Plato, THIS IS WHAT EREPUBLIK HAS BECOME. (Shout !)
Orango
"PLATO, THIS IS WHAT EREPUBLIK HAS BECOME. Chain Shout ! http://tinyurl.com/87mtp74"
You can also encourage me by subbing and voting this article.
😉
PS: If you want to publish the article in your newspaper & Country, feel free to do it. This is an Open Source article. Click here to get the code. But please do not change anything in the code, and do not remove my nickname at the end of the article. Thanks
😉
Hello dear readers,
Like 1800+ other players, I have read the excellent article of Fremenul Interviewing Plato: The Future of eRepublik. It's a premiere since months to have an article like this one, and therefore I think it is an opportunity for me to react by sharing my opinion + a small reflexion about the game, its purpose and how we, players, should react.
I've currently "left" the game, I mean I only 2click anymore. I don't want to get involved anymore. But I do like writing articles, thus once in a while I hope I'll have time to share a little something on this newspaper.
For new players, you have to know that we once had an eRepublik Insider. It was a newspaper which hosted articles with important communications from the admins to the players. This newspaper still exists but was shut down many months ago. Since then, the administration team has always been acting in the shadow, hidden from the players. It's a premiere that we get an interview of a staff member, and I would like to thank the_mihai for this initiative. It is really well appreciated.
However, some parts of the interview just baffled me. I'll try to explain:
Plato:Today I’m the executive director of eRepublik.com, since the moment George left the company, and I have the same mission: to try to keep eRepublik as close as possible to its original values.
This is a very good point. I never had the feeling the team had as main objective to keep the game close to its roots though. And if it is the case, how did this game become what it is now? I mean, this is as close to the original values as mice are to elelphants...
Plato:And now I am more optimistic than ever that we will succeed in this challenge, especially because, like we’ve stated a few weeks ago, we actually managed to make a take over in the eRepublik team (more than 50% from the team are eRepublik citizens!).
This is also something I cannot understand, if 50% of the eRepublik team have been regular players once, you have probably chosen the ones that didn't understand at all the claims of the players. Because beside the news display that is something everyone is asking for months (literally), the latest updates are far from what players asked. Is anyone listening to us at all?
Plato: The entire company has around 60 employees and 75 game moderators.
How is it possible that a game is at COMPLETE STATUS QUO since many months, with that many employees?! What are they doing at work?
Plato:When I joined the staff I realized that although eRepublik has a lot of channels, the quality of communication may not be that great. As a result, we decided to lower the number of channels and focus more on the quality.
Come on, this is definitively the worst part of the entire article. Back then, everyone knew that each communication channel had its own purpose. And each one was actively used. But this were a lot of things to handle indeed, but it did gave us the opportunity to have a real contact with you. Now, you have mixed it all in a horrible Ticket System that most players never use and will never use. And it is not because you want to "focus" on one communication channel but only because you couldn't handle that much pressure and preferred to mute the player community.
Plato:M: Yes, we’re working on this. And we have a pretty short deadline for this version to be live. But let’s say that I’ve learned that in this industry lots of unexpected issues may appear and I would prefer not to take a public commitment for this one. But we’re pushing hard to have a nice eRepublik mobile web page soon, for IOS and Android devices.
Great, but you're only 4 years late. This suggestion is as old as eRepublik itself.
Plato:I can share with you that the profits you’re talking about are low because we’re investing the majority of the money in servers.
Suuure... I highly doubt that the majority of the money is used for the servers. Certainly when you know that eRepublik has hundreds of thousands of players, many thousands of them who buy gold regularly, and players who tank massively by buying for hundreds of euros each month...
(Brief supposition: I ran a MMORPG server for more than a year back in 2008, for a thousand players connected simultaneously, we paid a monthly fee of 200€ if I remember well. On eRep I suppose there might be 15-20k players connected simultaneously at its peaks, If I take a large margin, we could say you pay 3.000€ monthly for the servers. But let's be honnest, eRep makes way more money than that.)
Plato:Since you were a bit unfair with your bracket, I think I should remind you that 2 years ago you were able to fight for free once per day for about one minute. Today, by eating food and coming back in the game we’re able to put some real damage in the battles. eRepublik is really not about gold but about having fun, the gold is created only if you want to have more fun right in this very moment and not later.
If you want my opinion, it was far more epic 2 years ago, when everyone had the same amount of health and your damage was only determined by the weapons you use and the amount of days you trained. And while weapons were not cheap either, everyone could afford them when working daily and eventually running companies. Therefore, by training every day and working efficiently you could make really significant damage in battles.
