The Dumbing Down of eRepublik Is Complete
Day 3,603, 12:41
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Published in Croatia 
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by
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by William Thomas Riker
DISCLAIMER: this article is simply an exercise of my journalistic effort to logically and coherently combine Star Trek related gifs with what is happening in this game. This article has no other purpose, but to provide some fun and insight for citizens who like my dearest show.
No need to call me Captain Obvious.
I am Commander Riker.
ALTERNATIVE TITLE: How Gene Rodenbery's vision became JJ Abrams' shooter Cash Cow Franchise.
Everybody is well aware how above average intelliegence and critical thinking became redundant in this game, and how the rules don't apply the same to all citizens. Still, I wish to present it black and white, with all the facts and arguments.
MILITARY
We can all agree V2 was the period with the most complex battles.
Instead of a wall, there was a map with hexagonal fields. Single field could be occupied only by one side at a time, though multiple players could be stationed there.
There were different terrain fields: plains, woods, mountains, rivers, bridges, and the city. Helicopters could cross all, all other units only plains, bridges and the city. Bridges were choking points, and the city field had to be won in order to win the battle on that map (the region).
There were different military skills: Helicopter, Tank, Infantry, Artillery. Infantry had an edge against artillery, artillery against helicopters, helicopters against tanks, and tanks against infrantry.
We fought against real people: the battles were player versus player. Depending on skills, weapons and health, loser would be drained of wellness a lot quicker, and after a while he would have to leave the battlefield, making it easier for the more prepared side to win the map and the battle.
There were Hospitals and Defense Systems: they would be placed in one or more fields, and defending players would group around them, they had the Area of Effect. You could even leave your PC to play automatically by putting yourself near the hospital and the DS. Since you would be afk, you would never attack, only defend, but it was still a nice feature if one didn't have the time to sit through turns.
Citizens complained it was too complicated and lasted too long. So we got the worst of both worlds: the simple wall that is not fun and the long battles. Granted, the current wall has mini battles, but if you want to win the campaign, you have to be online all the time anyway. People could've spent half an hour a day to fight in V2 cause we had wellness capped at 300 a day. I know, you're gonna say that I could use scripts to fight for me. How is that playing, let alone a fun one?
When it comes to the military module, V1 had the best strength gain, a logarithmic one, meaning the stronger you were, the less strength you would gain when training next time. That narrowed the gap between the old and new players, so the country had to involve everyone to win the battle. We had to attract new players. The strongest individual could heavily influence a battle at that time, and today they win, not only battles, but entire campaigns, on their own.
A one man army, indeed
Resistance Hero, True Patriot and Mercenary medals, Daily and Combat orders have reduced the significance of MPPs and even entire alliances, making diplomacy almost completely pointless, at least in terms of effort and time invested versus ally damage gained. Removing the ticket industry and Prestige Points awarding free tickets don't help either.
Citizens don't fight for their countries anymore, but for themselves. You are so consumed by your profile stats, you turned almost all the wars into training sessions to farm for your ranks, levels and medals.
ECONOMY
What is the point of global currency? Isn't that supposed to be gold's purpose? Or at least it was when there were 50 different currencies.
What is the point in restricting 10 gold per day purchases and donations, when people can easily transfer hundreds of thousand in currency and items like houses, weapons and food?
What is the point in used companies' price sale restrictions (+-10
How did medals manage to become basis of the economy and simultaneously killing it? Just keep on farming and "earn" hundreds of free gold for every 100 levels, free trainings and energy bars. On top of all the medals, the most powerful get PH medals, and then a couple of hundred gold on top of that. That's hundreds of gold every week for hitting the Fight button!
Why did ticket companies get deleted?
Why is there so much money and gold around that everybody has enough to buy top of the line items, and nobody buys Q1-Q6? How is a newbie supposed to earn from his Q1 company to be able to upgrade it several times? Tha module was for the smart. Are you smart enough to earn? Good, you upgrade. If not, you go bankrupt.
Why do we have tens of thousands of storage slots, making higher quality food companies unprofitable?
Why did different economy skills and its ranks get deleted? They were a feature that made countries organise themselves, that made good businessmen work smart. There used to be 11 of them, and an imbalance meant chaos.
Why was energy thrown out of the work equation, negating the economy war?
Why was Work as Manager introduced in the first place, enabling everybody to be independent of anyone else?
How come everyone can sell stuff, even though they have no companies? Why is there a single storage instead of every company having their own like in the past?
