The eRepublik Complexity Analysis

Day 1,053, 19:24 • Published in USA Spain • by Siddy Tramero




After reading CRoy's excellent article http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/chaos-theory-in-erepublik-1537588/1/20 , I decided to look in insight on the subject of game complexity.

Basically eRepublik can be divided in two big subgames

Ingame: The things that happen in the game proper: Wars, battles, elections, companies, and such

Outgame: The player-made things that are not coded into the game, but applied anyway because players voluntarily abide by them. The US Senate, the US Army, and Party Primaries are examples of that

We must identify three types of players

2clicker: Players who only spend 10 minutes a day playing the game. They will train, work, eat, fight if there is some battle available and that's all. They might be newbies or people who just doesn't play a lot. They are only involved in the ingame

Active Player: The player that gives time to the game. They get involved in the outgame.

Advanced Player: Usually a player who spent a lot of time in the game and knows what to do. They usually are in the higher positions of power.


I'm also going to identify three branches of the game. Of course, there are more, but I want to keep the analysis simple

Military:
- 2clicker: The player who fights by reading the DoD Orders and fighting there
- Active: The player who's a member of the Army or a Militia
- Advance😛 Army HQ, Militia Commander, or in EDEN/PHX HQ


DoD Newspaper. 2clickers Read it. Actives understand it. Advanceds write it

Political:
- 2clicker: Gets on the party they like the name most and doesn't get into the forums. Votes in elections to their party or depending if they received PMs or read articles or ads
- Active: A party member who gets involved in the forums and may occupy some low posts, organize elections, or vote in primaries
- Advance😛 Party Leadership, National Leadership

Company:
-2clicker: Worker
-Advance😛 General Manager

In companies, there are no positions for "Active players". I'll come back to that later



So, finally, we can define the complexity. There are two types of complexity in the game

Ingame Basic Complexity: The complexity of the game to play it. How to properly fight, how to properly work.
Ingame Advanced Complexity: The complexity of the game to master it. Attacking rules, Productivity formulas. That complexity is in addition to the Basic complexity and make the Ingame Complexity. They're inverse proportional, so, the bigger the ingame basic complexity is, the smaller the advanced complexity is.
Outgame Complexity: The complexity of the player-made institutions and measure. Since they're player made, they're as complex as players want



Advanced Ingame Complexity often involves the use of external tools


Now, what does each player want?

2clickers just use the Ingame Basic Complexity. They want it to be simple enough to not waste much of their time

Active Players use both Ingame Basic and Outgame (as Ingame Basic gets too small for the time they spend). They want both to be complex enough for him to be able to waste their time there

Advanced Players rely basically on Ingame Advanced Complexity and Outgame. They want it to be as complex as possible to give them challenges. They want also the Ingame Basic Complexity to be simple enough to not give them headaches. That's an important point I'll treat in the example.




How this works? An example


In the beggining of the V1, some might remember it, admins introduced a new concept



The nightmare

Yup, the dreaded Trivia.

The trivia appeared everytime you wanted to work, train or fight, and it asked trivia questions as shown in the screen. The correct answers and how quick you answer provided a bonus to your results.

This was, of course, a big increase in the Ingame Basic Complexity.

The results were clear.

- 2clickers didn't like to make those trivias everyday. They ended skipping them (and not getting bonus) and complaining.
- Advanced Players HATED the trivia. That trivia made impossible to know the predicted productivity of the companies, as the employeer couldn't know if their workers were going to answer the trivia correctly or not, and also made that people with the same working skill could have different productivities, so wages had to be changed almost daily. A similar thing happened for Army HQ on the estimated damage of armies.
- Active players were the only players who weren't that angry at the trivia, as they saw it as a way to have bonus and do something. However, increasing Basic Complexity for Active Players isn't that important, as they have the Outgame. After some weeks, making lots of trivias daily became boring, but that's because the trivia was boring, not because it was complex.



Answering correctly and quickly could double your results

Some time later, admins decided to remove trivia after everyone was asking to them.




The fail of Rising could be explained because all their changes brought a dramatic rise in Basic Complexity (which pissed the 2clickers and Advanced) and a fall in Advanced Complexity (which pissed Advanced even more). That explains why so many 2clickers and old players left when Rising came.


forget about it

I might analyze it with more detail in another article, to not make it tl;dr.