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I have a few thoughts on this: http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/thank-you1-1174946/1/20

So you're going with: "How about all the other times we didn't fail". It's like a child coming home with a failing grade and stating that it's justified with all the times he didn't.

And the occasional slowdown is the least of bugRepublik's problems. But no one wants to think about all the things he did wrong on an anniversary; after all it's a time of celebration. The problem is both the devs and the admins of bugRepublik are obviously in denial. I'd like them to drug addicts going "I can quit any time I want" and "You're the one with a problem" only less aggressive, due to the fact that they still depend on us for money. This is an intervention!

Firstly, you’re up and running for 2+ years now, not 2.5 weeks. After you hit the 6 month mark, you get to celebrate and be thankful once (read it again - ONCE) a year. We really don't care to be reminded every 100, 182.625, 250, and 365.25 days you managed to stay afloat, especially since all you seem to be doing is developing new stuff that doesn't work properly and celebrating senseless anniversaries. Get over yourself.

Secondly, and I can't stress this enough, get a competent, descent, intelligent, uncorrupt staff. I realize you won’t fire yourself for incompetence, but at least have the foresight to hire someone more intelligent and capable then yourselves to compensate. Don't keep hiring random drones (where do you even get them?) that will keep doing as bad a job as you did. You shouldn’t be trying to do the same poor work more efficiently; you should be trying to do it better:

* People are STILL getting randomly banned.
* The admin staff is SLOW and generally unknowledgeable.
* The devs seem utterly unable to write safe, well thought-out, working code in the first try (or the first dozen tries).
* Half the new modules and updates don't serve to improve the gaming experience
* Whoever is in charge of the community (whoever makes the global policies on banning, new countries, etc) is out of touch with the community
* Despite all of the shortcomings with the way the community is managed and the technical side of eRepublic being aired in newspapers and forums, fixing these old problems is PAINFULLY slow.


Let’s run thorough a couple of examples to illustrate...

Duruti is just the latest high-profile example, but there are numerous articles about ordinary people getting banned for no reason. I myself got two silly bans, one permanent, and one for 'quoting a private conversation' where he 'quote' in question was a forum screenshot. People ended up getting banned for buying currency on the MM a several months ago (and doing nothing wrong) when the alchemist bug was abused to overinflate the Serbian and Hungarian currencies. Yes, the bug has been removed, but many innocent people were permanently banned in a panicky and indiscriminate attempt of damage control.

What amuses me the most is that the two temp bans I got for my articles (one for said 'quote', one for calling the admins idiots (one 'By the way' joke sentence in an IMPORTANT article of several paragraphs) (technically against the rules, there's no rule against insulting admins, just other players)) materialized within a few hours of my articles being posted. Two days ago I reported a Nazi party and suggested deletion + bans, and nothing has been done yet. They make two questionable calls on my articles in less time than it took to write them, yet they need whole days to react to no-brainers like Nazi parties. In this and other cases I got a strong sense that eRepublik staff are much more concerned with covering their own asses, and maintaining what has to be a very shaky image then with doing actual work that benefits the society they make a living off. My article will probably share the fate of so many others that tried to point out there's something deeply wrong: it will be deleted, and I will receive a temp-ban and some FF points. The rule is that you don't write articles about eRep’s shortcomings because admins don't read newspapers but forums when they need feedback and having two platforms for feedback will make them miss important things. The truth is forum threads get quickly burrier, and most people don't read them anyways. If they didn't read the newspapers to 'feel the pulse of the people' they wouldn't DELETE MOST IF NOT ALL the critical articles that do come out, so clearly they do. This policy effectively allows them to burry discontent to where only they can see it. Why? Because if people don't know how bad things are they won’t mind.


It took from 27 July to 08 October (2,5 months!!!) for my ORG to be destroyed and my money refunded so I can re-create it again. Why did it take so long? It took on average 6 days to get a reply, and in some cases it took upwards of 2 weeks. All of this despite me describing the problem clearly from the get-go and asking for a speedy resolution because I needed the use of my organization ASAP. The first response to my ticket (2 weeks later) was to ask me if I managed to get the password back (really useful).

In case you're wondering why I wanted to re-create my org, it's because the lovely developers have no clue how to work with databases. It is possible to use the same e-mail for your citizen and all of your org accounts. It is not possible, however, to retrieve your password for your orgs if you do so, because the password retrieval function doesn't ask which account you need the password to, it just asks you for your email. When there are multiple accounts (citizen and org) with the same email it just sends the mail to the first account it came by.

The second one was to tell me that I can't do what I did to require the org being recreated. They obviously didn't try to do it themselves, yet they have the nerve to assume they know better than me what I did. Then they sent me a reply, stating that they changed the email of my org (to I mail I supplied). The only problem was that this didn't work (i.e., I didn't get the password in the new email). So finally, 73 days after I sent them a ticket describing my problem and SUGGESTING THAT CLEARING THE ORG WAS THE SPEEDIEST SOLUTION they did it. I consider myself lucky that I mistyped my password twice when creating the ORG and that I never got to do anything with it. God forbid I had some companies or money in it. God forbid I spent money expanding the storage capacity and not being able to use the ORG I spent money on for 73 days because the developers are bad and the admins are slow.

