Thanks for Nothing Admins and I'm Done

Day 966, 10:48 Published in USA USA by WmQ374


Well it's probably for the best that they changed the health and happiness formula so that food and houses give you an increase based directly on their quality but to say the least I am extremely frustrated with this change since I literally put a weeks worth of work into this article and the calculators that accompany it. I don't expect many to read it anymore because it's literally worthless with the new formula but since I put so much damn work into it I figured it was appropriate to release it anyway.

Honestly I've become so frustrated because of this I'm quitting the game. I see no point in wasting time on a game in which I write what is probably the seminal work of my eRep career and right before I'm about to release it the admins change the rule of the game. This has been a perpetual problem and I am freaking fed up. To all my friends you know who you are and I apologize for the sudden departure but I feel like I have way better things to do over the summer. Cheers to everyone that helped me and thanks for making my work worthless admins.
/rant

For an abridged version of this article, check out the take away points!

In my last article I took on the issue that so many players were worrying about but had not yet accepte😛 their new-found noobness.

Since then, it seems as though more and more players are, as DanielCD says, whining about the transition to V2 and their new noobness as opposed to embracing V2 and learning how to conquer it. Well, the game isn’t changing from its current core form and while it is welcome news that the admins are changing the raw materials market, this will not be enough for some old players. It’s unfortunate, but they will continue to complain and will likely quit out of frustration. Whatever they end up doing, these guides are for those who are ready to embrace the game as is and are prepared to educate themselves so they can become the best players that they possibly can.

Now, one of the most critical parts of the game, and an area in which I have seen many players have difficulty since the introduction of V2, is happiness and health. This article will give you the knowledge and tools to better understand the health and happiness system in eRepublik and the tools to better manage your health and happiness so YOU can be as productive as possible.

First, you need to understand that health and happiness influence everything you do in-game. As the Skills Formula page of the eRepublik Wiki shows, health and happiness is one of the key multipliers in the equations for working, training, and studying. In other words, the higher your health and happiness are, the more productive you will be when you work, train, and/or study. If you want to be successful in V2, you need to maintain high health and happiness!

Now the other critical aspect of health and happiness in V2 (as it was with wellness in V1) is that it is difficult to maintain. This can be explained in a few ways (like the poor management of daily tasks by most players) but the primary reason it is difficult to maintain your health and happiness is due to the mechanics of the food and house system. Check out the happiness formula from the eRep Wiki Page:

Happiness increase = (1.5 - (current happiness/100)) * (food happiness increase + house happiness increase)

This formula is absolutely critical for you to understand and the most important part is that “1.5” at the beginning. To illustrate it’s importance, let’s plug 100 into the current happiness, so that’s...(1.5 - (100/100) * (Food + House Quality); and that equals...(.5 * (Food + House Quality). What does this mean?...Well it means that if you are at 100 happiness, your food will work half as well (i.e.: 10 quality food will increase your happiness by 5 points). Now let’s plug in 75 happiness...(1.5 - (75/100) * (Food + House Quality); and that equals...(.75 * (Food + House Quality). So if you have 75 happiness, your food will give you 50% more happiness compared to what it will give you at 100 happiness. In other words, your food will give you a greater happiness increase at the end of each day (when it is consumed) if your player is less happy. For example, with a quality 2 happiness food, you will gain 1.6 happiness by consuming that food at 80 happiness while you will gain 2 happiness by consuming that food at 50 happiness.

This formula makes clear that we gain more happiness at the end of each day from food and houses when our player is less happy while we gain less when our player is more happy. Since we get less bang for our food buck when we are at a high level, it makes it more difficult to maintain our happiness at a higher level.

