Stagnation at Home and Abroad (PART ONE)
Auk Rest
First off I'm writing this article mostly because the Canadian media space has been pretty dry recently and I hope this article will inject some vitality into the country and get some people thinking.
Anyway, with that out of the way, time to get to the meat of my article. I don't think anyone should be surprised to see that eCanada and the entire eWorld are slowly decaying away. The problem in Canada has been exacerbated by 6 months of perpetual occupation and many formerly active individuals leaving the game. (Plugson if you're out there buddy, this one is for you)
But the decline at home in eCanada underscores the complete decline of eRepublik in general. eRepublik is bleeding players at an amazingly fast rate. I cannot find the newspaper article (link, anyone?) but some article was published recently in the international media which detailed an alarming drop in the number of players of almost all countries.
To see it more clearly. all you need to do is look at Colombia, still in the top five nations in terms of population but significantly dropped from its peak. Colombia had a large baby boom and many new players joined that country. I would guess the population peaked at ~25,000 citizens. Of course, in any large baby boom like that many players do not stay with the game, but a good percentage should stick with the game. Colombia now sits at 9700 citizens, a decline of over 15,000 citizens. I don't know Colombia's population before the baby boom, but I would assume around ~6000-7000.
This means the country gained close to 20,000 new players in a baby boom (good!), but the poor mechanics and the entire 'game' in general of eRepublik caused 75% of those new citizens to quit (bad!) between now and January/February when that baby boom occurred. A 25% retention rate (this is being generous) is AWFUL for a game like eRepublik. The concept of eRepublik and static mechanics ensures a certain percentage of players will always be leaving the game, and a small number will be joining the game just based on ads, word of mouth, etc. That means large baby booms are the primary driving force of populations, and for eRepublik only to be retaining 25% is not good.
That percentage of players leaving the game has certainly increased in Canada recently and we've seen it happen in many countries who have been occupied for a long time. Occupation and the staleness of eRepublik combine to make a retention rate for new players to be negligibly small here in Canada. This is exacerbated even further by Plato favoring large countries over small ones. Plato apparently is only interested in retaining citizens of the large nations.
eRepublik used to have a good amount of large countries, a good amount of small countries, and also a good amount of medium countries. Now, medium strength countries are extraordinarily rare, because of the way Plato has favored strong and large countries, 'medium' and 'low' strength countries are able to be occupied by larger ones, causing the citizenry to eventually quit (as seen in Canada).
Well what can be done about this problem, then? First let's remember Colombia's baby boom in today's eRepublik, and look at some other baby booms in the past (the benefit of a long e-life). These examples come from V1, the eWorld had many more citizens back then, Canada was home to about ~6,000 if I remember. Back in those days, Poland was a country of ~10,000 citizens, but an invasion of Germany lead to plenty of real life advertising of the game and Poland experienced the most massive (to my knowledge) baby boom in this game's history. At it's peak Poland was home to 60,000-61,000 citizens. A large percent stayed with the game for at least several months, but then about 6 months later the population had stabilized at 35,000 citizens, which means eRepublik retained 50% of these Polish citizens, very good considering the sheer numbers attracted to the games.
Another example was the USA and Canada in the previous summer, we were invaded by many countries of an opposing alliance and occupied. Occupation was a lot harder back then and the struggle to liberate our regions lead to a baby boom in both of our countries. I wasn't around back then so I can't tell you the numbers, but I remember many people born around this time in the USA and Canada, and I myself was born in November, a few months after the war, I had heard about the war and was going to join the game but wasn't sure what it was and decided against it. Several months later and I finally decided to make an account, so I can personally attest to this.
I know what you're thinking right now, "That's great Auk, but how does this relate today?" Well, let's see what Plato and the admins of eRepublik were doing differently those days. Because this article has become insanely long I'm going to split this into two separate parts.
Stay tuned for more
-Auk Rest
Comments
Around Spring 2010, eCanada had 2000 citizens.
When I saw the name Plugson, I felt an obligation to vote this article.
Is there any source for that? I remember it much higher.
