The Economist ~ A world without WAM
Spite313
Dear friends/admins,
A few nights ago I was reminiscing with some old friends on the eUK discord channel about how the game was in V1, and some of the challenges we faced. The first war I fought in (the ATLANTIS invasion of eFrance) ground to a halt as all the major forces involved literally ran out of weapons. Most players had only a few Q1 guns, and in those days health regeneration was based on hospitals (50 health per day) and gifts (10 health per day), so unless you used wellness packs (0.5g each) you could only fight 6 times. Even wellness packs were limited to (if I recall correctly) 80 per day. And yet we still ran out of weapons, despite the number of fights being so low.
What changed? There have been lots of changes to the game since then, but the biggest one in terms of supply/demand has been the introduction of “Work as Manager” or WAM. WAM allows an incredibly cheap, almost endless supply of raw materials. It cuts down the price of everything, makes the highest quality weapons (Q7) so cheap and plentiful that all other qualities are unusable.
This article is a thought experiment therefore. It asks the question: what would happen if tomorrow the admins decided to change all our companies so that you could no longer work as manager in them. What if every company required workers to produce goods? What would happen next?
Raw Materials
The two biggest products which are produced by WAM are Weapon and Food raw materials. Currently these are produced for the minimum possible cost, and make very small profits and have long returns on investment. The low cost of WRM especially has an impact on the cost of weapons. Here is a breakdown of a Q7 weapon (in peacetime) by cost:
WRM cost = 9 currency
Wage cost = 20 currency
Profit = 7 currency
Now let’s work out how much raw materials would cost if the admins straight up deleted WAM. To compensate for Q1 etc companies having no worker slots, I have given all companies +1 worker slots (so Q1 and Q2 have 1 worker slot, Q3 and Q4 have 2 slots and Q5 has 5 slots). This is what it looks like:
As you can see, this is a very unbalanced outcome, with Q5 being considerably better than the others. I will address the balancing issues in the last half of this article. But let’s assume then that the cost of WRM went from 4.5cc to 80cc. What effect would that have on weapons? Let’s have a look:
And then taking into account uses…
So in the worker’s-only world, weapons are really expensive, and still disgustingly imbalanced. Again, I’ll address that later.
Food
Right now, the entire world supply of food is produced using WAM. Whereas weapons companies do employ workers, employing workers in the food industry is not viable at any Quality level. Removing WAM would make food- and health regeneration- prohibitively expensive.
As you can see, the food industry is also woefully unbalanced and this is due to the random production amounts, the arbitrary number of workers and so on. As a result, Q6 is the most efficient food company if you’re running workers-only.
Shortage
So with this in mind, how many workers would it take to say, hit one hundred times in battle? Assuming you bought the cheapest per-use weapon (a Q7) and the cheapest per-energy food (Q6):
83 Q6 food = 5 FRM (1 worker) + 0.415 workers (for the actual production of the food)
10 Q7 weapons = 20 WRM (4 workers) + 0.5 workers (for the production of the weapons)
That would mean hitting 100 times in a battle with a Q7 weapon would require the daily work of 6 workers. Admittedly, that’s with the current (broken) balancing, but it highlights one factor very obviously: there would not be enough workers. Currently hitting 100 times uses (approximately) 0.5 workers. This means that you require 12 times as many workers to perform the same task. Effectively this means that global Q7 production would be around 8.5% of its current level. We would experience shortages.
Or would there be enough? Our current expectations about fighting are based on the idea that really none of us face any shortages anymore. Weapons, food etc are no longer limiting factors in how we play. We essentially churn through these products in their thousands without even considering acquiring them to be challenging. Individuals regularly give away hundreds and hundreds of these products. They have become valueless.
Would adding expensive products back into the game make things more interesting? I actually think it would. Having most people only able to afford lower Q guns would create a more strategic playing style, where people saved up and kept their best guns for important battles. Where “food fights” barehanded or with low quality weapons became more common. Where grinding for rank became incredibly expensive. Rather than have a game where everyone is shadow-boxing against easily achievable and meaningless targets, we would have a game which is difficult, where people have to prioritise and where every battle is not just about how many fighters you can bring, but about how much they are willing to sacrifice in order to win.
