The Economist ~ The end of war?
Spite313
Dear friends,
We live in quite possibly the most peaceful period in the history of the game. Yet at the same time, it’s rare there are less than seventy battles open at any given time. As I write this, there are 89 battles to fight in, and 72 countries in the game. At any time, most countries have at least one active battle open.
The reason for this is training wars (TWs). For those of you new to the game, a training war is a planned conflict between two countries, where the attacking country systematically takes the same 2-3 regions from the defender, and the defender releases the regions after conquest through resistance wars (RWs). TWs allow for 28g per round (60g per sky round) in medals, as well as a campaign hero medal and up to 10 resistance hero medals per RW. That means each conquest/release cycle in a region generates a minimum of 572 gold for the two countries involved (assuming all participants are citizens). That’s at least 572 gold per cycle (often more), and some countries have multiple training wars.
This is very lucrative, especially for the high strength accounts which benefit from TWs the most. Coincidentally, players with these accounts are, for the most part, in charge of international affairs.
TWs involve two partner countries, which usually involves a stronger and weaker country on opposite ‘sides’ (or at least not sharing MPPs). Most countries are now either occupied or involved in an ongoing TW with a partner nation. There are no avenues of attack that will not mess with someone’s TW. And the result of this situation… gridlock. The global situation has barely crawled in months, and as a result the game is… boring.
Solutions
There are a number of proposed solutions to this crisis. A common request (I saw a shout by iDiod this morning) is for the admins to reintroduce a gold cost for attacking regions. There used to be a gold cost, and the admins removed it with the intention of encouraging more wars. The end result is a lot more wars, all of them meaningless. Introducing a gold cost for battles would effectively end the profitability of TWs (especially if it was a high cost).
My proposal would be to introduce ‘war exhaustion’ to the game. Essentially this would mean that every battle fought as part of a direct campaign (not RWs which have their own mechanic for this) would contribute to ‘war exhaustion’ for both participants. This would act as a negative damage buff, meaning that as a war went on, the citizenship damage of both participants fell everywhere. This would build gradually, but would also fall gradually once the war had closed. This would discourage ‘permanent war’ and encourage a series of short, meaningful, global conflicts that do not always involve the same countries. A permanent war would result in the long term reduction of all citizen damage for that country in every war, everywhere. As you can imagine this would make them vulnerable to attack.
I would also extend rather than limit the legend bonus, since it’s impossible to put that cat back in the bag right now. Players with “Legend of XXX” rank do additional damage when fighting for their country (depending on which level of rank they have). I would extend this so that they also do 50% of this damage fighting in battles where their citizenship country is deployed as an ally. This would increase strategic depth to the game, and also mean that smaller countries with few legends could once again be involved in major wars, relying on allied damage.
What would happen?
If all TWs ended tomorrow, for whatever reason, we would see a dramatic rise in real wars as people demanded these to raise rank, gain medals and prestige points. The fewer wars would mean more epics, and closer battles (less 90% walls). Medals would be meaningful again and would be contested.
There is more to this than just stopping TWs, but that is a necessary first step to break the current deadlock. The amount of gold given by medals also needs looking at, the frequency of air battles and where they appear in the order of battle (1st and 5th would make more sense) and how deployment works (perhaps a bonus for ‘deployed’ countries rather than just blocking non-deployed countries altogether).
However the important thing is that we wouldn’t have a situation where there are not only no real wars, but no opportunities for real wars. I don’t blame players for the TW situation, since exploiting the game mechanics is what all good players do. I also don’t blame the admins, since they were clearly not expecting this outcome. However I think all are in agreement that it is time to make a change.
Iain
Comments
vote & cm for u
Poi!
Prijem!
Sounds interesting!
i agree with some points... but I have another point... in the last month real wars descreased because everyone is waiting an eb promo, if admins at least updated the "last updates" pages saying it´s over peaple´s strategy will have to change.
That would be true if not real wars would have stopped and tws inflated before the last promo 🙂
you are wrong, they would finished it anyway to sell the new ebs packs for real money
I just know what happened, what would have happened if it’s just a matter of religious beliefs🙂
Limit player level by their strength too! Not by experience. Every newcomers feel this game only for old players and the new one can’t involved in any wars because there are too many big strenght players in low division.
There needs to be more of a shift to air battles. Strength is here to stay- too many people would quit otherwise.
Totally agreed.
This game doesnt give even a little space for newcomer.
Game such like dota give same equality to both old and newcomer.
And Strength should be limited, ban maverick pack for low division.
Limit by rank should be top priority.
Air battles are the best example of admin efforts to allow new players to advance faster... now it's much a matter of how often you fight...
Re-establishing ticket factories would(eventually) drive down the price of tickets... and give economic players more to look att.
As always, good!