Nowadays, to be able to lay down significant damage, you HAVE to use tons of bazookas or burn hundreds of golds. Plus, I'm really tired of having to click 200 times a day on the damn "FIGHT" button. Please don't say the actual system is even equal to the one in V1, it would mean you have understood nothing imho.
eRepublik is not about Gold but only about having fun?
Sorry but the Gold "urge" of the team ruins the fun completely. When you see some players registered since 2 months, that own older players only because they have bought hundreds of euros of gold...sigh
And what to say about HUGE banners like the one that showed up a few weeks ago "NEED MORE DAMAGE IN A DECISIVE BATTLE? Get 40% more damage booster bonus! Click here to find out how! Limited time offer!".
I'm personally am allergic to anything called "booster bonus" after it went totally out of hand in V2.
But moreover, I'm very impressed of how aggressive this ad was. The ad took a huge place on your home page, there was a huge timer meaning "HURRY UP OR YOU'LL DIE" and when you clicked on it, you had the 100€ offer already checked, Visa checked and Terms of Service checke
😛you only had to click on the giant green "BUY NOW" at the bottom of the page to lose (yes this is the right word) 100 euros, a third of the average wage in many countries...
There was also no intention whatsoever to hide the message behind the promotion. For the ones that are completely blind it says: "GIVE YOUR MONEY NOW, you'll get gold that you HAVE to use in the next hours to get the damage bonus. In less than 24h you'll have no gold and you'll be ready to give us more money :3". Such advertisements are not new but I've always found them just completely scandalous.
However, all this wouldn't be a problem if the way the staff team earns money didn't totally mess up with the mecanics of the game. But it is. Selling gold is the roots of all the problems. To earn more money, the staff team has to artificially CREATE a need for gold, therefore the only implementations since over a year have only one purpose: "Spend your gold and you'll be able to do this, to enhance this, to become stronger". The Upgrade Training Grounds is a good example of this.
Now, THIS is what eRepublik has become, the_mihai. Definately, eRepublik is not at all what it used to be. There are only ruins left, and you have to pay real money to wander in this soulless landscape.
There aren't much old players that didn't want to spend real life money on eRepublik left, most just gave up and left the game. How should the players react? Let it go? ...
Please help SPREADING this article by SHOUTING this:
"PLATO, THIS IS WHAT EREPUBLIK HAS BECOME. Chain Shout ! http://tinyurl.com/87mtp74"
You can also encourage me by subbing and voting this article.
😉
Top Voted Previous Articles:
3522- 378 Day 1361: [The Call] The Players' Suggestions to Save eRepublik (Vote !)
1341- 179 Day 879: [EN] eFrance, PHOENIX and The Entente
758 - 43 Day 781: [ENG] Hacking, the day of shame
443 - 34 Day 1086 THE 2011 CALL. Il est temps que vous écoutiez vos joueurs.
397 - 24 Day 810: [FR] Communauté d'eFrance, la partie n'est pas terminée.
357 - 29 Day 1361: [The Call] Les Suggestions des Joueurs pour Sauver eRepublik !
350 - 72 Day 814: The Tale of the Frog and Sfailand !
352 - 72 Day 1135 [Le Phénix s'éteint] Serbie, Hongrie et Portugal quittent PHOENIX !
314 -64 Day 894: eFrance dans Phoenix? Qu'en pense Phoenix?
314 - 50 Day 835: [FR] eFrançais, unissons-nous et sauvons notre pays !
Comments
Voted!
Pour les abonnés français, je continuerai bien la saga "eFrance, 150 ans d'histoire" pour ceux qui s'en souviennent 🙂 Quelqu'un serait intéressé?
"I've currently "left" the game" ... I stoped to read when i read that, you are writing an Article and you left the game, y u so clever.
Tu soulèves des points pertinents et/mais bien sur, importants Orango !!
Plusieurs remarques que je me suis faites aussi en lisant le même article que toi hier ....
Quand je vois la connerie de photo qu'il nous sort pour nous présenter le modèle de sa caisse, je suis mort de rire ...
De toute façon ceci est un jeu ... Pourquoi son interview devrait-elle refléter l’ultime vérité dans un article qui fait partie du jeu lui-même ???
Qui prouve qu'il dis la vérité ???
......
Personne, ni rien du tout !!
Mais la pommade sera surement passée sur quelques milliers de joueurs au moins ....
eMonde de Merde ...
moi je serais très intéressé orango... 😁
et je pense que les nouveaux joueurs seraient encore plus intéressé que moi
Voted
Very nice said! \o/
Ah oui j'oubliai 😁
Je m'en souvient et suis intéressé aussi 😉
j'ai publié aux USA ton article parce que je pense que tu touches du clavier ce que nous ressentons tous, j'ose espérer qu'ils ne censureront pas ..... parce que des fois ça va loin dans le muselage
-V-
v+s
v+s
Mavie, Mavie, corre mundo... *.*
v+s
vote
This man speaks the truth!
