Join the new world

Dan/naD Wilshire – The Campaign Continues



The Introduction

Today is my 4th eBirthday. I have not managed to escape the game yet, I have ended up running for Country President again. But you already knew that!.

So far I have the support of Two parties. The Swiss Freedom Party and the Popular Peoples Party, the second and third largest parties in the country. I feel honoured that both parties have decided to support me in this campaign. I hope to not let them down!

In my last article I expressed my concerns about different issues. In this article I hope to explain how I would go about solving or improving these areas. No more pessimism from this point on. Optimism is the direction I am taking today.

The Campaign for a better Switzerland



A Policy of Participation – There are a variety of forms of activity. You have general activity which includes everyone who has logged into the game in any given day. You have election activity which counts those that vote on Election Day. Then you have the higher level of activity. Those that participate on the forum, in the IRC chat rooms and all those mass mail chats. This level of activity is the hardest to count, but the most important.

To improve the higher level activity, the game needs to be made more interesting. This is very hard to achieve, however with the right incentives, it is possible. From my experience, a good way to help boost activity is to hold group strikes. This is simply offering fighters supplies for all their fights if they come onto the IRC and request for them. The result of this was a slight increase in the amount of MU members coming online multiple times a week. This is just one way that activity can be improved.

Not everyone is militarily inclined, so there needs to be entertainment in place for those who aren’t avid fighters. As a big fan of being involved in party politics I have seen and worked on different ideas around boosting activity. Weekly pub quizzes, University Challenge, Poker etc. These were just some of the ways used to try to increase activity within the party. Once again we saw a slight increase in the amount of players who came on the IRC. This can also be applied to a forum. Forum games like Count to a million, King of the hill, Make a story etc. Are all great ways to make the forum more than just a place to go for congress debates.

All this may seem trivial to you, but it’s what I feel if important for a small country like Switzerland. The few players we do have, we need to help give them a reason to be more active. The more players we have on the forum, the more we have on the irc will lead to more voices and opinions. This can only improve the country.

Government Finances – Over the past three days the treasury has had 1075.85cc injected into it from tax revenue. This equates to an average daily tax income of 358.62cc. In an average month we will be able to afford one MPP and have 760cc left over to spend on whatever else we want! Thankfully we have 4301.74 gold and 188,895.90cc in our accounts to live off for a while. It is very hard with the current economy to make any large quantities of money. The returns you get from playing on the Monetary Market are minimal and not consistent, while tax income for a small country is hard to come by.

There are a few schemes I would like to try out sucks as the Training ground loans and experimenting by trying to play the market. Either way we have to try something, anything. Unless the market changes we can’t expect to have a balanced budget, however with a bank governor and the right minister of Finance, something positive might happen.

The Slovenian Problem – For years now we have been going between Slovenian occupation or a peace deal. It’s been a while since we have had a sustained period of time where we had all 4 of our regions. That’s the problem with being a small nation in a heavily war weighted game. However that doesn’t mean that a deal cannot be reached.

We have sent many delegates to Slovenia. Some have had a negative impact, others have had a neutral impact. This is an issue that will not be left alone. The Vice President will take the lead at striking a new peace deal with Slovenia. The MoFA and I will also be involved, however the Vice President is someone who has a lot of experience dealing with Slovenia. So fingers crossed, they will prevail!

The Strength of the nation – Switzerland ranks 60th in Weekly damage, and 58th for our monthly output of damage as the latest figures from eGov inform me. Over the past 11 days our weekly output tripled from 788million to 2.3billion. This increase has been led by a core of 5 players who over the last week have dealt over 900million damage. The next 5 hardest hitting players push that total to over 1.3billion damage from 10 Swiss Fighters. That leaves the other 56 active citizens with 1billion damage, averaging out with 18 million damage a week, or 2.6million damage a day. However putting this into context, 31 of the 48 fighters yesterday were in D4 and including D3 this number rises to 38 (79😵.

I have used numbers to try to show that we have some good fighters, but we need to spread the load. Being a soldier is expensive, between food and weapons it can cost upwards of 100cc a day in spending on supplies without really thinking about it. Thankfully communes are available however not all of these are running at maximum efficiency (located in a 100% bonus production country). As a country we have a dilemma. Do we lose a few citizens for the sake of doubling the production of weapons? This all relies on what you want the military to be. Strikes, supply schemes, rewards for meeting different targets can be put in place to encourage greater levels of fighting, however these can be costly. One of the first things that I think needs to happen is a country wide survey on what people what the government to do in regards to the military. It is such an important part of the game, the more damage we can do, the less we have to buy in, so that’s a debate to be had another time.



The Final Note

I hope this helps give you something to think about. I don’t want to say we will do this and we will do that, because other people may have a different approach to this. I am trying to put across that these are the areas that will be focussed upon and I am opening the floor to anyone with ideas to help.

From the Birthday boy

Dan/naD Wilshire