An Allegory. Fix the Economy.
Corrigan Brown
When it was first introduced in 1974, the Rubik’s cube was a smash hit. For those who don’t know, the Rubik’s cube is a 3x3x3 cube with 6 different colors that one has to orient on the same side as the centerpiece. Lost yet? Here, let me make it more complicated. The Rubik’s cube is solved by arranging every piece into it’s start position, and then re-arranging it with algorithms (fancy math word for straight pattern that is repeated). When people first had a look at the cube, it was an immediate sell mostly because the vast majority of the international population had decided that the cube was easy to solve. They were sorely mistaken when they scrambled the puzzle for the first time and attempted to put every color on its proper side. In other words, the Rubik’s cube was popular because of a preconceived notion, and then sat on every disappointed middle-school child’s shelf because it was hard. The cube’s algorithms are fairly simple to learn and memorize, and once the mind has committed them to memory, it is practically impossible to unlearn. Erepublik, among all names one could award the website, is a computer program that is based off sets of algorithms that run through the system every time one person clicks a button. These algorithms take money or gold away from personal accounts; add influence every time someone clicks the fight button, award players with medals then add the number to their profile, change their names, etc. But unlike the Rubik’s cube, one cannot become the master of Erepublik. One can memorize the algorithms and commit them to memory, but they cannot influence them, only be prey to the preconceived rules. I think it is this realization that sends individuals from the game, besides of course, getting permanently banned.
Ever since the economic crash that occurred last year, where gold prices dropped down the drain, salaries lowered to dire minimums and weapon prices reduced below acceptable levels, many players left. The days after the crash were but a shadow in comparison to the glory days beforehand. The economy has suffered much open criticism, mostly in the form of comments on every post Erepublik has the audacity to display saying “fix the economy.” Despite all of the comments and tickets, there have not been any solutions. The simple thing to do would have been to change fixed costs like moving costs to reflect the economic situation of the time. Instead the game lingered on. During this time, new players came and went, old players left and came back and the criticism augmented, but still nothing was changed.
Now, the introduction of the work tax plagues Erepublik. For those with their heads under a rock, the work tax is a tax set for managing companies, set at rates determined by congress.
Take a new player, I recently helped one join the game. Any new players does not have any companies, does not have the means to support himself and is constantly re-adjusting to find the salary that has the highest payout every 3 days. Q7 weapons cost 11, moving costs 20 at every interval and gold costs 210, and this is all on a 20-25 currency salary. This means that all players, new and old (depending on however many companies they own) have to choose between either buying weapons, working their companies , buying gold or moving, when the initial choice was simply between weapons, gold and moving (I chose not to include food in here, it is a relatively cheap expense in sustainable amounts). Looking back at this new player, just about every day they need food in order to recover however much energy they lost working or fighting. Now, we’re telling them that they have to spend the majority of their salary on getting the food they need to work to get their salary? What is the incentive to remain a player of Erepublik if one can’t afford to do the things that are fun? (i.e. fighting). What is the incentive to play, if the game stops you from playing?
And what about MU’s? There is no structure in how an MU gets it’s weapons besides perhaps military unit funding from their respective governments. As a result most Military Units have resolved to use individual players’ companies in order to supply their fighters with tanks or moving money. The work tax now forces those players to pool their own money in order to make the weapons necessary for their individual citizens to fight in the wars started by their governments, who get the money from the work tax in the first place. So what does the government do with the extra money being sent to them by managers?
So the majority of all money to be had by citizens in any country is being taken away by government (or Erepublik, depending on how you want to look at it) and there is not a single thing anyone can do about it. Players have the choice of forking over their hard-earned cash towards a work tax that not only makes previously sustainable players unsustainable, or to leave the game. And so, the allegory of the Rubik’s cube returns. Once you’ve solved the cube, and every color in all six 3x3 grids are back where they’re supposed to be, what then? It sits on the shelf. Once one person has seen all the algorithms there are to see in Erepublik, what else is there to do if all algorithms have been seen so many times that the originality of the game is suddenly lost to you? You leave.
or
You remain. You pay the tax. You live passively and under the radar, not raising any suspicion, not raising any doubt while you endlessly live under the new rule. I predict this is how it shall be. I predict that the majority will stay, and when the currency number hits zero, the players will turn to gold. Gold that has to either be bought by currency or bought with real money. Because that’s all it is isn’t it, a ploy to force players to buy gold. To send their real money to the game because they enjoy it and want to keep any shred of recognition from the past “glory days.”
I can’t claim to have seen as many algorithms as some of the more experienced players, but I know enough to recognize an algorithm that will destroy any past images this game once had that were positive. The work tax threatens to remove all fun one can have in the game, it has certainly removed all prospect of me having any fun.
It’s time for the work tax to go.
Comments
"The days after the crash were but a shadow in comparison to the glory days beforehand."
