[UPDATE][Open Letter] About the Changes to the Epic Battles

Day 2,842, 08:05 • Published in Hungary North Macedonia • by Azure Falcon

[UPDATE] WE HAVE DONE IT!!



Congrats to the community! Hats off to the admins for reacting so quickly.

Original article as follows:

I have tried to submit this letter as a ticket this morning but it exceeded the character limit. So I have decided to publish it as my last article before going on a 2-clicks lifestyle.

Dear Admins,

This ticket is not related to a bug or a glitch, but rather something much more important. I would like to convey to you the impression of the community regarding your latest changes to epic battles.

You see, we generally liked last week's event a lot. But with these new rules the overall wisdom is that this event was nothing more than a giant cover up for nerfing the epic-PP rule. And here's where it gets interesting: I think I can safely say that this is the worst decision that you have made in a very long time. Need an explanation? Luckily, I'm here to give it to you:

eRepublik is getting more and more boring by the day. The simple reason is that any wars that were even distinctly imagined to be interesting have already been fought. Every conflict that is present now is years old and there is no excitement even in ongoing battles other than to produce a higher number than the opposite side. But you see how boring that sounds.

In the past, these wars were much more exciting for three reasons.

Reason 1: Novelty. With every conflict, there was a beginning, and that, by definition it counted as a new experience. When the same conflict is played out for the 7th time, it's a lot less interesting. There is not much you can change about this without genuine innovation, sadly.

Reason 2: The stakes. Before January 2015, a lot of conflicts were rooted in the potential gain of a resource that was vital to the attacking country. But then you introduced the Resource Wars event, which - as nice as it was for the week that it lasted for - killed this. By now countries like Hungary, Serbia and Romania have easily made sure to have permanent access to all bonuses in their closest sphere of influence. Not to mention the USA, which has all these bonuses on their original regions thanks to having 50+ of them (while both Russia and China have less - but I digress). You probably see how this eliminated a lot of incentive for a great battle, just as well as we all do.

Reason 3: Tactics & Strategy. These were a lot more present in the era before the current MPP rules. Basically, countries had to be careful which region to attack the others in, so as not to activate their MPPs against themselves. There were also options for region swaps between allied countries which contributed to leading some countries to legendary places (Serbia - Liaoning, Hungary - Heilongjiang, etc.). All this fun was basically taken away with the Airstrike option. Getting to the Americas or the Far East required a grandiose plan and large amount of coordination with allies for European cointries to succeed. Today, all it takes is winning a single battle after launching the airstrike. Not quite the same.

So yes, the current wars are boring beyond measure. Add to that the current diplomatic landscape, where for the first time in the game's almost 8 year old history, we have not had two major alliances for a year now. And it all makes sense: who needs formal allies when the only way to win the war is to spend your money on Combat Orders? I've been playing this game since 2008 and I have seen war plans as long as 20 pages that were drafted with the cooperation of a dozen countries. Today we have none of these, simply the mindless spending of millions of CC on back-and-forth battles.

With all this said, it is time for me to get back to my original point. That nerfing the epic-PP rule was one of the worst decisions you have made in a long time. You see, the problems I have mentioned above are all old ones. These things have been here for all of 2015. And the community is still here, although in a much smaller number than before. What used to be over 200,000 people is now less than 80,000. This means that 3 out of 5 people left the game in the past year or two. The ones who remained though, have made do with something that gave them a replacement for all the excitement that was lost. For a very few percentage of people (including me), it was getting a large number of BHs, new ranks, etc. But that required an account that is stronger than most in ints division.

So what experience do the rest of the players get? For them, it was collecting Prestige Points in the Weekly Challenge. Now, don't mistake me for saying the WC is interesting. It too, is really boring. However the community found a way to make regular epic battles every Tuesday morning so that everyone was able to get a bit ahead with their weekly PP-collection. For players who had no chance for a BH, hitting for epic was their biggest experience.

And you have taken it away. Yes, epics will technically be possible, but you still struck a big blow to it for technically no reason. I have a really hard time in figuring out why. Organizing epic battles wasn't an exploit. Farming energy bars was impossible with double PPs. Heck, even with 4x PPs energy bars cannot be farmed. So really, what's the reason for taking away the community's last source of mutual fun? And what is the benefit of it? I would love to know and I thank you in advance for your reply.

Best regards,
Azure