Rebalancing
Naturally the module as it stands now would not function. Items do not scale well. The general principle behind any rebalance is that higher quality products should give more of a bonus, but should cost increasingly more to use. This would then reflect luxury items in the real world, where products become increasingly expensive for ever smaller gains in utility. There will still be a demand for the most expensive products (for battle heroes etc) but for most ordinary players they will have an actual choice of products, rather than simply buying the most expensive product as it is the only one with any utility.
Below are my free thoughts- not a finished product but just some ideas about how things could look.
Weapons
I will offer three possible models for weapons. Option 1 is a simple rebalancing of the way weapons work in order to make lower quality weapons actually viable. The second and third options are much higher cost options, which I think would be better as they would make lower Q weapons not just viable, but necessary.
Option 1
The same WRM changes for both options. Firstly all qualities of WRM would have the same production. Since they all produce the same product, and difference in production only serves to make everything but the highest Q unprofitable. However, higher quality companies can employ more people, and per-worker are slightly cheaper to buy. Everything has been changed to currency to fix the variation in profitability for companies, which is currently dependent on gold prices.
In this option I have made a few changes. Firstly I’ve made all weapons have the same usage (10) because this is not a sensible variable to have alongside weapon effectiveness (the bonus). Secondly I have rejigged the bonuses so that weapons become increasingly expensive to use per-damage as you go up the Q. This means a higher quality weapon is not the best option for someone low on money (as it is now) but is something more for a player with a lot of strength. This would also significantly increase the damage of using a Q1 weapon (more than double) over barehanded fighting.
Option 2
In this version I increased the WRM requirements per weapon by 50%. This put the price of weapons up correspondingly.
Option 3
In this option we double the WRM requirements.
Effect on scarcity
In option 1 we would use the same amount of WRM, but this would be produced by workers at (5*bonus) per worker. This means that 20 Q7 guns would require (at 200% bonuses) 3 workers instead of one.
In option 2 we increase WRM requirements by 50%, meaning that 20 Q7 guns would require 4 workers.
In option 3 we double WRM requirements, meaning 20 Q7 guns would require 5 workers.
However, lower Q weapons companies require less WRM to produce the same amount of guns. This effectively means that as more people shifted to using lower quality weapons, less workers would be required per hit, and this would in turn reduce the (initial) upward pressure on weapons.
Food
Food currently has a situation where all food can effectively be produced for the same price-per-energy. Despite this, people pay more for higher Q for no real reason. With food there isn’t really an option for scaling damage bonus, so it does make sense to have all food essentially the same (but with different levels of energy restoration).
In my redesign I have made a few changes. I won’t list all the formulas here, but this is based on 400cc wage and 200% bonuses. It is fully scalable and proportions remain the same regardless of wages (down into the commune range) and bonuses.
The main changes are:
1. As with weapons I have made the companies have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 10 workers.
2. The FRM requirement per unit of food has a raked scale, so the higher quality products require slightly less FRM per unit. I will explain this a little more below.
3. Output has been doubled. This is to compensate for the wages, which would otherwise mean that the majority of the cost of the Q1 and Q2 products would be the food workers wage (and this would mess with scaling). So I increased productivity and increased FRM requirements to compensate.
4. I increased energy restoration, so Q1 now restores 5, Q2 restores 10 (and so on- 15, 20, 25, 30 and 50). This again helps with the scaling, and also makes more sense since energy restoration is usually in chunks of 10. I recognise this might need tweaking due to the fact that nobody would want to use a 50 energy unit to restore 10 health, but that problem does include Q6 and Q7 currently.
So how would the scaling work? Currently most people have at least one Q1 food company. Even in a future world it seems likely that the majority of companies would be lower Q companies. They would supply most of the world’s demand for food products, and would do it at close to the profit margin for Q1 food (so around 0.4cc per energy in this example). The rake would mean that if you owned a Q3 company, you would make 0.02cc profit per unit (200% bonuses, 400cc wage), at Q6 it would be 0.05 and Q7 obviously 0.1. This is purely in this example, but it scales as I said. This makes higher Q companies always worth investing in, but I believe the cheapness and availability of lower Q companies would balance out the better productivity of the higher Q companies.