As military module has Training Grounds, the economy module had Library, to increase one's work skill. Off course, time management must be mentioned.
Besides Wellness, there was also Happiness. Products had Customization points: food producers had to set how much wellness and happiness their products would give, so you could have different food of the same quality on the market. Rifles, Tanks, Helicopters, Artillery had different attack, defense, durability values. Houses had different wellness, hapiness and duration values. Hospitals and DSs had different duration, AoE and wellness/defence points. All that contributed not just to the military strategy, but to economic as well. Producers had to learn consumers needs and tweek their products accordingly. And consumers had at least half a dozen possible versions of a single product of a single quality!
POLITICS
Why was the 2 gold PP candidacy fee removed? That fee made sure that only people who knew what they were doing and had a plan would become PP candidates.
Why is there no more preferential voting in congress elections? We used to vote for people with programs, now we vote for parties without one.
NEWS
Why was the old news page, which presented top rated and latest articles clearly, replaced by the current one which is all messed up and requires too much effort to browse articles?
Why do we even have journalist missions? You can basically make up mission for everything else, and you had to do it to the journalism! For years half of the articles have been nothing but spam asking begging for comments. Citizens wouldn't even try to write a real article, just the ones saying "I need 25 comments". What is the point of these missions?
Why are medal winnings published with the shouts? Nobody cares, it's just spam jamming important news!
Why can we shout every 10 minutes, instead of 3 times per day like we used to? People literally shout the same stuff (articles, battles...) every 15 minutes, without even deleting the previous shouts! Only 3 shouts per day made people think more strategically even when shouting! We had to spread evenly in a given timeframe to reach the maximum audience.
Why did eRepublik become so overly SIMPLISTIC? Where is the PLAYING PART? All you need to do is join the game, and it plays itself. Just like first person shooter games require fast reflexes, this one requires strategic thinking, in all modules. Requires, hm. Required. No wonder people are leaving.
All that is left are the battles. And while everyone can join them, only few enjoy them.
How long can eRepublik keep going like this?
This game had so much potential, it still has! We still play in the hope of seeing the game reach that potential. We are tired of automating and simplifying gameplay, and making it easy for all the players to win medals, become journalists, have companies, and "earn" insane amounts of gold and currency. It is no supposed to be like that. Easy is not fun!
Being OP and having it easy.
This was literally the last episode called Endgame.
Captain got "promoted" in rank to admiral.
She gave up flying for a boring desk job.
Live long and prosper!
WTR
No need to call me Captain Obvious.
I am Commander Riker.
ALTERNATIVE TITLE: How Gene Rodenbery's vision became JJ Abrams' shooter Cash Cow Franchise.
Everybody is well aware how above average intelliegence and critical thinking became redundant in this game, and how the rules don't apply the same to all citizens. Still, I wish to present it black and white, with all the facts and arguments.
MILITARY
We can all agree V2 was the period with the most complex battles.
Instead of a wall, there was a map with hexagonal fields. Single field could be occupied only by one side at a time, though multiple players could be stationed there.
There were different terrain fields: plains, woods, mountains, rivers, bridges, and the city. Helicopters could cross all, all other units only plains, bridges and the city. Bridges were choking points, and the city field had to be won in order to win the battle on that map (the region).
There were different military skills: Helicopter, Tank, Infantry, Artillery. Infantry had an edge against artillery, artillery against helicopters, helicopters against tanks, and tanks against infrantry.
We fought against real people: the battles were player versus player. Depending on skills, weapons and health, loser would be drained of wellness a lot quicker, and after a while he would have to leave the battlefield, making it easier for the more prepared side to win the map and the battle.
There were Hospitals and Defense Systems: they would be placed in one or more fields, and defending players would group around them, they had the Area of Effect. You could even leave your PC to play automatically by putting yourself near the hospital and the DS. Since you would be afk, you would never attack, only defend, but it was still a nice feature if one didn't have the time to sit through turns.
Citizens complained it was too complicated and lasted too long. So we got the worst of both worlds: the simple wall that is not fun and the long battles. Granted, the current wall has mini battles, but if you want to win the campaign, you have to be online all the time anyway. People could've spent half an hour a day to fight in V2 cause we had wellness capped at 300 a day. I know, you're gonna say that I could use scripts to fight for me. How is that playing, let alone a fun one?