Orango, this is the other game's Mark Stray. Cheers o/
V++
Every old player I have come across only talks about the past and how glorious it was?. Well some of those old players played consistently and are at a high level and a high strength and because erepublik doesn't reset how do you expect new players to compete against old players?
You talk about running costs of servers, €3000 a month? You have to be very lucky to get server, bandwidth and back ups for erepublik. Just because you ran an MMORPG game back in the days for 1000 users means nothing
Should we understand that Lemnaru was the reason of this (so left active role and they now try to revert back to original values) or eRep is considered as EOL (End of Life) ?
Also most people ignore company overhead and employee costs, and this 60 people also include those working on 'new project' .
Everyone has told a thousand times, eRep has structural flaws and internal problems. It is not very easy to fix them all, some of them (like WaM) are simply irreversible.
And for the records, unlike majority, I don't care even a bit about eRepublik. I just state my view.
Asif Pakistan: Of course there still are old players at high level, and luckily. In means that everyone has not abandonned all faith in eRepublik. It is easy to get high level and to compete against older players when you buy gold, you buy all training grounds, upgrade them all to Q2, and do +50 strenght each day. For experience, just use your gold to tank in battles. The thing is, there has always been a difference between high ranked players and older ones but nowadays the clivage is larger
Asif Pakistan: than it has ever been before. Concerning the costs of the server, as mentionned above it is a brief suposition. But anyway, the server I had hosted a thousand players SIMULTANEOUSLY (you seem to have forgotten that detail) on a full 3D MMORPG which implies bigger bandwidth use/user each day. I'm not an expert in any of this and I've never pretend I was but I try to understand and to me it makes no sense at all.
Luminara: I don't know if George Lemnaru was the reason of the slope that eRep is encountering since many months, it could be but I don't think so. There were the same big flaws in administration 2 years ago but I think the staff has never been able to question itself and change the things that doesn't work at all. This is the logical result of all this.
Luminara: Also, I did not forget the employee costs, but 60 employees, is it really necessary? And what for? The game is frozen since months and there was no good significant change. With 60 paid employees, you can get results way better than we have actually, imho.
No flaw is irreversible. It is just reall hard to fix some of them and the first step in this is to admit you were wrong.
Mavie75: Merci beaucoup pour l'article et le shout 🙂
TheMew: Cheers Mark ! \o
Neosis: Effectivement, c'est tout ceci qui m'a donné envie de réagir et souligner des passages qui me semblent peu crédibles ou complètement aberrants...Merci pour ton avis et le shout 🙂
Kaeguon: C'est noté !
All: Thank you for your support 😉
V
@Orango: Actually I asked it to Admin, we can't know about Lemnaru issue. (Actually with less than 30% share of Bonte and Lemnaru, I doubt they were controlling) And for employees, probably most are customer service and also they invest manpower in new game.
Finally, I highly doubt there is a way to get rid of WaM. They just opened Pandora's box, chose their new path leading them to this soft sand.
Dear Guagature,
Recently, you have created content which was declared to be not legal.
Content type: article Content info: PLATO,THIS WHAT EREPUBLIK HAS BECOME. Reason: Spam You can see all your penalties in your Law Infringements List page.
Best regards,
Your eRepublik team
2 articles removed in 1 hour by admin 😮
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0194y1md6
PROPAGANDA LEVEL PLATO
VOTADO !
Tu sais très bien comme moi que les admins en ont rien à battre de ton article.
Sinon bonne idée de reprendre 150 ans d'histoire, j'aimais birn.
eRepublik V1, c'était pourri.
Rising, +42 pour le module éco si les formules avaient été écrites correctement.
eRepublik aujourd'hui, le module militaire est nettement plus tactique qu'avant et ce malgré les gros utilisateurs de golds qui existaient déjà en V1 (parce que pour acheter 40 HP et les tanks Q5 correspondant, il fallait plus de 100 golds en poche ou alors pomper les joueurs). Le système militaire est plus équitable aujourd'hui.
Si le jeu semble moins bien, c'est juste parce que la communauté est moins riche qu'elle ne l'était et que l'actuelle ne trouve pas les solutions adéquates pour rendre le jeu intéressant.
Pour ma part, je trouve que le jeu est devenu plus accessible à tous qu'avant, il n'y a toujours pas besoin de golds pour être influent dans le jeu, il suffit de s'en donner la peine.