Honestly, between this and weapons, this is the weaker model and I am still looking at how to optimise it. My feeling is under this model higher Q food would be too profitable, but without ridiculously large outputs it’s hard to scale. I will think on this some more.
Factory prices
In order to make this system work, the prices of factories would also have to change. The idea is to make higher quality companies rarer, and lower quality companies viable, but still not easy to acquire. For this reason the price of all companies would go up.
When I started playing I had a few Q1 and Q2 companies, and just with those (around 300g worth) I was a very rich player. These days, everyone has companies, and there is a glut of worthless low quality companies. A 10g entry level company is far too cheap - by a factor of 5 at least. People should have to think about and research their company- otherwise the market just ends up flooded with noobs with stupid prices.
Assuming with weapons for example that each company made an average profit of 10%. This would mean that in a year, they would make the following income (in gold, 450cc/gold):
Q1 = 45g
Q2 = 117g
Q3 = 214g
Q4 = 337g
Q5 = 487g
Q6 = 1103g
Q7 = 1622g
I think a year is a reasonable ROI, and so these type of prices could be used as a guideline for roughly what the prices of companies should be under the new system.
Conclusions
Would a world without WAM survive? Yes it would. Under the hypothetical model above, global product supply would drop to around 25% of the current level. Prices would correspondingly rise, as would wages, until a balance was found. Fighting would become rarer, but more meaningful (no more 70 active wars). People would care more about saving money and resources. Countries would be more hesitant to go to war. Wars would become more expensive (not in real numbers, but in terms of what percentage of world resources were required).
I think this kind of change would require a certain level of soft reset from the admins. Perhaps a conversion for companies between “old style” and “new style”, or simply an option to dissolve at full price and rebuild. It would be a daring move, but in my opinion some move is needed in order to save a moribund and dysfunctional economy.
This article is purely a thought experiment, and perhaps a gentle nudge for the admins, nothing more. The numbers are not carefully considered, but done on the fly. Please do not take this as a serious proposition, it is a very rough proof of concept. The numbers do not all work and I know that, so no need to tell me!
I hope that you have enjoyed this little detour from my usual programming. Please feel free to let me know your own thoughts, ideas and feelings about it in the comments below. I do read them all!
Iain
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Comments
First comm
I had been thinking these article was about George Michael's Wham for a couple of days.
The Tycoon Pack and 1cc multi-workers would make production unprofitable for fair playing people.
100%
And a lot harder for admins to monetize given the current state of the game.
Multis existed in V1 too, but companies were still profitable before WAM.
voted
You forget we already have a similar situation with air weapons: they are so expensive, it is cheaper to buy energy bars to make the same damage, and double your experience points on top of that.
If food production were drastically reduced, packs which offer increased energy storage and regeneration would be pointless, since there would be no food to use that potential. Packs sale would plummet.
As I pointed out in my Open Letter, it is pointless to "attack" one module at a time, in this case WaM. As soo as you think you have fixed one thing, another issue arises. In fact, the more you try to fix the game, the more you screw it up. The only way to fix the game is to bring it back to a point where most of the modules worked solidly, and that is V1. And that is not going to happen as long as there is around 1000 players giving 50 euros/month each for the packs. And even when that stops, admins might decide to abandon eRepublik completely and shut it down, instead of restarting as V1.
Air weapons are broken because of the formulas, and the way they are designed. Yes eb cost would have to be taken into account.
They'll never go back to v1 because it was unprofitable and ultimately they are a business.
Today, eRepublik brings roughly the same amount of money to the Labs as it did at the height of V1 (a little over half a million euros). Except the game design as it is today is more high maintenance, tehnical support is more expensive, and the game itself is getting more and more negative reviews. And that is after a multi million euro investment, which happened after V1.
V1 was profitable, just not profitable enough for them greedy bastards.
