SERBIAN STORY #1 - Basics

Day 1,266, 17:26 • Published in USA Serbia • by Jovan Tekelija

To my Serbian readers, овај чланак је о нама. Можда нећете бити сагласни са њим 100%, можда вам неће изгледати тачно уопште, али то су моји ставови. Да сам хтио да пишем шта други људи мисле, постао бих члан неке политичке партије 😉

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this article will be eSerbs. Not Serbs or Serbia, but eSerbs.
It is quite possible that I will make a series out of it, if there’s enough interest in it. If I make a series of articles, it is quite probable that not all of them will be about eSerbs.
As I have already mentioned in Serbian, this article contains my views, not those of other people, but my personal. In some matters I will be comparing eSerbs with eAmericans, but I won’t be writing about eUSA here, as it might be regarded as trolling 😃

eSerbs are a complex group of people, but I’ll try to keep this article as short as possible. That’s why it might seem a bit shallow, but we’ll get to the bottom of things eventually 😃

POPULATION AND BABYBOOMS

I think everyone in eRepublik is familiar with the eSerb babybooms. Most of you probably know that we were able to acquire so many players because of two facts:
1. our RL animosity with Croats(we were almost completely wiped out by Croatia when the 1st major BB happened)
2. some of our players’ media connections(Lipec and others)-Serbia is a small country, so having 5 minutes on air of some popular TV channel or an article in the newspapers means the word WILL spread around.

What is not such a well-known fact is HOW we managed to keep so many of the noobs alive.
It is not just the game, or the battles that happen. To be honest, the game itself is not that interesting. Quite opposite- Battles are boring and unrealistic, politics is very RLesque, economy is lame as hell…

*Definition*-Babyboom is considered successful if at least 10% of the noobs continue playing after the initial login -by Jovan Tekelija
( XD )



So, how did we manage to keep those players here?
Yeah, like everybody else we published tutorials, opened a special for-noobs chat channel, gave out free stuff to them and similar.
There is one more thing. We HUNTED noobs. There were lots of players that literally looked for new players in the Online-Who? page. Then they would start mentoring them, giving them stuff, and what is extremely important, they did it independently. That is important, coz in that way a bond between two players establishes, the new player has an impression of other players as very hospitable and friendly, and those are the things that make up for all those moments this game (itself) lacks.

RL MEETINGS

Lots of them, and they happen quite often.
Thus, a whole new connection between players is created.
A new meeting is set to take place on the historic site(WW1)-Mount Cer on May the 15th. According to some, this one will be the most massive ever.

ако неко има још бољу...

ARMY

eSerbia has the strongest army in the New World. This is mostly due to the fact I mentioned above-huge population. Also, what makes eSerb military even stronger is Serb fanaticism when it comes to this game. In RL, Serbs consider themselves as great patriots. Those beliefs are transferred into this game too.

That’s why you get 400 eSerbs online even though it’s 3 a.m. in Serbia 🙂

SERBS AND LEADERSHIP

If there is one thing that (e)Serbs suck at-it’s being led. One of the main characteristic of the average Serb is that 90% of the time he is convinced that his views are the ones that are correct. Mere 85% of the time our average Serb thinks that he could do things better than the current leaders of the country.

Serbs LOVE politics. That’s a second thing we’re fanatical about. In certain moments one is not sure what is the priority: eSerbia’s interests or someone’s political beliefs.

SUCCESS

It’s not good for our mentality. It seems as though Serbs hate success. If it’s a military one-after that brief period of time when we’re celebrating some epic victory(thru spamming with our 2pics+one bad-English sentence articles) inevitably comes a long period of political struggle. Peace doesn’t sit well with the eSerbs as we tend to get nervous when it’s all peaceful.
If we don’t have any legitimate reasons to fight about, we make some new ones up!
The only thing that unites eSerbs is a direct threat!

CIVIL WAR

I’m all for implementing a possibility of civil war in eRep!
You think eTurkey-eGreece war or eCroatia-eSerbia war is intense? Wait till you see Serbs fighting eachother. If there was a possibility of civil war, Serbs would forget about their emnity with both the eCroats and eAmericans a long time ago! They are not worthy opponents! XD

^yup. Two heads=two opinions

Also, if secession was a possibility in this game, instead of eSerbia with 7 provinces you’d have 7 new countries! That is owed to the fact that I already mentioned in the Leadership bit of the article.

MEDIA

Although it mostly contains spam articles or just plain stupid articles, although it contains bunch of political boring-as-hell-and-dirty articles, although in average it is worse than e.g. eUSA media, I’d say that individually eSerbia has better writers. eSerbia has some of the smartest and most artistic people you’re able to find. Personally, eRep has given me hope for Serbian RL literature(seriously!).

There are only two things that I regret when it comes to that:
1. great articles are incredibly outnumbered by the stupid ones
2. these authors write in Serbian only, so It’d be useless to promote them.

Newspapers were used for one more thing too-gold harvesting. Massive MMM actions were organized, where people were subbing listed newspapers so that those author would get the MMM medal and 5 golds which they would donate to the country. Although the idea behind these projects is good and noble, it is my view that it has done more wrong than good, as nowadays we have scores of writers with 2K+ subs that they didn’t deserve.

WHINERS AND TROLLS

Yeah…we got them in record-breaking numbers. Mostly cause of huge population and the fact the I mentioned in the Leadership part. eSerbs HATE changes. We start criticizing them even before we are able to try them out. Sometimes, whiners are right and changes really do turn out to be lame, but sometimes they are wrong which makes them look terribly stupid.
The point is, a lot of eSerbs, in general, criticize almost every change and mostly they overreact.
Blame our numbers for it, as these are not the representative examples of our eNation 😃

When it comes to trolling-our international trolls are just terrible! I’ve already mentioned them: those that publish 2 pics+one sentence articles or spam with some c/p comment and call it trolling. Unfortunately, these are the loud ones, and they (try to) write in English. Do not judge us based on their attempts. We have some great trolls too, but they tend to write mostly in Serbian.

There you have it. The first article about eSerbs. I will be publishing more articles concerning this subject and they will be more in-depth than this one.
In the next article, I will be writing about parties, elections, RL-spam and many other things.
I may even decide to draw a parallel between eSerbia and eUSA, but that is not for sure 😉