Is there a hidden country in eRepublik?

Day 2,563, 20:07 • Published in USA Bulgaria • by Stolch


Ok, so I decided to do an article about damage distribution between the different countries as it seems we're coming upon a new alliance redistribution phase which has become traditional once a year.


Since CS damage is a poor source of information about damage potential of the different countries in the game, I added up the damage according to the MUs of each country for the past week and also took the information for CS damage so that I can compare the two.


To my surprise however there were 75 countries ranked in the CS damage ranks, with a nameless country in 75th spot which came in with 630 million damage for last week.





Mystery, nameless country at rank 75




So I initially tried opening the leaderboard for other weeks as well, but there was no 75th country. Even stranger at some point it actually disappeared from last weeks ledger as well...


To make sure it's not another "visual" bug I opened "inspect element" on the browser and lo and behold it was there. AS everyone can see in the SS above.


The first time I opened it, the country was actually called "Guderian Heinz", though that could only be seen if you open the inspect element and not on the actual page. When I reopened it to make the SS however the name had disappeared (the name in the element follows the "alt" after the image source for the country.


At this point I started wondering what this mystery country could be, and decided it might be the Plato account, which at some point in time had the EU flag and who knows what type of CS went with that at the time. However when I checked the account it was with Swiss CS and in no way had it done 630 million of damage in the last week.


Now we've all heard the rumours about the admins "tilting" walls using scripts and bots and so on, to manipulate battles, however there was never anything that can give any credence to those rumours. Since I'm not very versed in programming I can not speculate more then what is presented if this is indeed evidence of possible such manipulation. Obviously 630 million in a week when 3.1 trillion damage was dealt cannot really change anything of importance unless it was in very close rounds. In an a epic round where both sides have put in 5 billion each, a 51% wall represents an advantage of only 100 million. However it's presence alone begs the question, has it been different in the past.


More importantly, I personally am tired of the "visual bug" excuses, not to say lies, and am interested to know what is this mystery "country" or entity that fights along side the real players in the game even if it is not the admins themselves interfering in battles.


The reason I'm putting it in an article is to bring attention to it, to the whole community as I've long lost any faith in the administration of the game to be helpful honest or truthful. If it turns to be something benign then nothing of importance has happened and this article can go by the side along with 90% of the garbage that goes for media articles nowadays, mostly hunting for comments.



As for the damage comparison article, that one I'll leave for tomorrow. I am waiting with interest for the response of the admins on this one.