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Dear readers, voters, subcribers and all of you who haven't found yourself in these there words, today I offer you an article about the front page of our beloved game, eRepublik.


The first image


In the first image you can see a pretty nice picture composed of different elements which eRepublik contains. On the right you can see a conquering army which represents the military part of the game. Although it doesn't really look like that, rather like this.

On the left is of course the world famous eRepublik logo and underneath a sentence that immediately reminded me of buying gold. "Make your country the greatest world power." This one is rather misleading. It is very difficult as a single person to make a big difference but it is possible with some features that eRepublik offers e.g. buying gold. You can do it somehow by not using that option but only a few came near and even less have succeeded. I'm not saying it's impossible but is still misleading.


The three column bar

Next on is the three column bar which gives some information about the game itself. Although it looks quite simple and only information giving it provides more and gives you something to think about.



First on is the "Features" column. I would also call it misleading but this time only partially. The first one is: "Conquer your country neighbours and extend its territories." This one is actually quite true. It is very much possible to so. All you need to do is be very tactical and be dominant on the battlefield. You can't do it alone (or can you?) but it is understandable although the sentence from the beginning actually returns us to doing everything alone (buying gold).

Second feature is: "Claim a land and develop your economic empire". What economics? Real economics as they are supposed to look like don't exist here. The "Work as manager" feature has killed it completely. Now everyone can produce as much as they want and that leads to killing any purpose to economically evolve. It is possible to have many companies and be the king of the market but very difficult if you don't spend hours of your time tracking the market, investing and hoping that someone won't undermine you.

Third feature is: "Fight against real people on the battlefield". Hmm.. This one is definitely, I dare to say, wrong. The concept of the battlefield is based on you fighting against a virtual citizen who has virtual health. When you fight him, he won't exactly die, he will just be removed of the battlefield in which he wasn't on at the first place. You don't fight real people. The enemy you encounter is real, he does exist, but you don't fight him as a real person who is sitting at the computer trying to fight you back. Enough said.




Secondly we have a "Top countries" ranking bar. It shows you top countries by number of citizens. This gives a good image on the order of things in the game and who is most powerful of all. Of course, half of the citizens are multies but I won't go into that. It still is a realistic order of things. But what I resent is that they removed the eWorld citizen counter. It was obvious that the number of citizens is falling and the probably wanted to hide their path to failure.




This is the part where eRepublik CEO raises himself to the sky. All of those quotes are true and I've checked the original articles and something interesting came up. Well, it didn't came up but it's interesting. All of them are from 2008 which was, if my calendar is correct, 3 years ago. It is nice when you get a good critic and of course you show it off, but the game has changed so much during the last 3 years and maybe today they will have a different opinion. I don't blame them for still keeping it on the front page, but still, 2008. And I liked one quote: "Bonte’s goal is to get 100,000 citizens by the end of the year and a million by the end of next year."
New YorkTimes Guardian TechCrunch


All in all, the front page is visually nice and quite interesting. For a non-player it probably won't meen much, but it still represents the game itself. The way it looks now, it might leave the wrong impression on people.