The Life Death and Rebirth of Jasper Signa

Day 3,343, 12:42 • Published in USA USA • by Jasper Signa
Birth


My eRep life started on June 10, 2010 and things were changing. For those old timers maybe you should just vote, make a quick comment, and divert your eyes as I am about to talk about eRepublik Rising, quite possibly the worse ever development decision in gaming history. For those who need counseling please leave a comment and we can discuss, I hear group therapy is quite useful for dealing with traumatic experiences and I need it for the mission anyways.



We were about 3 weeks from the change, and as a newb there was literally no help anyone could offer, as all the tried and true mechanics of the game were about to be replaced with a new war, economic and time management module and as always the way ahead was clouded in secrecy.


The United States Training Corps

Like most new players at the time I joined the United States Training Corps, which was a precursor military unit that helped organize new players damage and keep them from killing themselves by fighting till they ran out of energy and having no food to heal.

All of the administration of the unit was done off site and Platoon Commanders were responsible for reporting up an elaborate chain of command how their charges were fairing, mostly with making sure they stacked the wall of whatever battle was the priority for the day.

This was my first introduction to the absolute necessity of being competent in Google Docs, which for all those millennials out there was actually fairly new at the time. I'd say gaining a better understanding with GoogleDocs was the biggest skill set I learned from playing eRepublik.

The War Module:


When Rising struck it hit the eUSA pretty hard, as if I recall we were quickly embroiled in a battle with Russia and Indonesia in Alaska and Hawaii and we were getting our butts handed to us. The new war module turned out to be a turn based grid capture type game, with the offensive team needing to capture the territory's capital and some percentage of the hexes to win.

The challenge was that it only mattered when the timer ran out so the community needed to organize large Mass Battles to coordinate their attack in the last hour, otherwise the opponent would just recapture stuff while you were sleeping. This made it incredibly difficult to win when battles were ending in Asian prime time. The module also required you specialize in your choice of Tank, Helicopter, Infantry skills which required you buying certain weapons to pilot around the grid. It was sort of a Rock Paper Scissors type damage calculator and each side had like a minute to move, decide to attack and score a hit before the other side got a turn.

The initial strategy at the time was to just to pile up on the capital when you logged off for the day and try and create a huge meat shield that the enemies would have to whack through. The problem though was that many players would then end up dead the next day and wouldn't have the resources to heal themselves. My solution at the time was to have players fight in off peak hours to capture hexes and run away from fights just to bog down the enemy in recapturing.

Time Management


The other mechanic that people despised about V.2 was the time management function where you actually had to plan out your day between working, training, studying and leisure. Each hour spent would give you certain benefits like improving your military skill (there was like 4 if I remember), studying to improve your Job Skill (yes you actually had like 11 job skills) and partying which cost gold to improve your happiness which impacted the results of all the other efforts.



Having poor happiness was a great way to tank your character so it was careful not to do to much in one day. The other wild thing was that you could actually customize your food companies to provide both health and happiness. So there was all these special blends out there you had to buy to manage both.



Political Career


My political career started with the Federalist Party who was the number 2 party in eUSA at the time behind the USWP. My initial decision to join was because the Right of Center position matched my own personal beliefs. I of course didn't realize at the time that there are no mechanics in eRepublik that match any RL political philosophies and to really be successful as a country you sometimes have to be a slave to the mechanics (welcome to the commune comrade Jasper)

Like most new players, I made the mistake of trying to be a business person and just like now the mechanics sucked. If your new and your considering starting a business, don't under any circumstance waste your gold.

At the time I blamed the high income tax and lack of an import tax as the reason I couldn't make any money. I ended up even getting a decent amount of support mostly because I operated my companies as a Profit Sharing Enterprise to avoid taxes, and that made my employees pretty happy as we basically split 50/50 the profits from what we made. Course I had to keep track on this ridiculous spreadsheet to make it work.


In my 5 terms in congress, I started off being a pain in the ass to the elites mostly because I had always been a political gamer (Model UN, Mock Congress, etc.) and to me the rules mattered and while I was okay with getting shut down, it had to be the right way and IMHO they weren't. My biggest accomplishment in congress was helping to make the Code of the eUS (Not Constitution there was a difference that took like 2 months to argue about) more clear. I also wanted to have an audit of eUS orgs as no one could ever really explain how much cash or food stuff we had buried in like 50 National organizations. I think we did end up passing something but it was ultimately repealed, probably because it was a pain in the a$$ to maintain and no one really cared.

Death


My eDeath came quickly after a series of eRep Admin attempts to undo the blunders of eRepublik Rising. They got rid of the war module, switching to the more common one use today. They gutted all the uniqueness of the economics module wiping out any investments people had made to make their Job Skills better.

At the time I had started dating my current wife and frankly I didn't feel like investing any more time or gold into a game that was always changing and unpredictable. Pretty much the only thing that made the game playable was the great player base and most of the mechanics to make the game fun required elaborate operations created by the players outside of the game. I did make one return briefly to help with the founding of EZC the Fed Militia but then i lost interest caught in the thralls of real life.


Rebirth
I am not sure why I clicked the eRepublik 9th Anniversary link. I had been getting them for years and never clicked. I think it was mainly a curiosity to see if I still had my gold and companies and what if anything the game looked like now.

With the exception of the MU and Air Battle modules everything is pretty similar to how I left it. I am glad they did have the air battle mod as I doubt I'd have stayed around as long as I did without something new that I could do, as I'd have never caught in strength training with people the same level as me and I doubt I'd have gone through the hassle of restarting.

Anyways I am glad I am back with EZC and the Feds, its been comforting seeing some of my old player friends (I think maybe 50 of the 500 old friends I had were still alive), so since I haven't pissed my wife off playing too much yet, I guess I am here to see when if ever the Perception module is added.


To new players I'd say give it a shot, the game is what you make of it. Just make sure to reach out to your MU and find a political party. The game isn't worth much just fighting your energy level every day. Make sure to reach out and take advantage of the government programs. The reason they have such high taxes is to take the money from players just 2-clicking to redistribute it to active players who are actually putting up damage.