Additionally, the nature of the happiness formula makes it so we all have an “equilibrium happiness” level. If we all worked, trained, studied, and relaxed for the same amount of time every day, and used the same quality of food and house for all of those days; we would all approach an equilibrium level of happiness. For instance, let’s say that you are at 50 happiness and you simply work 12 hours every day (subtract 12 happiness) and rest for 10 hours every day (add 10 happiness), train for 2 hours every day (subtract 2 happiness), and gain one happiness from the basic booster for a net loss of 3 happiness after your daily tasks. Let’s also say that you use a quality 5 happiness food at the end of each day. Based on our happiness formula, at the end of the first day your food will give you a 5.15 happiness gain...
[(1.5 - (47/100) * 5] or [(1.03 * 5] = 5.15. The next day you will have 52.15 happiness but due to the nature of the formula you are going to gain less happiness from your food since your player is at a higher happiness level than the day before...[1.5 - (52.15/100) * 5] or [.9875 * 5] = 4.89. So on the third day you will now have 54.19 happiness. If you do this over an extended period of time, you will eventually reach your “equilibrium level” of 93 happiness. Other WTSR (work, training, studying, and resting) hourly combinations will result in equilibrium happiness which is far less than 93 and this is a significant problem for many players.

**Note: I have been using happiness to describe these concepts but all of these rules and the same formula apply to your health and any health increases alike.

Now, I believe our goal as a country and an eSociety should be for all players to start every day at 100 happiness and 100 health, but many are working, training, and studying too much and resting too little. Some are also using too low of a quality of food/house, so they are quickly approaching zero happiness and health, or approaching an equilibrium of happiness and health that is too far below 100. People have been understandably following a low happiness and health route because these modules are so new that they don’t know how to do anything differently. We need to change this! The rest of this article will focus on how YOU can increase your equilibrium health and happiness.

Tepwnzor’s Calculators
To help you start a new chapter in your health and happiness, I have developed five calculators. You can view these calculators at this LINK, but to actually edit these calculators and use them yourself, you will need to Make a Copy by going to --> “File” and then --> ”Make a Copy” (you need to be logged in to your gmail account to do this).

The best way to get a feel for these calculators is to just play around with them yourself, but I’ll briefly explain how they work:

(A) Use Calculators #1 and #2 if you have not already worked, trained, studied, and rested for the day.
(1) Use Calculator #1 if you want to find the quality of food that you need to purchase in order to reach your "desired" health/happiness at the end of the day.
(2) Use Calculator #2 if you want to find what your health/happiness will be at the end of the day based on the food you plan to use.

(😎 Use Calculators #3 and #4 if you have already worked, trained, studied, and rested for the day.
(3) Use Calculator #3 if you have already worked, trained, studied, and/or relaxed to find the quality of food that you need to purchase in order to reach your "desired" health/happiness at the end of the day.
(4) Use Calculator #4 if you have already worked, trained, studied, and/or relaxed to find your health/happiness for the end of the day based on the food you plan to use.

(C) Use Calculator #5 to test various work, training, studying, and/or relaxing combinations and the "equilibrium" levels of health/happiness which they produce.

Calculators #1-#4 are great and I highly encourage you to play around with them and find the happiness and health levels that you are looking for. However, the most interesting and most useful calculator out of the set is #5, which allows you to calculate your equilibrium happiness and health. All you have to do is input a variety of factors which are common throughout the calculators and it will extrapolate your happiness and health increases over a 100 day period to find your equilibrium level.

Equilibrium Happiness

A critical facet of equilibrium happiness and/or health in V2 is understanding why there have been so many players who have so easily drained their happiness and health to extremely low equilibrium levels. The issue basically comes down to the ease at which you can decrease happiness through a mismanagement of your daily tasks.

Let’s say we have a player named Bob, and Bob wants to fill all 24 hours of each day with WTSR--- which makes sense, assuming that you want your player to be as productive as possible. Let’s also assume that Bob’s current daily task breakdown is 10 hours working, 2 hours training, and 12 hours relaxing for a net gain of 0 happiness (subtract 1 happiness for working, 2 happiness for training, and add 12 happiness for relaxing). Now let’s assume that Bob wanted to add an hour to the amount he trains every day without decreasing the amount he works. To accomplish Bob’s goal, he has to take away one hour from relaxing and add one hour to training. Now Bob’s losing 10 happiness from working, 3 happiness from training, and only gaining back 11 happiness from relaxing, for a new net loss of 2 happiness every day.