Summary of Developer Log: May - June 2018 :
[MobileApp]
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Change is needed, because this now is essentially a version of FarmVille...
Mimimi why would i buy maverickpack with just so few wars. Mimimi i want/need TP money.
Dont get me wrong, id really love to see 5-7 battles max/day. But then again: what to fight for? The problem is that there is nothing. Bonus? Big 10 are farming and not willing to change.
It needs a mix of several things to be changed, no NE laws, no 24h autoattack, attackcost depending somehow on the attacking and defending country, starting rws for gold instead of 1k currency, multiple rws simultaneously etc...
The purpose of the game isn't for a handful of fighters to farm medals...
Some interesting ideas, Ian - I like the suggestion for expanding the applicability of the Legend rank. Currently it makes no sense for Legends to fight for other countries because then they collect less rank points...
Very true!
Good ideas. I would also suggesr a game mecanic to allow one country to rent anothers region (s). This would stop reset wars that necessarily happen every so often. Better yet just allow countries to sell resources to each other similar to real world.
I'd love to see a more complex commodities market and as you say trading of resources as an alternative to war (make them rarer, and make each region have x amount of the resource that can be traded on an open market and bought by countries). That's much more work than the above for the admins though!
And exactly how have they put themselves out recently? 😃
i STRONGLY agree... admin burden MUST be lessened. The people behind those ban hammers ARE REAL PEOPLE!
How much are they "putting themselves out", lately?.................................................................................................................................................
... https://forum.erepublik.com/index.php?/topic/5644-plato-foundation-report-week-39/
Wow! I see now why the game is so great!
They exchange Moderators for Developers & Coders.
Wonder exactly how much fake gold costs new owners to hand out?
Wow! I see now why the game is so great!
They exchange Moderators for Developers & Coders.
Wonder exactly how much fake gold costs new owners to hand out?
They have a big team of developers and coders, but this game is not very profitable. Their other games and apps are where the development goes. But if there's something simple they can fix they will.
Thank you for that Spite313. My point was that they do all they can because they love the game and try to improve it for that same reason. Just because you want to keep your job does NOT always suggest that personal self-service always dominated your motivation. Cannot AVOCATION not come first where/when POSSIBLE?
plato foundation is just a jerk off competition. only profits certain categories of players. always bs reasons for not rewarding if your not one of the boys like keers is.
Good insights as ever.
No eb promo is the mother of this tw era
I like these ideas - o7
Good idea, but #ITFW
Like the war exhaustion idea as it brings new real mechanic into the game. More choices - more interesting game.
I concur - the challenge that we face is to find a way to reduce the likelihood of a very small number of high strength players continuously harvesting huge volumes of Battle Honours (with associated GOLD bonuses).
The concept of introducing 'Battle Fatigue' (or should that be 'Battle Honour Fatigue') which increases over time with the number of BHs accumulated over say a 30 day sliding time period - could have the effect of spreading the spoils of war a bit wider....
😃
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Do you really want to take eRep out of business? It seems... And without business there would be no game.
Previously we didn't have a game full of TWs and we had plenty of people spending euros. In fact, the constantly boring game reduces us all to farmers, so the income is a lot less than before. People were buying thousands of euros of gold for battles, more than twenty packs. Now it's just low level churn.
great article!
o7
🙂
War weariness would be a good idea but mechanics to govern it would be complex.
The game isn't for a handful of fighters to farm medals, but basically they buying packs makes the game sustainable. If there are no wars there are no pack sales, and the game won't be more interesting because of the imbalanced arrangement of alliances. Even the outcome of the real wars are known before they are started.
Everything has a root cause - the current stability is what prevents any sort of alliance political shakeup. A single powerful alliance is best for farming. Remove that incentive and things get interesting.
TWs are not what drive people to spend rl money in this game. Farmers do not buy packs.
Farmers do buy packs even if indirectly for CC. What drives them to do that is to improve their accounts, and not to win wars. Without wars they would be unable to produce the price of their packs in CC and probably many who played this for years would try to sell their accounts and leave. Of course maybe the change would drive other people to buy more packs, I don't know. As a whole I don't believe admins would do anything that has risk to lose players who generate income.
Basically you are saying we should keep the current broken system so a handful of people can save cc to buy packs which they use to save cc to buy more packs... Endlessly without wars.
It's stupid. Back before packs, before training wars, we had real wars. Tanks bought gold and the game made a lot more money. So there is no worries there. And people will still buy packs anyway. Its just fear talking, fear of the unknown. People would rather have wiped countries, endless stalemate and no fun rather than lose their own personal advantages. That's why the game is so bad right now.
What I am basically saying is why admins won't do anything. Besides I am not sure people can be made interested in wars again. The game should be attractive for new players. With the present people playing no change is possible.
Great ideas, Iain.
Votado
Money talks louder than reason.
V.