Join the new world

Voted but I'm too lazy to write something ahahah.

I really enjoyed the Grab Bags and other community events where we GAVE money to a project or a program that in turn benefited the community. I tried such Giving events a while back and they failed miserably. then I switched to Gimme events, where players just got free stuff for nothin'... and those programs succeed.
so there's one change since the old days... we like to get free stuff but won't Give to those same programs.

but in the big picture.. the War Planners have devised a way of playing a workable game within Plato's idiotic setup. but a groove has formed, and playing for profit has ground away all the fun.

I should put an astersik up there somewhere.. there were players-- both deep pocket donors and a couple regular joes-- who donated to the programs I ran. some donated huge amounts of money and goods for me to give away. those people remembered the old days and the spirit of community building, and threw a ton of money down that hole with me.

There was also a bit more community in departments in general aside from just the funding. I am sure you remember, like we had an entire Ambassador program at one point.

I remember running it - it was a pain to run as half the ambassadors didn't do their jobs, and someone had to run in circles getting their reports and pushing them to actually talk to their nations LOL

Those were the days!

But they're gone forever I'm afraid. Too many people gone and too little to care about in this game anymore.

They were PTOed

Only one module was successfully monetized.
Most of the players not almost exclusively centered on that module departed.
The kids grew up.

And then there's the anthropology of early erepublik. Players didn't enter from rl nations so much as they did in groups from common web spaces.

That is a fair point as well, the kids grew up, got accounting degrees and calmed down haha. And that is also true, there was a good mix of people speaking any language anywhere one picked more on preference than nationality.

I agree!
it was much more fun before. Our finests moments were when we as a nation, or a group, or a party all stood up for a common and larger goals, larger by ourselves as individuals. Now the individualism seems to be the largest and only goals, by hunting BH and SH medals.

Often seems the case, who has the best profile maybe?

So true! I used to play this game 13 years ago and then gave up. And I cam back this year-that's the most apparent thing-players only care about BH's and SH's. Just like the people in the real world-caring about their own interests rather than big goals.

The community has more interests yes. Like for example: keep your country whiped. 🙂

o7

The international commie collective that joined together in Czechia was definitely one of my all-time favorite episodes.

There was a similar movement -- very early on, in V1 I think -- of lefties who all moved to Russia to create a "super commune". The idea was to crash the capitalist market and replace it with a collectively-run one. Kind of worked too until a, umm, well let's say, an anschluss of oligarchy bots, put an end to the scheme.

Mobilizing... we used to have reasons to mobilize, to gather numbers of players to a certain task, to accomplish a battle thing or a political thing..
now mobilization amounts to pinging party members to vote up an article, and even that gets half assed results.

eUK very much ran a commune system for the military, and it worked really well for quite a long while. Then they changed the game (again) and it wasn't worth doing any more.

I remember the Super Comune

a fantastic article about the good old days of erepublik, back when e-nations engaged in heavy roleplay and wild wars...

i could say that some great moments were the old wars of e-slovenia VS our e-switzerland,
or the time when we got invaded by the e-romanian MU ''nemesis'', and mungos035, vincent, rican, me and other veterans of e-switzerland lead a resistance movement and we kicked them out, after some very hard battles.

i also liked the heavy roleplay that occured in old e-north korea too, which tried to imitate the insanity of irl noth korea.
or the wild moments of e-pakistan, to which they remain playfully faithful to this day.
or e-japan's cool roleplay of their CP being their emperor, and them running e-japan as an imperial nation, but with a progressive congress, aka the japanese congress/the imperial diet.

e-UAE (united emirates) also ropleplayed as a modern kingdom of emirates with fun moments too,
and i definitely forget about some other cool e-nations too.

but yeah, i would love to see more fun political events in this game, and to see new e-nations being added in it,
to have new quests, new events, and new medals to earn...
this games needs more things in order to become fun again.

o7 from just before your time in Switzerland. Paul and Rican vs Clifford Burns and company, the PTOs and re-TOs, our fledgling little Swiss Armed Guard and trying to convince the big alliances to regard us as something more than just a pathway nation..

These memories bind us to this site.
Greetings from Nemesis! o7

And Imperial Japanese nation is in my memory somewhere. It was pretty cool.

