Overproduction solutions

Day 122, 09:29 • Published in USA • by Plato

Dear Citizens,

It's pretty clear that the Erepublik economy has an overproduction problem. This is causing a high unemployment rate in some countries and a difficult time for many companies. We've worked on it, brainstormed with some of the Erepublik Presidents and here are the immediate solutions that we have implemente😛

1. Until today we gave 5 free food units on registration to each new Citizen. Even if this helped the Citizen survive easier it also represented a negative interference with the e-market that was affecting the companies’ profits. So starting today new Citizens will no longer receive free food on registration. A new Citizen will start with the usual 50% wellness, which will allow him to survive for 10 days. During this period, he will need some money until he finds a job so we decided to impose in each country a minimum Citizen starting fee value of 5 in local currency.
2. Also, many Citizens stated that Hospitals should not help in times of peace (at least until we implement a disease feature) but should help during the wars. So having a hospital will not give you extra wellness each day but will be very useful later, allowing soldiers that lost fights to come back faster onto the battlefield.
3. Each time you will train you will lose 1 wellness point (no matter the strength level)
4. Companies can upgrade their products to quality 4. Employees working in a Q4 company will lose 4 wellness each time they work; at the same time the offer will be more diverse than now. The cost for the upgrade is 100 gold and you will need at least 7 employees to upgrade but the importance of wellness will increase greatly with wars. (We are also working on other ways to differentiate your products than simply price and quality).

Price of Gold
After discussing the Gold payment system with the community we saw that many Citizens were concerned that it could affect the virtual economy and give an unlimited advantage to some. We analyzed this issue and the conclusion that we reached is that a limitation would be recommended, so a Citizen will be able to buy only one pack of 20 gold per week. The price will be 1 Euro = 2 Gold.
We believe that a good implementation of the gold payment system will help the economy and bring the correct amount of additional gold into the New World.
Keep in mind that this solution is an intermediate one and has 3 big benefits:

1. We can test a payment system and its impact to the game before the launch of V1 and fine tune it further.;
2. It will create a revenue system that will start helping us cover some of the expenses and allow us to progress faster. (Donations are not a valid option and neither is advertising at this stage, merchandising we will be doing later and we don’t think premium accounts are a better solution for the game).
3. With the 20 gold per week limit, newcomers with deeper pockets can’t just buy their way to Erepublik economical success or destroy the economy since gold keeps being a limited and precious resource. (Additionally, for V1 we are working on experience based limits)

First marriage in Erepublik
We are happy to announce that a new and original event took place in The New World. [a url=http://www.erepublik.com/profile-5079.html]Cristesco[/a] the President of Romania, married (e-married) [a url=http://www.erepublik.com/profile-13025.html]elena.coman[/a] . [a url=http://www.erepublik.com/article-141831.html]Here[/a] is a complete coverage of the event.

We want to take this opportunity to thank you again for all your feedback, we are trying to create something that didn’t exist before and it is not an easy task. We know that by not doing exactly what some would like us to do or by not copying what already exists we are taking a big risk. But it is impossible to please everyone in the short term and at the same time build something for the long term that can stand the test of time and be truly unique.

And by the way: we implemented the voting system for the newspaper articles. This will help the community find easier the best articles. We are expecting your feedback on this subject.

The Erepublik team