The players are currently unable to heal themselves because the pages of our home regions have cached pages where we didn't fight yet and are at almost full wellness. It's been that way for a few hours now. Adding to the silliness is a headless chicken wondering about after every 3-4 pages being refreshed. If you run a training company (hundreds of jobs for the low skill players, working at a loss so they can have descent wages the first couple of levels) you no doubt noticed that in the long employee lists some people appear twice in two consecutive pages, and some people don’t show up at all. Why? Because the developers have no clue about how databases work, and didn't think to add citizenID as a second sort attribute. All of this just a day after the EI article celebrates 800 days of bugRepublik and reminds us of all the times they didn’t screw up. Hilarious! You run a game that's expected to run flawlessly 24/7/365. You don't get to reference (the relatively rare) periods of flawless works as an excuse the constant bugs and down-times. Especially since this isn't a charity or a non-profit NGO. You're taking money from the players; you're supposed to do a proper job.

Anyone remember the big renaming scheme? You know, where the community managers said they need to rename a lot of territories because they have trivial names and were asking for help from the community. Let me tell you about the days before eSerbia was formed. The admins asked for help, and many of us sent them emails offering it. I was one of them. They asked for trivia questions (and answers). I wrote a couple of hundred questions in the various categories they asked, ranging from easy to answer to really difficult trick questions. Do you know how much time it takes just to write a few hundred questions and 4x as much answers? It takes hours just for the physical typing, and it takes hours more to actually think them up, and to verify the answers on some of the more difficult ones. Serbia was introduced on 11 February '09. A couple of days earlier they decided they were going to pull the trivia out of the game due to it being abused due to god awful coding on the developer side, although they came up with a few other excuses as to why they were doing it. Of course they didn't think to tell either me or the guys who were doing the same job for the other new countries. They also sent me a proposed map of eSerbia with province names and asked for my opinion. I replied that the division is OK, but that some of the regions need to have their names changed (East, West and South Serbia) since the names are too generic and people would not identify with them (especially since they were in English). I offered alternative names in Serbian, explained the reasoning behind the names. In most cases I offered more than one alternative. The admins didn't listen to me; they decided not to include Kosovo, even though the map which they showed me and other community members had Kosovo in it. A FEW MONTHS LATER they realize that yes the names are too generic and they should change them, and a FEW MONTHS LATER STILL they still didn't change the region names. Let’s go over that bit one more time: they were told that the region names were generic, they ignored the advice, they came to the same conclusion 5-6 months later and decided to fix it, and a full year after getting the advice they still didn't implement it.

The last two major updates to the game are Lana and Citizen Ads. Both are designed specifically to drain gold from the economy so we'd be forced to buy more. They actually made attempts to make more money off of us without actually improving the game. Sure they did get more gold out of circulation as planed, and some people probably did end up buying more gold with real money. But there's a big discrepancy between the extra gold being spent and the extra gold being bought. The result? A global economic crisis, the likes of which didn't exist in 2 years of eRepublik. But they're still patting themselves on the back for doing a good job 'most of the time'...

I have to liken the eRep staff with the DDR administration (East Germany, the Cold War country). The DDR leadership always fascinated me; it's one of my favorite historical subjects. They were a bunch of people who spent WAST resources in repressing the people they ruled over and keeping them from running away. In his famous 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech JFK said "Capitalism has its flaws, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in". Think about it; think about how incredible this is. In 1957 East Berlin revolted and Soviet tanks snuffed the uprising out in cold blood. In the following years 20% of DDRs population escaped to West Germany. So what does the DDR leadership do? Do they even consider the possibility they are possibly doing something wrong? Do they make the minutest of attempts to fix the problems and address the dissent? Nope. They build a wall. And it wasn't just any wall, it was THE wall. It was made out of re-enforced concrete, had 116 watchtowers, 20 bunkers, dogs, barbed wire, traps. The sewers underneath were barred up and microphones were set up to listen for hammering, drilling and sawing. They actually had people who listened to these microphones all day. That was their job, just sit and listen to silence for years and years. They let loose the state police (Stasi) on the population and ruled peacefully until '89. It is estimated that when the Stasi was dismantled in late '89 there was one Stasi agent for every 166 citizens (3 times more than the KGB and 14 times more than the Gestapo) and one informant for every 6 citizens. Imagine the energy, the resources, the time they spent on keeping people from running away, and from voicing their protests in the street or the media. To them, it was easier then addressing the root causes of the problem. Does the incompetence, the repression and the ignorance remind you of someone?

The main point of this article is to voice dissent. I don't really care if the admins/devs/whoever is in charge read it. I care that the people read it, to see that others too are annoyed at the same things they are and maybe to find out some things wrong with eRep they didn't know before. I highly doubt any real change will come of it; I'm just voicing my disgust. Since the article isn't addressed to the eRep staff (and since they don't give a damn anyways) and if any eRep staffer were to read it and get the sense it’s addressed to him/her/them, he/she/it/them would be mistaken. I shall consider the deletion of this article superfluous abuse of administrative powers, as should any able-minded eRep citizen.