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The problem that you will be reading about today will be the certain case of my friend Jerry, who had to look for the solutions all by himself, but was later generous enough to share his findings with me. Jerry is a third year student at University of Economics and to pay for his studies, he works a part time job as a book keeper. He started playing eRepublik because someone told him the game had real life relations, and saw a chance to peek into some of the fields of economy that were otherwise in real life obscured to him.

He registered, and for a first couple of days patiently waited to pass the dull levels. Finally, he reaches 6th level, getting his first 5 gold pieces. Until then, he had enough money to buy himself the daily bread from his earnings, however at 5th level his option to fight in wars opens up and with it the chance to spend more money buying weapons. Since the earnings at those levels were not good enough to allow him to arm himself, Jerry decides to sell some of his gold so he'd buy some weapons at the marketplace.

THE PROBLEM

Jerry goes to monetary market and without much hesitation buys him some local currency worth about one gold coin. Couple of days later he realizes he's out of money and so he goes to the exchange office again. Then he notices that eRepublik monetary market works the same way as a real life exchange offices, in which case if he was to put his gold for sale, he'd get more money out of it than before. At that moment the economist inside him wakes up and realizes the chance to grasp himself more earnings. Why wouldn't he put his gold for sale, and later when it's sold put up his currency, and so repeat the procedure? The Wiki encyclopedia and some newspaper articles he found in the game confirm his suspicions. That's will be his thing. After all, he started to play this game for the money speculations.

The tutorials describe three well known methods of earning from monetary market, but the safest way being the double sell, all Jerry's suspicions are gone. He immediately put the rest of his gold on offer at the lowest price, so his offer would turn out first in line. Ten minutes latter he gets a notice. He just sold all of his gold. Ha! That easy?! He is already imagining the pile of yellow coins in his mind, he'll make a fortune here in no time... heads monetary market right away to put all the currency on offer and... there's a heap of offers there all the same price?! His offer appears on page 5 if he is about to earn the difference and in the other case he loses?! Who'll buy from the 5th page? He must have missed something in that tutorials... Offers are sorted by date, and they last 5 days before being taken out... what, to wait that long? Other tutorials say that in countries with a lot of money circulation offers would appear in first position in a day or two... Ok, he thinks, maybe this whole business won't happen that fast after all, but it will. Once he creates more capital the profits will be bigger, so it's not really a problem to wait a while.

Jerry now calculates how much money he needs for weapons for the next two or three days and the rest of it he puts on the monetary market. Checks 20 times a day to see if his currency got sold... He can't see his offer, so he asks his friends to inform him where it's positioned at the moment. By the end of the first day, he gets relatively good news: he's almost at the top of the second page! That brings him back to life: at this tempo, his money will be sold tomorrow, possibly even before noon.
Next day at 9:00 he logs in and stays the whole morning clicking refresh button, waiting for a notice that his money was sold. Somewhere around 15:00 he gets bored with that and goes to look for his friends who would tell him the position his offer is at. "At the end of the second page," was the answer that managed to completely confuse him. Now he is clueless. Well, he read that sometimes offers disappear from the list for a brief period of time when somebody buys a part of it, probably his friend when checking yesterday was just there at the time when a lot of offers were missing this way... And also the offers above his were quite large, so before they sell off, it could take some time... Nothing wrong with that, but this is not being interesting.

Day after day, Jerry occasionally keeps the track of things and wonders, but nothing changes. His offer stays put for the whole 5 days, walking up and down the second page, until the notice arrives that the time passed... He asked more experienced players, look at manuals, browsed the newspapers, but to no avail. Since offers are sorted by date, his offer was bound to turn out on first page some day, but it never happened. One thing was certain. Something was wrong with the whole system.


THE SOLUTION

As the time passed, Jerry gave up the idea of profiting from monetary market exchange. Instead he opened a couple of companies around the world and after he solved a couple of problems that occurred in that field, started to make extensive profits. But that shall be the subject of some other tutorials. All in all, this question about monetary market he never quite forgot, and it always bugged him.

So one day he needed substantial amount of currency in order to buy raw materials for his worldwide companies. He goes to monetary market and buys currency from the first one on the list. Five minutes later he goes to the next monetary market to buy another currency, when something strange happens. Nickname Charlie is first on the list in both countries. A suspicion arises. He checks a couple of other markets and realizes that the offer made by Charlie is among top 5 in a couple of world markets. Whats the trick? How's that possible? This man is like subscribed to world markets?! Is it a thing admins are offering for a bonus? It doesn't take Jerry long to find out there is no explanation. He digs into tutorials again, newspapers, he asks around, but... nothing. It seems to him that some people know, but nobody tried to explain him. Why? What's the big secret? All right, he'll dig into this himself.


- end of part 1 -

... to be continued ...



by Jack Jockson



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