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Dear reader,

For the sake of not boring you all to death and avoiding to make it too long, this article will be divided in two parts. I cannot offer you an exact time for when I will publish the second part as the amount of data required for it is enormous and I’m collecting it by hand in my free time.

Topics for Today’s Specter News:

1 | USA’s Voting Statistics from all times



So, you can tell I was bored and decided to do some statistics, but in reality… I wanted to investigate what drove the game to become so less active than it was about a decade ago and while I can’t find a definitive conclusion, some theories may or may not be entirely plausible.

Active Population Measurement

In terms of measurement, we need to start by defining what “active population” really is. Typically I’d say it’s the combination of the active “meta-game” players (I’ll call them metas for the sake of abr for the rest of the article) with the “two-clickers”. But how can we really measure with a certain degree of approximation who these people are? Well, thankfully for us… both two-clickers and metas have one thing in common: Both vote in elections.

As such, I’ve decided to use both the Presidential and Congressional election total number of votes in the eUSA as the most approximate measure of the eUS Active population.

Theories

So I’ll start with the first one I’ve heard many old players use: “V2 was trash and it was the cause of many players leaving”.

According to my sources, and someone older may correct me if I’m wrong, eRepublik had at least 3 versions, the current one being the 3rd. This table below should give you an idea of which month/year these versions were released :




Now, if we look at both Presidential and Congressional elections and try to combine these, here is what we find out:




If we take a look into the previous months before a release, we can see that there is a decrease of active population every single time. It is extremely substantial between Version 1 and Version 2 of eRepublik. The same however is not as substantial between Version 2 and Version 3.

If we look into the Congressional votes, we can see that the pattern is similar.



Still, even though we can see clear decreases every single time there is a release, we can also observe an increase above the values during V2 some months after V3 is released.

So what do these graphics and statistics tell us? Do they support the theory of the majority of the older players I have spoken to?

The answer would be partially yes. On one hand, we in the USA have never again had the same type of numbers in terms of activity as we had during Version 1. On the other hand, we can see that Version 3 had better numbers for a period of time than Version 2 ever had.

This concludes in fact that Version 1 was the most successful version ever of this game as far as the eAmerican population is concerned.

Now we move on to theory number 2: “The Admins and Moderation team have proven ineffective at punishing the people who cheat”

This one is a difficult one to prove as there have been many articles concerning the use of multis and even player-initiative investigations on other players suspected of cheating. I found articles from players reporting cheating openly back in Day 500! That’s more than 10 years ago!

Would that be a contributing factor for people to leave? Sure it is. Nobody likes cheaters and people who have a higher and greater sense of justice will like it even less when the people enforcing the rules do little to nothing about it.

According to one of my sources who preferred to stay anonymous, referring to eRepublik’s reason of the game dying:

“I heard the Admins kicked a bunch of Moderators. Some scandal that killed the game. Something about not punishing cheaters.”

Sure, there is nothing concrete there about what exactly happened, but it is also clear that an unwillingness of punishing the people who deserve punishment according to the rules may be a big reason why a lot of people left.

Theory Number 3: The Real Life

As time goes, people come and go. One of the reasons this game might have survived this long according to some of the older players is the community and the friends people made here over the years. Naturally real life kicks in on everyone. Some people finished college, some people got married and/or had kids or embraced other responsibilities that made them either quit or play this game less than they used to.

Regardless of it all, some of these people, particularly the ones who liked the community and kept a good relation with some or most people, tend to come back. They come back not mostly because of the game, but because of the people they met.

Trends

If we take a look at the graphics from both elections, we observe that both follow an exponential type of trend. If the behavior followed a linear trend, we would have hit 0 “active population” in January 2021.

So let’s take a look:






Presidential Elections Trend

Now for Linear Trends:







If the numbers keep the same behavior, we won’t hit 0 as we’ve reached a plateau. We can see here the trend of the last 5 years since January 2017.





The trends and numbers are similar when looking at the Congressional elections of the past 5 years as well.

Conclusions:

1. V1 was indeed the best version this game ever had and the new releases are partially the reason why some players left the game.

2. Not punishing cheaters and some scandals may be contributing factors to the decrease of the populations.

3. Real Life is to an extent the reason people also leave. Community tends to be the reason they come back.



On December 2015, a President was elected and the total votes in that election was 666, the number of the beast or the Devil. The elected President of those elections was....

... Gnilraps!

Coincidences maybe? May the eConspiracy theorists thrive!



I hope you have all enjoyed the statistics from eUSA. My next piece regarding this topic will include statistics from the entire eWorld. I have been collecting the data by hand, so please bear with me as I keep collecting. It may take some time.

I’d like to give credit to Mister Y and Paul Proteus who made invaluable suggestions to my graphics and trends and I’d like to thank the anonymous contributors who took the time to answer my investigative questions.



Stay tuned for my next articles!

Thank you everyone and kind regards,