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Firstly, I'd like to apologise for this article being a day late; I got pretty busy with RL stuff, but better late than never I guess!

Now to start this article off, think of something in real-world terms. You get a group of money-hungry entrepreneurs, who come up with a product that nobody else has, they're bound to manipulate that status for personal gain, right?

There is little difference between the above example and eRepublik's developers. People take this game very seriously when the wars get heated, and nothing is stopping the developers from profiting on rigged features in the process.

This is where the 'conspiracy' comes in - we all know that eRepublik is trying to milk as much money from us as possible, but very few people understand the extent in which the admins go to achieve this.



Brief History

Lets look through the history of eRepublik, and see how things have progressed.

V1:

Great game, all round fun experience and a genuine strategy game. Tons of features and the right balance between complexity and usability to make the game successful.

[img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QpGF05mr7hk/SO9eVSlHgnI/AAAAAAAAAMw/9px5ijOuj-Y/s400/erepublik_v1_screenshot.PNG[/img]

V2:

This went downhill rapidly from here, fortunately they kept some of the complexity and most of the strategy that made the game fun. The new war module was a sign of worse things to come however; it was highly unbalanced and it was clearly just a gold sink. People were very disappointed with both of these factors, forcing the developers to make changes. (Back when we actually had some form of community interaction)

'V3' - Modern Day eRepublik

We now have a stupidly simplified war module, which serves no purpose but to make us spend gold; all modules now link in to it. Oh look, a Q7 food factory, I best drop £100 on this so I can fight more.

I'm sure you all know the rest of the gold draining that came with this module, but have you ever thought fully into how the economic module works through Plato's eyes? (Who, might I add, the eRepublik team claims to have a trademark on - one of the first philosophers in ancient Greece can't lawfully be trademarked)

Details of the 'Conspiracy'

Lets look at the key things that make the economic module much worse than it seems as a regular player.



Resource Bonuses

This change didn't come for no reason - very few people have looked at just how the resources are placed. Lets assume that Serbia and Croatia are the centre of the game. (because they indeed are)

To boost the economy fully and gain Rubber, they both have the exact same distance to travel. Croatia must cut through Western Europe and into France to get their rubber bonus; Serbia must head through Asia, towards Indonesia to get there's. Unfortunately, this is one point to Serbia because Croatia chose France over a strong economy.

This is where it gets interesting - Croatia has a very strong advantage over their neighbouring enemies when it comes to the food bonuses. Most food bonuses between Serbia and Croatia are almost exclusive to Croatia; without getting too complex, this basically gave Croatia a huge advantage in the war, until this next change which rendered it obsolete:

Merging local currencies

Local currencies were merged in to one, global currency, commonly referred to as 'CC'. This was likely when the developers realised that Serbia is stronger than Croatia, and simply took Croatia's bonuses. Now that currencies are one, there is almost no economic gain that Serbia can take.

This once again weakens the stronger country, Serbia. They spent thousands of gold per day as a nation on overcoming the problems caused to them, simply to have their efforts wasted over night without them even knowing. Still, they have the bonuses, and what's next? The market bot.

'The Market Bot'

This one, while not being one of the indirect manipulations of the war module, is a direct manipulation of the economic module which allows the developers 100% control over.

The infamous 'Market Bot' is a theory that the developers had some kind of script running that purchased X amount of goods for X value every day. This kept the eWorld's economy afloat as production is A LOT greater than consumption.

The Market Bot is widely accepted to exist. While I was in eUSA, I found an interesting thread on their forums which tracked the market bot's activity. It went through each country almost hourly, at around 3am local time (I think) for that country, when they were likely the most quiet. It would by up to 75% of the cheapest goods in that country, which were then sunken into the void of Plato.



Then suddenly, one day, the bot seemingly shuts off with no explanation. This crashed prices of goods down to around 7 - 13% of what they used to be, while at the time, the cost of gold was approximately 2,000 local currency. The reason for intervention maybe?

Many believe the market bot was disabled permanently, but my belief is that it's still running, it just purchases goods for the absolute minimum and in lower quantities. (If somebody was to set up a price tracker of the economy, you'll no doubt notice a small fluctuation in prices at night) If it didn't continue to buy, nothing would ever sell.

So why was this apparent intervention done by the developers? It was obviously related to gold sales. I'll compare the effects of a decrease in the value of gold below:

2,000 CC per 1 Gold

At first, people were encouraged to buy gold and turn it in to local currency, allowing them to buy weapons, fight etc. BUT - the developers had 10 '44% off company upgrades' too many, and people no longer needed to buy gold; they became completely self-sufficient. The high market prices at the time meant they could simply sell 99% of their produce off, and train/tank without ever having to buy gold again. This isn't what the developers intended, and after no doubt losing out on gold sales, they took swift action.

400 CC (And falling!) per 1 Gold

We are still seeing the effects of their change today - the cost of CC:Gold is slowly falling. This was accompanied by the lowered value of products on the market. (And I believe it was almost a direct result of this) The amount of CC in circulation is now falling rapidly, yet things such as resource pits are exactly the same. What went from 1 gold for a basic RM company now costs the equivalent of 4 gold. Product prices constantly falling means training is becoming slowly but surely more expensive, upgrades become slowly more inaccessible to the casual player again, and soon gold prices will peak - demand will increase and gold prices will raise again, except now there's not enough currency in circulation to match it.

Leading me to an important question, what happened to all of the currency? And again, leading me into my next point:

My Predictions

In the next 3-4 months, it's my belief that the developers will find a way to manipulate the last part of the economic module they've been too scared to manipulate extensively - the monetary market. They will decrease the amount of currency in circulation, but artificially push the cost of gold with a highly active 'Gold buying bot'. Gold prices will become 1 gold for around 1,000 currency, but you'll now need to increase your product 2.5X to meet this value. The gold buying bot will then keep prices around this margin. This is just one of many methods they can use to further increase the cost of gold.

non-TL😉R version/summary:


Why do they do all of this? To simply increase the game's revenue.



Thanks for reading! I know some of it was a little too vague, I have a tendency to digress into long-winded theories. If there's anything you don't understand, feel free to message me/ask in comments!

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The next article will be the Estimated Cash Flow of eRepublik, which will come at some point today (hopefully it lets me post 2 in a short time!) to make up for this late article.