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i'm not sure that is right. Certainly the days when you could do hire/fire were fantastic. But we kept making a tidy sum and frankly that amount, reckoned in gold, has stayed pretty constant through the "collapse". I am inclined to think that the pain you feel is related to the absence of any bonuses. In addition, the absence of a congress makes the eUS work tax incredibly high compared to other places. It is remotely possible that both the absence of bonuses and the absence of a congress and the absence of game tiles is related to the quality of players running the team or the quality of their game play at least.
Very well written.
You hit the nail on the head!
Voted and subscribed.
HM, I still think this game is now better than ever! Think irl how many Africans do not even have enough food to feed themselves? How many central and south Americans make just enough to eat? How many Chinese work in factories for very little? You need to accept there will be poor people in a accurate model of human behavior! And there will be rich! Because this game is showing human behavior so closely it makes me very happy!
Excellent, excellent writing. I'm tempted to pay for some votes for you.
Bought you a few votes to hit top5 for a bit.
V+S
Voted. Good work.
Nobody wants to pay more taxes but this is a way to curb overproduction that has caused the prices of goods to plummet. This forces people to make decisions about what is best for them, whether it's to spend their money on producing more goods, looking for profits if the goods prices rise, which they have, or whether to use their money to buy weapons and fight to increase their rank.
When I started the game I had to make those same decisions, whether I want to invest in companies or military rank. I don't think it's too much to say you can't have everything. Make your own decisions and spend your money which ever way you believe is best for you.
V
Great writing, great article, to hell with the greedy Admins !
Or you remove the new rule by setting the wotk tax to 1%. You have to do it because some country will or allready have and so they gain an economical advantage that force you to adapt or die.
For once Plato allowed us to ignore the change, just do it
Btw a cube has 6 faces (so 6 colors for a rubik cube)
V
One of the most idiotic things eRepublik has ever implemented.
V
Voted.
cubes, bro!
I dunno but if you take the game as unblanced/unfair, just as life is, then the game seems pretty good, though can't say the same for people's satisfaction with it. USA and Canada appear to be in the same boat with no Congress and no way to adjust a high tax we can't even put to use. Talk about a double-whammy.
As you say, it doesn't seem that there is a mastery of the game or really any end goal, so anything that takes your money or stats away should just be seen as a bump in the road on a destination to nowhere. Who cares how long it takes or what bends in the road you hit...you're not getting to any real endpoint.
Voted and agree!
Many people do not like this tax. But, this is just a game. It is like a sim city where a disaster hits your city. I think it is a bit interesting to see what happens next. Now you may have to play the game differently for a while.
People ignore that this tax goes right to the countries treasury. The fund is increasing quickly. Maybe this will help with the war. Maybe Serbia will make sure we do not get a congress to use this money.
I am not sure what the future brings for this game, but I do think changes make things more interesting. This tax may not make the game more fun for many. I can understand. But, the fact that they made this change indicates to me that there will be more changes in the future. You can always hold out hope that they get it right.
My daily wage is $ 16, the tax I have to pay to work my business are $ 40 per day, and assume that I will pay?? I will not sell my guns, I will not sell my food .... and I'll never sell my gold.
I have to find another game?
Tinpy tgats what this article says, if you are not willing to sell your stuff or gold you will be in the red always... Shut down some raw factories for now. Ive put a battle where they are paying to fight on MU feed, check it out, I earned 100usd on that one.
*thats
plato wants us to sell companies and only obtain gold with real money
Advices
- Shut down some Raw factories.
- Sell your stuff.
- Fight in battles with Paying orders.
- Hang on!
Admins just answered me that this taxes are a RL issue so in eRep you also have to deal with it...
awesome article spot on! you have my vote...and subscription.
v+s
GG, long live to new taxes ....... ......2-Click Mode On :/
The tax is negligible once a country adjusts the rate to 1% - having the tax stuck at a higher rate and being unable to change it is an unfortunate and perhaps unanticipated side effect of being wiped.
As Fermio pointed out, this money isn't leaving the game, it's going into country treasuries. I doubt that the US and Canada will be wiped forever - at some point, some CP will cut a deal and there will be a windfall of cash waiting.
Certainly some players won't stick long enough around to see that happen, but who knows how long a given person would stay if a situation were different?
The wiped countries will only be allowed to exist again once they agree to hand over all or most of their treasuries to the countries which wiped them.
This game gets stupider every month.
I agreed to play as long as my friend did. I now regret making that promise.
I wish a bad case of intestinal flu on Alexis Bonte.
wall of text :/
I may want to translate that to french if you allow me, it's a really nice article you wrote there and I really think it shall be in other languages 🙂
Just like in RL the "work tax" is designed to hit the poorest among us.
Those with small companies will get hit more because they can't sell as much, and they can't earn much from working outside their own companies.
The real big players do well as they speculate outside the game market ( tax evasion ) or simply produce and sell more.
In the end they will lose to as if the small - buying - players quit, they will crumble too.
Ridiculous article. Lots of wasted time and effort, I must say. Comments on Rubik's cube are misleading. Not to mention they are irrelevant. The writer has no idea how the economy module works (or why it doesn't work).
Very well written. You hit the nail on the head!
Voted, subscribed + shout