State of the Game - embarrassing

Day 2,023, 19:40 • Published in Australia Australia • by infin

Someone mentioned on IRC last night that I was a once great journalist but now no one in the Australian community could be considered great. I take the point, and lately I could not care less about this game, because it is no longer a "game" by my understanding of the rules but a plain old addiction-based money sink, exploiting the crude "e-peen phenomenon" that some people can fall prey to.

Back when I first played erep, politics and economy mattered. They made sense, we engaged in constructive debates about policy because the decisions taken by government affected the performance of a country's economy and in turn its financial fire power to fund soldiers and defend its borders.

You could buy a company or trade the money market and with some acumen you could outplay your competitors and make wealth for oneself. The economy module has been destroyed by admin with overproduction and then bot buying, no one knows what the hell is going on. Markets operate best when transparent, whereas Admin is secret.

The problem is that there is no need to be secret unless all Admin care about is hiding their stuff-ups. But customers are pretty forgiving about stuff-ups when the management are open and honest about it.

When I joined rep, players enjoyed discussing aspects of the game for hours a day, and these differences of opinion gave rise to great ideological differences and thus REASONS to have political parties. Now there is no reason to have more than one political party in a country - in fact if you try to deviate from the single party philosophy you are decried as a being anti-PTO or whatever that crap is.

Back when I joined erep there was a limit on tanking so each country had to recruit tanks, and hell being a tank was a respectable honour as high hitting players were sought after. Now tanks are irrelevant. Anyone with a credit card can become a tank which is not so illustrious. In fact it is plain boring.

Now none of this matters. Erep has been changed from COD4 (the best competitive FPS yet) to MW2 Blackops. Erep has been changed from a nuanced PC game to a kids console game to play for 10 mins a day. It's not what I am looking for.

I still think multis are the biggest problem with erep and I have even been accused of it myself. I think the best way to deal with multis is simply charge every player a membership fee of $1 per month (real money). If it weeded out the multis then I would surely pay it. Such a program would get rid of players creating 100 accounts for their own benefit of article voting and influencing the political module. This in turn would give the political module much more influence. Also now with Divisions in battle these would be protected from multis so that genuine noobs can have an influence in the battles.

People say Australia can only grow if we get more real life players. I would never tell my friends about this game because it is now quite frankly an embarrassment. I told my friends about the game when I joined because then it was a game I was proud to play.

infin