Air and Ground Scheme Analysis, or; Why to vote no on Defence Donates

Day 5,974, 04:41 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Mr Woldy


Air and Ground Player Scheme Analysis, or; Three Reasons to vote no on Defence Donates

Happy Easter, everyone. I hope you have as many easter eggs as you have kills on eRepublik, ground or air.

In my previous article published over two weeks ago I raised concerns over the volume of spending associated with Air & Ground rewards and the several different Bounty schemes, which any god fearing Congressperson would find difficult to justify.

Two days ago in an apparent response to this the government published a puff-piece about it’s programmes that you can find here.

All statistics are useful, and interesting, but we should properly evaluate whether a set of figures actually addresses the question being asked.

As I am often keen to point out, stats are stats, people can interpret them as they please. In official papers people will readily point out that more facts and less opinions are desirable. There are some official papers where even just presenting stats without commentary has been challenged, but perhaps those readers missed this MoD report, which appears to have the exclusive aim of using unrelated data to justify a false premise.


Quick Fact Check

Let’s take a look at some of the spicier claims made and assess whether the data cited can be used to make them.

There’s some dubious suggestions in the text of the article, which appear to be there to misrepresent suggestions made by myself and the criticisms people have of the Government’s approach. The main ones are:


The real clanger here is the idea that people have proposed ‘capping kills’ or a ‘lower cap’, and that this is unfair. The authorship of the article is, in keeping with recent customs, obscured. But whoever put it together has misunderstood (intentionally or not) that the information used to evaluate the current programmes was CC, not kills. Likewise, any caps referenced in those proposals have been based on CC, and not kills. There is a reason for this.

Why CC and not kills!?

When considering that each kill is given a CC or CC equivalent value, then the Gov itself has CC caps - 15k for Air and 10k for Guns. Here’s the big brain bit - whilst any cap exists there is not a pure relationship between ‘1 kill’ and ‘1 reward’, and anyone who exceeds the caps in fact receives a devalued ‘part reward’ for each kill.

This means that understanding how rewards are (or are not) working can only meaningfully be done in CC terms. As such the reward value and the caps are only meaningful expressed and evaluated in CC/Gun terms. It means that the data on kills provided in their article is interesting, but is not a good way of judging ‘fairness’ of the rewards program.

In fact, it would only be a way of evaluating fairness if caps were removed and that would inevitably lead to the cc per kill dropping. If you imagine a world without caps on rewards, and imagine that we paid only 2 cc per kill (air or ground) then the cost of rewards alone in January would have been over 4.8 Mil (with the Govs eligibility criteria). Guess what - that would be insane - and so that’s why we need caps!

As such whilst the Government tries to criticise the idea of a ‘lower cap’ (more on this below) their argument only makes sense as a criticism of any cap. That begs the question, why they use caps, or what percentage of kills they think it is fair to not-reward. When it comes to fairness, the proportion of kills rewarded is a data red herring (it is cool data to compile though, and interesting for other reasons).


How best to understand ‘fairness’?

Rewards have two main levers (without radically changing the approach so that fighting remains incentivised) 1. how much cc per kill (or cc equivalent), and 2. the cap on CC any one player can receive.

The actual unfairness identified by looking at rewards data (in CC, not kills, because the rewards have CC value, not kill value) is the large volume of the UK’s tax-based income which goes to a small number of players. This is the result of political choices made by the Government, and which the Government sticks to every time it decides to pay out without considering whether it is actually fair or not.

Without re-treading the back half of my previous article the really key thing to keep in mind is how few people actually hit the current caps routinely. Lifting caps, as Huey George suggested last year, would benefit only 5-7 players. Raising CC per kill benefits everyone. Conversely, managing costs or managing unfairness by lowering the CC cap whilst raising CC per kill would mean the distribution of public funds across the fighting population would be more ‘fair’, because there would be a smaller gap between those rewarded the most, and those the least.


What was actually proposed

As shown above the Gov has tried quite hard to misrepresent what suggestions have been made so far, but I’m sat on all the data and it is quite easy to take a month and examine what changing caps and cc per kill would do to what people received. If you have an idea you want to model on the data, by all means drop me a message!

In essence though, what has been proposed over the last month is simply for the system to be changed because of its unfairness. The rewards are not the sharp end of mad and unjustified ‘rewarding’ of public money to a chumocracy, you have to look across the different programmes under the bounties banner for that. However! The fact that rewards are not the entirety of defence spending and that higher ranked players should have access to accessible bounties (they need reform too though) means our air and ground program should distribute its funds better. As a reminder, one citizen got over 2.5 mil between December-March.

Absolutely no one is suggesting fighting should not be supported and promoted!

Policy examples provided/proposed have focused predominantly on consolidating the two programmes into one with a single cap, and specifically Betafoxtrot also proposed a Universal payment of 5k to everyone to supplement fighting rewards of 10 cc per kill capped at 10k a week. This would have seen only 8 people worse off by 10k or more, and only 15 people worse off in total. That’s over 100 people who would have benefited from such a reform. Does that really sound unfair to you?



A call to action!

Credit it where it is due, Spygon, AMD, and Alexander J. Burrell all recognised the need to vote no on donates to a greater extent, and sooner, than I did!

However, interpreting the Government article as digging its heels in rather than openly engaging with the debate (and noting a great many questions being ignored from the articles on the topic), I encourage my Congress colleagues to vote no on donates for these programmes.

Plato gives us the decision on donates. It is the game mechanic by which you can approve or not of spending. This is a democracy, people should vote how they please. I know that will be difficult for some based on party, but let's put our money where our mouth is rather than wait for ‘longer term’ changes preferred by the Government. It is our choice what to fund.

If it helps, you can determine a magnitude of rot that can inform your approach to donates:


So take your pick, if you feel strongly about one of these programmes, this helps you determine where to place your no vote. I believe they should be voted on, so have included them in my proposal for a donations schedule.

When Congress has queried as to how rewards are paid for when the spend far-exceeds income and donations for this purpose, no answer has (yet) been given. As such we can safely assume reserves or funds requested for other purposes are used. This presents a challenge to transparency, and so send a clear message about that I shall also occasionally vote no on Bank of England donates.

We need to defund these programmes to properly fund the eUK!

Thanks for reading!
Mr Woldy



P.S. - A quick cock-a-snook to anyone who has commented recently that ‘left or right wing economics don’t mean much in eRep’ you are looking at an example of when they do!