New feature: eRepublik chat module is live!

Day 729, 06:36 • Published in • by Plato

Dear citizens,

If we would ask 10 passionate eRepublik citizens “what is it that you truly love about eRepublik?” most likely eight out of 10 would answer immediately “the social interactions, of course”. Yes, it is nice to be a hard-worker or a successful company manager, it feels good to conquer other lands or liberate your own, it is an overwhelming experience to become the president of your virtual country. But social interactions, within all possible channels (articles, comments, shouts, PMs, etc) are the salt and pepper. And this is no surprise, as the social interaction was, and forever will be, the very foundation of human civilization. We need to stick together, we need to interact, we need to talk to each others. It is a true primordial need of our existence. Not even those disobeying the conventional social rules (laws) are facing the deprivation of social interaction: it is true that only under strict boundaries, but they still have this right.

eRepublik already had a pretty strong social interaction component, through the existing features. The user generated content reached tremendous levels in the New World, if we add up the hundreds of thousands of articles and millions of comments and PMs our players exchanged. But this was not enough, and we proudly jump to the next level: we now officially announce the launch of the eRepublik chat module! If not the only one, eRepublik is among the very few online web-based games which offers a true real-time massive communication channel. Now, any of you can talk in real-time with any other citizen of eRepublik by using the in-game chat module. Different communities can interact in real-time with other communities thousands of miles apart, all this in-game!

Passionate eRepublik citizens founded many IRC-based national chat channels a long time ago. Their contribution to the New World social development is huge, and for this involvement we would like to sincerely thank them all. As a recognition for their work we have offered them the option to become the founders of the first eRepublik chat rooms. One thing we would like to ad😛 the eRepublik chat module is not competing with the existing IRC fan chats. We are just offering an integrated in-game solution, where citizens are just a click away from all the rooms they might be interested in. Also, the in-game chat module has some features that external chats lack and external chat have features that are not implemented yet in the in-game chat.

Next we will describe the basic characteristics of the eRepublik chat. You can reach the chat through My Places - Chat Rooms. Here you have three sections:

- Chat rooms created by you. If you have a minimum 10 level character, you can create your own chat room, either publicly available or password protected. The cost is 10 GOLD.

- Favorite rooms. Here you have a list of all the rooms added by you as "favorites". This way, you can easily and directly access the rooms you are most interested in. Also, you have the “check rankings” button, which lists all the rooms created by citizens, sorted by number of fans (citizens that added the rooms as favorites)

- Featured rooms. Default rooms for your country (National and Beginners). In the same section you are provided with the list of all other eRepublik National and Beginners rooms, for each country. Also, there is a General room, where many nationalities will mix together.

By clicking any room, you are automatically authenticated and the chat window appears. If not, check your pop-up blockers and add the exception to allow eRepublik pop-ups. Also, check that you have the latest Adobe Flash player plugin installed. As you can see, you cannot change your nickname, and you cannot join a chat room if you are not a citizen of eRepublik. Also, the avatar is extracted from the game, you can not change it either. This way your friends are easily recognizable and no “fake” nicknames are allowed. On the upper part you have the tabs for each room you are logged in. Bellow is the text area, and in the right we have the list with online citizens. By clicking (left-click, not right-click as usual) on any citizen, several options appear:

- send personal message puts the name of the citizen in front of your message, so this way he/she will know that you are talking specifically to him/her. This should not be understood as a private message. This is similar to tab auto-complete option of IRC;

- send whisper: this sends a private message, which only the one you are addressing to will see it. It is similar to “notice” option of IRC;

- request private chat, sends the request for a private conversation in a separate tab. The other citizen must accept the request, before you can start chatting privately.

You can “lock” either the Personal Message or Whisper mode while chatting in the main window, by clicking the little lock near the “Send to,” so that you won't have to repeatedly click your friend and choose one of the options.

On the lower left part of the window, you have several buttons: smiles, output settings like hide/show time, hide/show user avatar, start/stop auto-scroll and clear all the text from the screen. Next you have the sound options. Another feature of the chat module are the predefined messages. By clicking this button a list of predefined messages appear, and by double clicking any of them, the message is automatically written and sent. Of course, you can set up your own predefined messages.

More settings, like showing/hiding system messages, options for the fonts, and styles or colors of different kind of messages (public, own, personal, system messages, etc) as well as sound options, can be reached by opening the “Settings” section, located in the upper right part of the window, between the rooms and help sections. Speaking about the help, we strongly recommend you read it, as it provides intuitive instructions including screen shots. The “Rooms” window lists all the rooms created in eRepublik, and you can sort it by name, online users, or description.

Please bare in mind that the eRepublik chat module is not in its final version, but in alpha phase, which means that for now some issues may occasionally occur. We will constantly work to improve this module and provide you with a cool and fun-to-play-with feature. We kindly ask you to report any problems you may encounter by submitting a ticket to our Feedback department. Also, any suggestions and feedback about the new chat module are welcomed.


What else can we say other than: happy chatting everybody!

Regards,
The eRepublik Team