An open letter to eRep Labs from eNorway

Day 3,216, 00:14 • Published in Norway Norway • by Pressekontoret
This is an open letter to the eRep Labs team from the eNorwegian community.
We think it would be about time that we get the possibility for congress members to vote to withdraw citizenship for players that have got CS from a former dictator that is defeated long time ago.


Erep Support Team,

We need your help.

We love this game, but our experience of it has been marred for well over 330 days now due to a structural imbalance that serves only to create tedious list-making work for us at regular intervals.

The essential history of the problem is as follows. Almost a year ago ago, eNorway was attacked by an eChilean MU that managed to install a Dictator. This Dictator let in a very large amount of his/her MU players and other eChileans before being successfully deposed by eNorway's previous population. Fortunately for us, many of these eChilean players were permanently banned for being multies, or many other avatars simply died from inactivity soon after (suggesting they are really just unconfirmed multies).

A tiny, stubborn contingent of eChilean hangers-on remains, however. They are not particularly active players, have absolutely no role in the eNorwegian community, and do not appear to interact with each other much at all. In short, they seem pretty much disinterested. Except, of course, when it comes to harassing us through comments, or the occasional run for office.

Two-clickers like these generally aren't much of a problem, especially when there aren't many of them. It is for us, however. While it takes very little effort for them to harass us, it is a massive problem for our population for the following three simple reasons:

1) While there aren't many of them, there aren't many of us (an increasing problem for many ecountries),
2) these two-clickers are hostile,
3) they sometimes do, and always can, run for political office.

The combination of these three factors mean every election for us is a matter of signing in at odd hours, switching parties, reducing the number of candidates who run for office (in order to avoid splitting the vote) and having to vote in a prescribed way for every single election.

You may have read the above paragraph and thought to yourself, “Yes, that sounds like elements of a strategy game,” but please re-read it keeping in mind that eRepublik is a social strategy game, and think about what those elements do to the social aspect. In that context, here's what all that now means to us:

1) Elections are things that interfere with some of our citizens' sleep multiple times each month which, as you can imagine, certainly takes the shine off of signing in.
2) Our former Political Party loyalty is now meaningless (since we can't necessarily vote our own Party without potentially imperiling eNorway), so there are few, if any, discussions with political consequence.
3) Many of us can't run for office for fear we might split the vote, inadvertently favoring an eChilean candidate, which means candidates.
4) We don't even get to choose which candidate we vote for since we can now only have one candidate, which means there's almost no point in campaigning.

Clearly, none of this is good for the social fabric in this game, and does actively hinder it.

From a simple gameplay perspective, these factors add up to something very similar. Signing into eRepublik just to vote is a tedious, unpleasant chore, that some of us have to set our alarms late at night or very in the morning for. It means there's little point in political debates, trying to persuade voters with newspaper articles, or really even running for office. And even if you do run for office, ideas are almost irrelevant, since it is simple a matter of blocking out the former invaders.

We're sure this isn't the kind of eRepublik you imagined when you decided to introduce the Dictator dynamic. You were envisioning something that would make government unpredictable and more fragile, putting a premium on good military defense. We like all that, but we think your work here is unfinished, and that we have the proof.

Please know that we are not complaining about the possibility of a coup, or any other strategic element. What we're complaining about is the unending punishment being inflicted on us due to having one Dictator once, and the remnants of that Dictatorship that continue to pose an outsized threat to us. This most certainly seems like a loose end in game mechanics to us since it costs them so little, and us so much on an ongoing basis.

What we propose is a simple fix: allow us to expel them to their previous ecountry of ecitizenship. All the information is already available in eRepublik, and congress can already grant CS, so why not be able to take it away, too? In RL, invaders from a coup would not be allowed to stay either, and we're not asking for any more than that. Our specific suggestion is that once a Dictator is deposed, we recommend letting the new, democratically elected Congress remove the invading players who received CS from the Dictator.

Please let us know what you think.

The eCitizens of eNorway