At one point I got up at 5 am to support a RW in Eastern Macedonia to liberate it from the bulgurgurs. I still remember posting my first ever Battle Hero on Facebook, back a long time ago in 2011. I had fun on this game, met people with which unfortunately I am no longer in contact, but it was a f-ing fun game back then. But I was also 15 at the time so, I guess you kinda grew up. Now I'm hanging out here only to make my account stronger in order to exchange it for some amount of economic commodity sometime in the future.

setting our alarms to meet up in a battle room, hitting when we're told and watching the wall..
then going back to fucking bed.

Absolute dedication when you would wake up at 5AM to hit up the browser game. It felt like consequences were much higher back then.

Sub 84

I never got the chance to see that but I wish I could have.

I can remember the days when defense teams were up for 36 hours straight trying to prevent country wipes and throwing everything they could at fighters to fight... those days are now long gone.

Most of the problem I think is that gradually it has turned more and more into a game designed for "log in twice per day and click a few times" and not a game that actually has any depth any more... the political module got dumbed down (not more mayors etc) and dumbed down (no more running for specific places for congress) and dumbed down (just sign up to a list and maybe you'll get in if the PP puts you high enough up the list... no actual work involved in trying to win over the people of a region any more!). The military module having been through various changes only requires you to choose a battle, choose a side, set off the thing to autoclick.

There is nothing about this game any more that actually *requires* engagement. And that right there is the problem - the simpler they made it the less invested people have become.

great take.

Have expanded this in my own follow-on article https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/where-s-the-fun-2769485

Same with the economic module. It mostly consist of WAMing, with a few industries still needing employees. No more differences to production based on skill, wellness, or employee count. Countries can't get money out of the treasury so taxation is pointless and government programs are shadows of what they used to be. No more informal and international trading. Etc.

"I can remember the days when defense teams were up for 36 hours straight trying to prevent country wipes and throwing everything they could at fighters to fight... those days are now long gone."

Still happens/happened

As Rainy said, the kids grew up and moved on to other, more grownup, things. I'd bet that a majority of the people who played back when this game was new now have kids of their own.

The gaming landscape is much larger and more competitive than it was then; you have all kinds of flashy games with wild graphics that require nothing more than mindlessly pressing buttons.

But something else Rainy said really hits: back then, entire communities joined. I know I recruited several people to join from LiveJournal, which is a ghost town now. And there aren't that many such communities left -- Facebook is for "old" people (who don't game), Twitter is a weird cesspool, I could go on. But the key is back in the day one of the reasons people played was for the community. You could come here, find a group of reasonably like-minded people and try to accomplish something together. We used to hang out on IRC and talk about strategy, game mechanics, and so on, but other things as well -- it really was a community. Nowadays, there is so much social media that people already have their own communities -- a game like this has little pull for people looking for community.

It used to be exciting because people cared enough to have debates and really invest in the game; nobody does that anymore -- everyone is jaded and playing out of habit rather than passion. That doesn't make it anything to get excited about for new people interested in accomplishing something. And the game has largely been "solved": people know more or less what needs to be done, so there's no challenge to it, no discovery, no debate (figuring out WTH was going on and how "best" to get things done is what kept me involved back then). So more and more people gradually drop out, and they aren't being replaced by new players.

I've wanted the developers to add a new combat mode, like Space, for years, but nothing much is happening on that front. I assume they figure the game is in a slow death spiral and the investment isn't worth the return they can expect, plus with every new change they lose players who hate the changes, so changing things is a bad risk. And this is where we are.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/019/798/donttalktome.jpg

Maybe the larger contingency of people just sort of made for more eccentric thinkers as well, more people willing to LARP and have a good time.

It's something of a virtuous circle. More people ---> more characters ---> more interesting game ---> more people.

Помню как начинал играть в 2010 году, когда ещё был студентом, заканчивал университет, заводил будильник на 3-4 утра что бы повоевать парой куликов против Польши, затем реал ботов через ананомайзеры, чтобы хоть как-то получить золото и купить компанию, затем был банк, и вот спустя 12 лет я снова в игре, мне 35, у меня семья, ребёнок, работа, иногда даже игра мне снилась та игра из 2010 года...

Sweden has some fun rp going on

Oh yeah? Color me intrigued, what is going on over there?