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The Dictator module is the biggest change to the game we've in years. It has fundamentally changed the way we all play this game. Congress is has spent the better part of two months formalizing and codifying and tweaking the way our Defensive Dictatorship works in cohesion with our set of meta laws.

This is not an article at all meant to argue against the way we are currently using the Dictator module. The majority of our congress has chosen to enact a preemptive means of safeguarding the gains we have made in the game, and we've progressively talked about what we need to do to secure our future gains as well. This article is about the next step. It is about securing not only our economic and foreign policy through the dictatorship, but also securing whatever social gains we make in the meantime.

And in that regard, we cannot afford to elect our Presidents for more than two terms.

The precedent is easily seen in real life with the reasoning for George Washington's self-imposed term limit and the 22nd Ammendment which followed in its spirit. And while that has minor application to here in the game, I am going to attempt to expound on just why it's as necessary an idea for us to follow here, and how not doing so has contributed to the collapse of one of our most important assets. As a note of warning, I haven't discussed this idea really with anyone, so if it seems somewhat rambling and disjointed, that's because it's fresh of the mind press. My apologies.

First, a graphic:


This is a graph showing the total votes cast in every country president election in the eUnited States. I've used a similar graph to this previously, however this one is the most recently updated one. A couple of points to bring up about it:


All those things are immediately evident if you look at the graph, but what's most interesting (and pertinent to this discussion) is the fourth point I would like to bring up:

Look at it. From November of 2013 (1176 votes cast) to May of 2015 (795 votes cast), vote totals have not increased or decreased by more than 300.

That is unprecedented.

I mean, from November 2009 (4585) to August 2010 (835), we lost over four times the voters we had previously had voting. This, our older players will remember, was due to the Version 2 implementation and the consequent exodus from the game. From that July (1927) to that August alone, we lost over 1000 voters in game. We would not see voting numbers like that again until the Spring of 2012, which was made almost entirely possible by the iNCi immigration.

But in the last year and six months (yes, it actually has been that long), our voter turnout has roughly remained the same, and lazily trended downwards. Now, I'm not a math genius like Evry or Kemal. In point of fact, I'm anything but.


I do, however, possess excellent pattern recognition.

Let's take a look at another trend.

This is a list of Presidents we had during one of our largest eras of expansion from December of 2009 to December of 2010:


Now, here is a list of Presidents we had during our current era of stagnation from May 2014 to May 2015:


Are you, by any chance, beginning to see the problem? For those who may still need help, I'll lay it out nice and easy. Simply put, we are part of the problem.

First and foremost, this game was created with socialization at its core. The promise of eRepublik isn't that you can press buttons or mindlessly click through a war. At it's original core, the idea of eRepublik was to tap into that political desire many of us wish for.

We want to be the President of a great country, who skillfully navigated politics to ascend to the highest office.

We want to be the leader of a fearsome fighting force, with troops so loyal and responsive that their dedication can change the course of a war.

We want to the be tycoon of a burgeoning economic empire, with Scrooge McDuck style pool of money we have reaped from our investments.


That's the dream this game was built on, the offer it tantalized you with at signup. Every new player has at some point pictured themselves as mastermind of something when playing this game. However, the reason we keep playing is - inevitably - the community.

To be a leader, you must have followers. Some of us are inevitably in this to play some sort of role that isn't the grand hero; we're the ensemble cast of someone else's experience. The adviser, the joker, the worker, the manager, the right hand, the sergeant; plenty of roles abound for us to use.

So we made ourselves a paradigm. We asked for a mixture of experience and innovation in our leaders of old. We ensconced ourselves in battles over policy and national direction. But those wars can't be fought anymore.

Things have been... simplified.

Even being in Congress isn't as fun as it was before the Dictator module. There's no buttons to click when a dictator is enacted, and for the US, that's hypothetically going to be always (barring cheeky interference and the occasional chaos).


But there's something else that's contributed to our decline, something that changed the way we approach things. In the summer of 2013, nearly two years ago (has it really been that long?) we were invaded. Artela brought us into World War VI relatively strong with our wipe of Hungary, but then two Presidents came into office, and things got bad. Tenshibo and Paul Proteus tried unsuccessfully to navigate the theater of war, and what we as a nation were left feeling was that we had elected inadequate leaders.

This is arguably the greatest turning point in our country's Presidential history. Unlike in previous wars where at least one of our elected officials had been able to turn things around, we had elected two back to back CPs we then viewed as incompetent. Things seemed dire, and in our desperation, we went back and elected two people who we knew would get the job done: Oblige and Josh Frost.