It was a NPNS episode: http://acaciamason.podomatic.com/entry/2010-04-16T13_30_07-07_00
Acacia Mason mentioned having 17 parties in eCanada for 2000 citizens and how ridiculous it is.
Trivia for this episode:
- Acacia Mason openly started a rumour that CPF is PTOing other parties
- Adasko screams out "FRAM YOU'RE GAY"
How I miss this trio... NPNS, just hilarious.
Thanks, I guess my memory is imagining it higher because we had a much higher active base from that 2000. I remember DAL had 500 citizens and CPF 300 around this time?
I can't say for certain since I wasn't involved in any politics at the time so I never took note of party populations.
Then again, I'm not sure if eRepublik purged the dead citizens from the active citizen count for populations.
Your best bet to gauge and verify active citizen numbers from parties is to look at the PP elections from 2010 of each party. Obviously, a lot of TOs occurred over the past 3 years so names are all over the place lol.
I compiled a list on me eRepublik wiki of the CPF PPs and also links to the in-game elections, from the time I'm talking about the CPF had 182 votes, sounds right for a party of a little less than 300 at the time.
Sorry for the necro Mary, but I found this:
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/twice-the-size-of-sweden-1153288/1/20
NW about the necropost, based on the elections for April 2010, it's ~1000 votes caste😛 http://www.erepublik.com/en/main/presidential-elections/23/1270450800
May 2010 experienced a small boom (I think it's from V2), with 1100 votes.
I'm fairly sure that during the time, dead citizens were counted towards total country populations as well as party populations.
as always auk, an excellent article.
Good stuff penguin!
Needs more Plugson!
Well written Auk; definitely gets my vote.
Good read - informative.
Great article, voted.
When I saw the name Plugson, I felt an obligation to vote this article. x 2
eRep needs to consider resetting the game every 6 months or so. What i mean is reset occupied territories etc, and start a new game from scratch. Declare a country the winner in 6 months, leave a week between rounds for alliance negotiations, setting up gov't, etc, then play again.
They'll never do this of course, but I think people are starting to realize there is never a winner in eRep, it just goes on and on. That used to be OK when the game was much more like a sim, but the focus on the war module has destroyed the sim feel of the game and now its like playing Risk, except even if one country takes over the whole world, the game still isn't over.
An idea popped into my head as I was reading this. I can explain this quite quickly too.
Put the Airstrike game mechanic in your head.
Now change "Airstrike" to "Advertisement" or "Promotion".
And perhaps take Energy contribution out, replacing it with Gold and possibly add RL currency.
I see admins already regularly advertise, but if as a country we decide to assist in that advertising, the admins can increase the frequency of ads in our RL country.
To further expand this idea,
To increase incentive to donate to the cause, admins can reward an amount of Gold to those who contributed based on the percentage of their donation in the campaign compared to the other donors, as well as how successful the additional advertising was over the period compared to the previous year or the last month... some sort of period... i'm sure marketing people have some system to show how successful a marketing campaign is so apply that here.
After I gave my all military wise for canada and being shown as the villain I am especially by yourself I'm enjoying watching it stagnate.
You may not like me but my style of leadership brought the one thing you now crave.
Activity.
Just keep telling yourself that and it will come true, right?
I dont have to tell myself anything your the one crying about stagnation so i know it to be true
I see you didn't even read the article - I am talking about the decline of eRep in general, I don't mention you even once :/
I dont recall saying you did mention me even once
You're insinuating I'm crying about activity and blaming you for it
Long live the Plugson!
Agree with the comment on resets. I've only played a few online games besides this one and reset bring excitement to the game and give newer players a reason to stick around for a day when they can be equals with older players. Imagine the different attitude we'd all have if we realized that the occupation would soon be over with the upcoming reset.
What reset u are talking about?
If game would reset everything would be meaningless here....so go play other online games where reset every month or half a year(99,99% of online games)
Leave us for this 0,01% game where no reset and no skill cap,thanks.
As others have already said an excellent article and I look forward to episode 2.
I can see the writing on the wall for this game.