Citizenship brainstorming session

Day 546, 07:45 • Published in • by Plato

Dear citizens,

We would like to announce that our team will soon begin developing the highly requested citizenship module. Currently, eRepublik citizens are free to move to any country and participate in the political life of that country. Also, there is nothing binding a citizen to his or herits real life country, nor to a New World country. This means that smaller nations can easily become a minority on the political stage of their very own country. Adding the module is a great idea in theory, but it brings up a few questions: Should this module remove the overwhelming advantage of large nations over smaller ones, or should it provide certain tools that allow small communities to put up a fight against large groups of oppressors? Should it also provide citizens with a sense of nationality?

It can probably be useful to remember the controversy started by the first political takeovers that took place in eRepublik, in which highly organized groups of citizens, led by experienced leaders, would travel to smaller countries and gain control over them by winning the elections. Some citizens claimed that these were shameful and cowardly tactics, while others saw them as intriguing new possibilities offered by the game mechanics. The key word of the debate was “fairness,” as it was argued that it was not fair for a group of “mercenaries” to take away a nation’s right to rule their own country. It should also be considered how much of this talk was propaganda, and how much was real concern toward the lack of defense of small nations against larger ones.

Scientists have carefully analyzed the issues that could be solved by the citizenship module. They have also considered what other improvements the citizenship module could bring to the game, and how to achieve this without creating other potential problems in the game mechanics.

The beginning session of the actual module development should consist of: setting up the final details and implementation plan, making the design changes that will be visible from the front end of the website, start coding the module, testing it, and integrating everything in eRepublik. But before scientists start working on this and creating the technical specs, we are interested to hear how you think the citizenship module should work. We don't want to influence your opinions, so we are not going to release all the details discussed in the internal brainstorming sessions. However we can say that it is nothing close to being as simple as one of the suggested solutions: Require a citizen to live in a country for a predefined number of days before an election, in order to be able to vote in the elections.

You can be as creative as you wish, as the most important aspect of this module is its potential for improving the game, and not how easy it is to implement. If you would like to join the brainstorming session regarding the citizenship module, visit this forum topic.

Jammu and Kashmir changes original owner

Based on the feedback of a citizen, we have analyzed the status of Jammu and Kashmir and reached the conclusion that this eRepublik region should belong to India. This country will become the original owner of Jammu and Kashmir starting tomorrow, 0:00 eRepublik time. The current original owner of this region is Pakistan, but it is currently occupied by China. This will not modify the current owner of the region, only the original owner, and will give Indians the option of starting a resistance war in Jammu and Kashmir.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team