You know, why doesn't eRepublik have paid mobile smartphone applications?
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by ahava3233
Ever since I rejoined the game last month (my old account is deleted, this is not a multi), I've noticed that nearly half the time there's been some sort of offer above the feed, typically for sales regarding items that sell for prices in gold or for buying items in game with real world money. With this in mind, it seems clear to me that the admins are pretty dang desperate for cash, being that they're trying to entice people to use their gold (which they supposedly need to buy with cash, given how sparse gold is in-game) enticing them buy more gold straight-up with their own cash! Even right now there's an offer up there to buy overpriced damage boosters for a discount that I would personally consider insufficient. Honestly, even for the lowest tier booster (which is the only one not actually on sale) 5 Gold for 10 minutes? That's ￥8550 in-game here in eJapan or anywhere else in erepublik (Given an exchange rate of 1710/Gold in any currency) or €2.50/$3.28/￥267 real-life cash, seriously? For just double that I could buy a great arcade game on PSN/Xbox Live or for half of that a great app on a smartphone, seriously!!! Not to mention that I have permanent access to those things, unlike the damage boosters!
I know for a fact that this has been going on for quite some time too given that erepublik has been touting offers like this to get people to buy gold since at least last year with their loyalty program and all...if they had any brains, they would've figured out by now that it's clearly not working by itself! They need to approach this situation differently, and I propose the following.
Seriously, if the admins bothered to make a smartphone application (in particular for me, Windows Phone 7) I would be on it a heartbeat, so long as it worked well and had all or most erepublik functionality built-in, even if it was a relatively expensive app (I'm talking on the order of $10 or more here in the USA or the equivalent price in other countries!). I'm sure many of you would do the same for that price (or possibly less, but you would still pay for an app). The admins could make a killing doing this (especially on iOS/Android and probably in the future, Windows Phone 8 ) and could very well run the game better with some of that extra money! Vote up this article if you agree!
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So, wait. The first half is you "complaining" about how overpriced it is? Then you switch gears saying if they made an app that did this, you would be all over it and buying it x1000?
@Letigerr, that's not what I mean; here's an analogy you might be able to understand, take this in video games, specifically a rather infamous example, The Elder Scrools IV: Oblivion. In that game, I would never pay $2.50 for the horse armor pack (which is basically worthless nickle and dime DLC) but I would certainly pay $10.00 for an extra 20 glorious hours of content in game.
In other words, what I'm saying is thus: I'm willing to spend money for games, but I'm not a fan of the sort of "worthless" nickle and diming content that they sell here on eRepublik. I would figure it would be far more worthwhile to spend money on an app (making accessing this game far more easier than it is now) for example then the type of content they sell now.
In my opinon, we should just buy eight hours of damage boosters, and then just wail on Chubu for all of those eight hours, spending the 5-10g we need to re-fill our health every ten attacks.
Nice way to go through a few hundred or thousand $/£/€ in a day.
You know...that makes me wonder if Romper and Argrob (These two ridiculously powerful players, see my links below) are billionaires or the children of billionaires or something 😮.
But yeah, that's another point I like to make, the type of upgrades they sell give an extremely unfair advantage to those who have real world money to spend (a smartphone app would not do that).
http://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/2020512
http://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/1915732
In most MMORPG games, that's typically considered a huge no-no by the majority of players (Spending oodles of real money to get ahead so easily). There's a reason why you don't see that in SWTOR/WOW.
The thing is, it`s a free to play model, and unless you want MANY MANY ads, it is a necessary evil.
Well, I would personally prefer all of those ads to be honest...go figure
Many ads. Before you fight in a battle, watch this 30 second commerical. Ads now comprise 50% of the loading time for each any every page.
Once a day, even if perma-logged in, you must watch this 2 minute commerical. Also, before recieving any gold for free, you have to complete a survey.
Must now enter captcha and watch more commercials before fighting and training.
Newspapers now have ads in their own articles, at the top and the bottom.
@Letigerr What games do you play? O_o I've seen plenty of f2p games where ads make up the majority of their profit. They usually have an ad or two at the top of a page, one on the left, one at the bottom, and for this site one would go under the left-hand floater (IMO). Mind you, these are static ads. I've only seen a few sites that use rollover ads or interactive ads.
Captchas are only used for verifying your humanity, they're not the kind of thing to be thrown at you for no reason. And video ads are only used before viewing videos.
Again, this is just what I've seen. And now I seriously wonder what part of the web you browse that has such scary advertising.
He said he would like more ads on the site, so I gave him a slightly exaggerated example. If you`re going to cut out buying gold completely, they have to make up the lost revenue somewhere.
I'm not against selling gold as it is now. It's better than Ads , and if someone wants to pay for it , its their choice seriously. I've bought once gold with sms when it was worth it. The Plato's problem is that for majority of players , the gold is not worth spending real cash. Seriously : new players, even the ones with too much money can't beat people like Romper now. They will always be "one" step behind no matter how much they spend. Too bad that admins instead of upgrading the game to something giving more encouraging features for new players, they adress most of their promotions to veterans... after all Romper to be the best, must invest continously, because it would be sad to lose what he 'worked/bought' so far. Poor Romper, and insidious admins who use him like this, instead of making something great out of this game, where they could get a lot of new customers.
nothing you buy in this game is worth it at this point.
I think Romper said he works oil exploration.