When it comes to the military module, V1 had the best strength gain, a logarithmic one, meaning the stronger you were, the less strength you would gain when training next time. That narrowed the gap between the old and new players, so the country had to involve everyone to win the battle. We had to attract new players. The strongest individual could heavily influence a battle at that time, and today they win, not only battles, but entire campaigns, on their own.
A one man army, indeed
Resistance Hero, True Patriot and Mercenary medals, Daily and Combat orders have reduced the significance of MPPs and even entire alliances, making diplomacy almost completely pointless, at least in terms of effort and time invested versus ally damage gained. Removing the ticket industry and Prestige Points awarding free tickets don't help either.
Citizens don't fight for their countries anymore, but for themselves. You are so consumed by your profile stats, you turned almost all the wars into training sessions to farm for your ranks, levels and medals.
ECONOMY
What is the point of global currency? Isn't that supposed to be gold's purpose? Or at least it was when there were 50 different currencies.
What is the point in restricting 10 gold per day purchases and donations, when people can easily transfer hundreds of thousand in currency and items like houses, weapons and food?
What is the point in used companies' price sale restrictions (+-10
😵, when people negotiate buying a company and then receiving some of the gold back?
How did medals manage to become basis of the economy and simultaneously killing it? Just keep on farming and "earn" hundreds of free gold for every 100 levels, free trainings and energy bars. On top of all the medals, the most powerful get PH medals, and then a couple of hundred gold on top of that. That's hundreds of gold every week for hitting the Fight button!
Why did ticket companies get deleted?
Why is there so much money and gold around that everybody has enough to buy top of the line items, and nobody buys Q1-Q6? How is a newbie supposed to earn from his Q1 company to be able to upgrade it several times? Tha module was for the smart. Are you smart enough to earn? Good, you upgrade. If not, you go bankrupt.
Why do we have tens of thousands of storage slots, making higher quality food companies unprofitable?
Why did different economy skills and its ranks get deleted? They were a feature that made countries organise themselves, that made good businessmen work smart. There used to be 11 of them, and an imbalance meant chaos.
Why was energy thrown out of the work equation, negating the economy war?
Why was Work as Manager introduced in the first place, enabling everybody to be independent of anyone else?
How come everyone can sell stuff, even though they have no companies? Why is there a single storage instead of every company having their own like in the past?
As military module has Training Grounds, the economy module had Library, to increase one's work skill. Off course, time management must be mentioned.
Besides Wellness, there was also Happiness. Products had Customization points: food producers had to set how much wellness and happiness their products would give, so you could have different food of the same quality on the market. Rifles, Tanks, Helicopters, Artillery had different attack, defense, durability values. Houses had different wellness, hapiness and duration values. Hospitals and DSs had different duration, AoE and wellness/defence points. All that contributed not just to the military strategy, but to economic as well. Producers had to learn consumers needs and tweek their products accordingly. And consumers had at least half a dozen possible versions of a single product of a single quality!
POLITICS
Why was the 2 gold PP candidacy fee removed? That fee made sure that only people who knew what they were doing and had a plan would become PP candidates.
Why is there no more preferential voting in congress elections? We used to vote for people with programs, now we vote for parties without one.
NEWS
Why was the old news page, which presented top rated and latest articles clearly, replaced by the current one which is all messed up and requires too much effort to browse articles?
Why do we even have journalist missions? You can basically make up mission for everything else, and you had to do it to the journalism! For years half of the articles have been nothing but spam asking begging for comments. Citizens wouldn't even try to write a real article, just the ones saying "I need 25 comments". What is the point of these missions?
Why are medal winnings published with the shouts? Nobody cares, it's just spam jamming important news!
Why can we shout every 10 minutes, instead of 3 times per day like we used to? People literally shout the same stuff (articles, battles...) every 15 minutes, without even deleting the previous shouts! Only 3 shouts per day made people think more strategically even when shouting! We had to spread evenly in a given timeframe to reach the maximum audience.
Why did eRepublik become so overly SIMPLISTIC? Where is the PLAYING PART? All you need to do is join the game, and it plays itself. Just like first person shooter games require fast reflexes, this one requires strategic thinking, in all modules. Requires, hm. Required. No wonder people are leaving.
All that is left are the battles. And while everyone can join them, only few enjoy them.
How long can eRepublik keep going like this?
This game had so much potential, it still has! We still play in the hope of seeing the game reach that potential. We are tired of automating and simplifying gameplay, and making it easy for all the players to win medals, become journalists, have companies, and "earn" insane amounts of gold and currency. It is no supposed to be like that. Easy is not fun!