I know for a fact that V1 was not profitable.
some countries already try lowering the WAM. 8% tax is too much for me, but they can make it even higher.
it is self balancing market that mitigates the new players. making head count more meaningful will improve the balance.
disabling WAM for some companies is interesting option. let weapon raw be without WAM 😉
Work Tax is dependent with WaM. And because the fact Work Tax is maybe the most revolutionary feature we have in this V3 game, I strongly disagree with any proposal to end the WaM.
The same amount of money would exist in the system, it would just move differently. You would tax it in different ways.
In that case, the company's owner should be taxed over all the production made by workers, to emulate the current Work Tax.
The workers would be taxed (as they are now). The way you could claw that income back would be through VAT.
Then we come back to first base.
We both know VAT can be eluded via black market. Work Tax was implemented precisely to avoid that elusion, but, also, it allow to manage a new dimension in political module (the fact community haven't use it until now, is another topic), and have the capacity to fulfill the same goal you show in this article: making goods scarce.
Then, again: Work Tax is dependent with WaM. And because the fact Work Tax is maybe the most revolutionary feature we have in this V3 game, I strongly disagree with any proposal to end the WaM.
The "black market" is a really tiny fraction of sales.
A world without WAM = A world full of 'less developed accounts' working for 0.01 per day.
The future would belong to the nation with the ability to stimulate the production of 'new players'.
"They would just make multis" has been an argument since day 1. It is still a reality. You can't plan your whole game around that. Some people will cheat, and you need to catch them and ban them. Even if they are "top customers".
You pretty much explained how it all worked before WaM. Orgs and tax evasion by buying and moving gold and suddenly it works again. eRep's fairness policy urine strategy. Today everyone, even new players, are equals. Black market is blasé. As for fighting, 6 shots and you're out! I remember sitting in IRC for hours, then "NOW! GO! GO! GO!". You had one shot to get a battle won, timing was everything. Now I WaM my Q5 for basically nothing and sell a couple packs to buy Q7's. Mindlessly clicking so I can win another worthless BH.
*urine strategy?
Meant to write "ruined" strategy but I think spell check is correct, admin pissed on strategy.
I;m not sure what I think to the economy and the best ways to change, rather than the removal of WAM maybe a reduction of the gains, maybe 50% of a worker
They also need to do something about air weaps either that or remove them, houses would change a lot with changes to WAM so can't judge them as they are currently
I've also worked out I really need to move my weaps stuff from Scotland just need the time to work out worthwhile places to pick, and to factor in travel costs
The other approach is to argue that there is only a limited number of hours per day and so you can only work in 10 places per day - be it your own factory or working for a wage in someone else's. If you can only work in half your factories daily then you half the supply of goods being made and might need to prioritise your production.
The other opinion is to make working in your own factories take 15 health and only 10 for working for others. Basically in the case of making it a bit more expensive time wise to operate stupid amounts of your own factories.
Rather than remove WAM completely, you limit it...
Q7 weps factory is not cheap, if you starting off neither are Q1 or 2. Bearing in mind that without help to get self sufficient requires a lot of gold.
I did'nt hit that lvl until GoW.
Maybe a lot of people made use of the training grnd gold lend system. I did put in requests but due to change of CP these things were overlooked many times.
BTW Still operating only Q4 Food. Just cannot afford the horrendous gold price for upgrade.
v + c.
I was Q2 food for a long time, now we get 1k extra storage a week there's not really much benefit in upgrading food,
If you really want to upgrade to q5 the only time of year they seem to do company upgrade offers is black friday / erep bday (can't remember which but they're not far apart anyway
1. less wars -- PLATO angry
2. less firms(WRM) - PLATO lose money
3. war more expensiv - less gold sold form $ >>> PLATO kill's you
The same big tanks will still spend money, they may do less damage but I imagine the spend would be the same, This site is probably 90% funded by a very small number of players
You are assuming there is no shortage currently when there actually is (I think), but of workers. Salaries keep increasing at an alarming rate.
Perhaps because so many people stopped playing that it´s actually difficult to find employees?