Arno600: Je sais, mais je sais aussi qu'ils le lisent tout de même 😃 Enfin, les modos en tout cas.
Mavie75/Guagature: What a joke. Plato once more preferred to delete rather than to listen... o_O
Nya Muad Dib: Tu avais déjà donné ton avis je-ne-sais-plus-ou, mais je ne suis absolument pas sur la même longueur d'onde pour le coup. eRepublik V1 avait un charme qui s'est perdu avec le temps. Rising était absolument naze, les boosters à tout va étaient carrément horribles et ces modules
Nya Muad Dib: étaient inutilement chronophages. Je ne pense pas être le seul à penser ainsi vu la chute de population juste après la mise en place de Rising.
Le module militaire actuellement plus "tactique"? Je ne vois vraiment pas en quoi, surtout que les règles des MPPs et d'innitiative ont été modifiées. Et celui-ci bouffe mille fois plus de golds qu'auparavant, tu ne peux pas être sérieux en niant ça oO
Mais bon, chacun son avis.
most funny experience:
Today I decided to unlock mission by 20G
Invite 10 ppl, help them get Leutnant status and Get society builder medal.
I pay 20G for completing mission, and I didn't receive Society Builder medal.
20G for 10 EXP for completing mission, you are kidding or it is bug?
I want mine Society Builder medal, I pay for it 20G.
or money back guarantie 😃
ANS: you paid 20 gold to be able to finish the mission without having to earn the society builder medal.
Win up to 10 gol😛 http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/trolls-and-fools-and-puppet-masters-oh-my--2027352/1/20
Super article Orango, ça fait plaisir de te revoir prendre la plume. Moi aussi je serai très interessé par la reprise de ta série sur les 150 ans d'histoire d'erepublik.
Faut arrêter de se complaire dans la pleurnicherie, t'es pire qu'une femme. Si t'es pas content t'arrête de jouer et tu créé ton propre jeu ou tu pourras faire ce que tu veux.
Ca va t'es quand même pas complètement perdu tu vas pouvoir survivre sans tes quelques potes IRC que t'appelle "communauté".
good article... I'll shout it 😉
Interview très intéressante !
WTF, les liens donnés en fin de l'article pourraient être "malicious" selon erepublik...
Censure ou réalité?
Surcouff: Olol, joue dans le silence et l'obéissance, c'est bien aussi.
David Abruzzi: Ce sont juste les liens erepublik de mes articles, je ne sais pas pourquoi cela s'affiche ainsi 😮
On oublie souvent que eRep c'est une société avec des investisseurs qui veulent rentabiliser leur investissement. Et le but d'une société, c'est de faire des bénéfices, pas de faire plaisir aux joueurs pauvres et raleurs français 😉
Je rejoints tout ce que j'ai lu ici, mais je ne vois aucune raison 'logique' à ce qu'ils changent leur fusil d'épaule : ils gagnent des zeuros, et même nous qui ne sommes pas d'accord, ben on reste quand même, alors aucune raison de changer quoi que ce soit !
bon article , bon du mal à lire l'anglais vue l'heur qu'il est , mais bon article ! +1
Un charme ? Un jeu qui buguait pendant 40% de la journée ? Tu es maso ?
Rising avait juste le meilleur module économique du jeu. Il fallait aller chercher tes employés pour produire tes ressources. L'entreprenariat était plus actif que jamais, les interactions entre joueurs plus fortes.
Evidemment, les abrutis n'ont rien compris à ce module qui demandait de réfléchir et se sont empressés de quitter le jeu. Ces joueurs ne me manquent pas, ils sont un poids pour les communautés.
Par contre, aucune idée pour le module militaire de Rising, je ne me battais jamais.
Oui, le module militaire V1 était à chier, rien d'épique il fallait lâcher tout en fin de round. Round qui durait 24h et où tu ne tapais que 5 fois. Fin.
J'avoue que les MPP ajoutaient un petit truc. Mais pareil, le module faisait partir plein de joueurs car trop compliqué (dixit mes nouveaux employés morts en 2 jours).
Aujourd'hui, et malgré les CB, tu peux gérer chaque round en fonction des disponibilités de chacun, donc mieux organiser tes raids. La coopération est nettement plus poussée pour les joueurs qui restent plus longtemps sur le jeu.
Gardez tes fights pour les moments clés des rounds où les points changent, tout lâcher pour faire abandonner l'autre, gérer les timezone. Des batailles qui durent entre 12h et 30h selon l'importance.
Tu es juste nostalgique et non objectif.