Being OP and having it easy.
This was literally the last episode called Endgame.
Captain got "promoted" in rank to admiral.
She gave up flying for a boring desk job.
Live long and prosper!
WTR
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Comments
Asking the real questions 🙂
Another short article on a similar subject:
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/self-importance-of-players-in-erepublik-2652357/1/20
\\\\ /
she-umber bear was here 😃
spot on
v + s
v+s
only Allah knows...
I remember the hexagonal battles 🙁 good times.
Good point.
nice read
Really interesting to tell about the old versions, for players who never knew this time)
Great article, and a darn lot of questions 😃
Q1/Q6 products are only worthless if we are talking about weapons.
And Food is almost the same. Granted, in this case Q7 is not the best, but whichever one is the cheapest per 2 units of energy. And that's Q1, Q2, or Q3, never others, which have become unprofitable.
Profit and worthlessness are different issues.
Profit is tied more to wage costs and multies than anything else.
But still no profit, and no need for higher Q's food companies.
What does it matter any way it is all the same if we use Q1 or Q7 food. And on top of that 1 Q7 food company cost good damn to much, and has no real value compared to weapon company's. FF's are limited while with Eb's one can spend daily 100 000 tank's but can never spend unlimited amounts of food because there's no option to buy pack that would allow that.
The answer to the majority of your questions is their greed. They do not want players. They want payers obsessed with their profiles or their ego in general. That is why a massive multiplayer game became a game of 1000 people. Fortunately for them, many of these 1000 are addicts who can still afford to pay about 100 euros in average per month. So, they had a golden cow eating cheap grass from thousand meadows and exchanged it for a Siamese cat wearing a diamond ring which is fed with exquisite caviar.
V2 was actually fun and engaging, now it's an uninspiring chore 🙁
The complexity of V2 is what made this game awesome, they need to re-implement it ....
And as always....silence from admins, half baked modules unfinished and worthless to average players that get less and less each day.
They wrecked a perfectly mathematically modelled V1 economy and 'easy; no "wait" battles. Players deserted en masse. New player retention (bots excepted) is now zero. Lots of new pretty pictures and do nothing icons. Even the new military 'page' is a waste; Old one was easy and always on page one. Every new 'fix' is one more step backward.
Good questions!
I fear no real good answers will come from the game developers, but we can only hope it does one day...
Gold and greed isn't the right answer, that's for sure.
[removed]
[removed]
journalism up the face!
the reason the economy is crazy now is because people are only worried about who has more gold or higher stats rather than what they can actually do with that gold and their level. It is almost the.same in real life as it is a competition of position rather than what can be done with it..
It makes things redundant for common people.
Very good questions!
Supported!!
v+e
v
Hardly voted
o7
o7
your referring to v1 not v2 by v2 there were not the battles you talked about.
I wrote about both, but mostly about V2. Check your facts.
NAW PERHAPS AT START BUT SINCE 2011 there was not the battles you mentioned. why cling to the past new system is way better in a game with less and less people.
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/craftsman-versus-factory-owners-2652242/1/20
I remember everything.
Yuo are right,a thoughtful analysis of the game situation.But i am doubtful if someone will actually hear your saying.peace and keep swinging that credit card
logout and never come back..
😛roblem solved=
Jesus I wish i got even 20 Gold a week lol
this is a very well thought out article. You bring up a lot of old features that I miss. Work skill and diminishing strength gains being the big ones. New players have no chance any more so the only new players the game attracts aren't new at all but multi accounts used to farm gold and cc for their master accounts.
Welcome to the twilight zone......
v + S
even the simplest change, making divisions tier people by strength instead of XP would be a great improvement, since new players or old players who returned to the game have no chance competing against those who buy packs enabling infinite buildup of strength without going to the upper tier.
tl; tr. vote
10 Gold limit is to prevent one way of transfering from multies to master.
You still have currency and items for that.
You do, that's why I have said one way.
But you can't buy ebs with cc, only with gold.
You can always turn CC into gold, but instead of donating 300 gold, you have to buy 10 gold every day for 30 days. It's not like the gold rate is changing every day, so it's not a big deal. Annoying, yes, but it doesn't change anything in the end.
Very good questions and article. Half hearted attempts to improve game has destroyed it. Doubt it that this game can come back as now people have too many choices and erepublik is not any more important for the company.
v