which the player devotes to the game. Who can’t or doesn’t wanna spend so much time with it, they can buy those stuff to catch up with RL money, which helps to climb the same mountains like the others who spend 16 hours in the game day after day.
The operator of the game, the company, the owners run this game, pay the server, the employees and go holiday on the profits. If the players don’t buy golds, it means game over.

But this business model was upset in Erepublik. The rising players feel, investing any euro would be a waste, because they never catch up to the top accounts.
Thanks to the negligence and bad planning, the game is now fundamentally flawed.


I thought for long that this tactic is conscious and because they have neither power nor motivation to modify or reform this game, they are planning in the shortest term, in order to maximise immediate profit. That’s why the huge amount of discounts and events, get as much money as possible from the dangerously decreasing player base. There isn’t any plan even for middle term, there isn’t any vision in the owners’ head for the future.

My opinion changed after the last umteenth event failure: I realised I had too much faith in the developers, now I realise they are simply stupid, they don’t understand what’s going on. Whoever creates these missions that work so poorly obviously hasn't the competence nor talent to be employed as they are.

It’s not so promising to be an eRepublik pensioner.