For so long, we as a collective had trusted our Country President to be able to at least learn on the job and respond to the threats at hand. But after back to back disappointment, we became afraid. We couldn't afford inexperience! It was a luxury we had to surrender for our national security, to secure our country again, to end the war.

And in two months, the war was ended. Josh Frost signed a Non-Aggression Pact (the first of many in the coming months) and we were at peace once again. Soon after, our Serbian PTOers left. It was like a miracle.

From total occupation to freedom again, just like that. Our faith in our former leaders had been upheld. However, this had a side effect, and I don't think it's one any of us could have really foreseen or put into words. Looking back, it's relatively easy to understand the why, but in the next couple of months, we didn't realize that new and extremely high value we had suddenly placed on experience.

Suddenly, if you had any lack of experience in any field, you were not qualified to even run for POTUS.

In the aftermath of WWVI, we carved out a nice place in the world for us. We were careful, and placed an extremely high value on experience and discretion. We were building back up from essentially nothing in a grand foreign diplomacy experiment. Block by block, we climbed our way back to the top of things. We were steady, and we were proud of our work.

However, the fear of failure still loomed. We remembered how much we had lost, and how incompetent our Tenshibo and Paul Proteus had been. And we remembered how well Frost had navigated things.

Thus began our stagnation. Being POTUS was no longer about possibly changing anything. Mention any sort of change, any sort of derivation from the norm we were creating, and you lost all credibility. "Do you want to go back to what we were?" That's what the little voice kept asking. It rang through Congress, giving voice to our fear that one day we would be incompetent again in some degree.

But the truth is we've always been incompetent in some manner. Even the great presidents of the past had their failings and their differences. But we don't want different. We can't afford it.

The Dictator module has given more power to the Country President than he has ever had before, and we fear the day it is abused.

Where previously there was room to argue that we needed innovation, the game now necessitates us to turtle. Any discussion of not having a Dictator is unheard of, and it's understandable why: the module isn't going anywhere. This is the way we play the game now.

But there still can, and should, be room for innovation.

The worry about an inexperienced candidate claiming the throne of Dictator and failing is strong, as is the worry that someone will sneak in and immediately abuse it. The potential for immediate disaster in our country is now higher than ever before, and we feel it. Our fear has been given a name: Liberation.

But we've played without the Dictator for years. Over half a decade of experience can attest to that. We've done better at some times than others, but we now are fearful of those times that we aren't. And the truth is, we need to stop fearing them and strategically embrace them.


There are two sayings I'm sure you're all familiar with. The first is that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." It's the entire reason George Washington set term limits on himself: he didn't want another monarchy. Term limits lessen this corruption. They lessen another Oblige just coming into office, sitting on his butt, and just coasting off of former achievements. It deters people like Trekker from just getting by, and forces a time limit in which you must accomplish something.

In addition to forcing the people we elect to innovate in the time given to them, and preventing lackadaisical former Presidents from going on another vanity election, term-limits also help to drive party competition. I'm sure many of you have noticed that some POTUS potentials have just been slotted to win sometimes. People like Deepchill were run largely because some people thought it was "their time." The same was done for many other of our recent Country President candidates: it was just their time.

Country President elections are the main way in which we generate party rivalry, and thus how we generate party activity. Our most precious commodity in this game, that primary asset that I discussed at that beginning of this, is people. Without people playing this game, there is no game. Therefor, it should be our top priority to retain people and prevent this place from being a ghost town.


Yet we haven't pushed to have a baby boom of any sort since iNCi first came to this country. We haven't courted anyone, we haven't done massive online recruiting drives. We've become complacent, comfortable, and apathetic, just content to coast in this game until it is no more.

But is that fun? Is that what you really love logging into every day? Is good enough just, good enough?

Or is there a way we can safely kick our ass back into high gear, while also defending the same gains we have accomplished? Isn't there a way we can work to make the most of the Dictator module while also having a bit of fun? This brings me to my second quote, that one by old Tommy Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

We need innovation to make things interesting. Things to discuss are what drives activity at this point. And in so limiting our CPs to 2 terms, we will force our parties to produce leaders who want to bring something different. Not just because it's their time, not just because they want to do it again.

But because they want to have fun, and be the guy.


We have the space to afford experimentation. It's been a long time since we were in dire trouble. We can once again dip our toes back into unknown sees, and together explore the possibilities we find.

It is not too late to turn things around, and to get us out of this slump.


To Paul and Tenshi: I love you both. Please don't hate me. And to everyone else, sorry for party rocking. This one was long.

tl;dr term limits should be discussed, let's go and do something