It is this dynamic which explains the rapid decrease in so many peoples’ happiness levels. Not only does any one-unit decrease in number of hours spent relaxing subtract one potential unit of happiness, but spending that hour training, working, or studying will also subtract one unit of happiness; the net loss here is really two units, not just the one you lose from working/training/studying. I am calling this the happiness/health deficit, and players MUST understand it in order to practice solid daily task management.


To fully underscore this dynamic and the significant effect that small decreases in hours allocated to relaxing have on a player’s happiness, I prepared a series of charts using my fifth calculator. You can recreate the conditions in these charts by simply putting the following variables into calculator #5:

Inputs
Current Happiness: 25
Company Quality: Doesn’t Matter
Work Hours (Hours): 11
Training (Hours): 2
Study (Hours): 2
Resting (Hours): 9
Relax Booster: 1
House Effect (Health): 0
House Effect (Happiness): 0
Food Effect (Health): 10
Food Effect (Happiness): 10


Happiness vs. Days (Relax for 9 Hours)
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AmBYoyeCxqV0dE9HV0tJa0xrUWgwTW9EY3M1ZFg1cXc&oid=7&zx=nkjaai-efbw7i" />
This chart shows that with the given inputs, relaxing for 9 hours will result in an equilibrium level of 105 happiness (the calculator computes past 100 but this simply means that a player that used these inputs would reach equilibrium at 100).

Happiness vs. Days (Relax for 8 Hours
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AmBYoyeCxqV0dE9HV0tJa0xrUWgwTW9EY3M1ZFg1cXc&oid=6&zx=ell3dk-oocbyk" />
This chart shows that with all other inputs equal to the previous chart, changing the number of hours relaxed to 8 and increasing the number of hours spent training to 3 results in an equilibrium level of 87 happiness. In other words, in this scenario, decreasing your relaxation period by one hour while maintaining a 24 hour day produces a 17 point drop in your equilibrium happiness level (13 if you account for the fact that the original equilibrium level is actually 100 happiness).

Happiness vs. Days (Relax for 7 Hours
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AmBYoyeCxqV0dE9HV0tJa0xrUWgwTW9EY3M1ZFg1cXc&oid=5&zx=feiti6-hqrnxp" />
This chart indicates that with all other inputs equal, changing the number of hours relaxed to 7 and increasing the number of hours spent training to 4 results in an equilibrium level of 69 happiness. In other words, decreasing your relaxation period by one more hour while maintaining a 24 hour day now produces an 18 point drop in your equilibrium happiness level!

I use the graphs to help illustrate the idea of equilibrium happiness level, but it is also crucial to point out that no matter what the initial happiness level was for each of those graphs, the equilibrium level would be the same for each change in the number of hours relaxed. Thus, current happiness is not the key to determining future happiness! The key variables in determining happiness are the number of hours which the player relaxes on a daily basis and the quality of food and housing which the player consumes/uses on a daily basis.

Considering that the number of hours relaxed and food/housing quality are the variables we really care about for equilibrium happiness, I have prepared a chart which presents all combinations of equilibrium happiness levels based up to having a 10 quality house and 10 quality food. Remember, equilibrium levels assume that all other factors remain equal, so this chart assumes that a player will use the same quality of food/house and relax for the same number of hours each day for a long period of time.

# Hours Relaxed vs. Food/House Quality
You can access a more design friendly version of this chart HERE .

12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 100 N/A 100 100 100 100 100 98 90 82 74 66
19 100 N/A 100 100 100 100 100 94.5 86 77.5 69 60.4
18 100 N/A 100 100 100 100 99 90.7 81.6 72.5 63.4 54.3
17 100 N/A 100 100 100 100 96.2 86.5 76.7 67 57.2 47
16 100 N/A 100 100 100 100 92.25 81.75 71 60.7 50.2 39.7
15 100 N/A 100 100 100 99 87.6 76.3 65 53.6 42.3 31
14 100 N/A 100 100 100 94.7 82.4 70.14 57.8 45.5 33.2 21
13 100 N/A 100 100 100 89.7 76.3 63 49.6 36.2 22.8 9.4
12 100 N/A 100 100 98.6 84 69.3 54.6 40 25.3 10.6 0
11 100 N/A 100 100 93.3 77.1 61 44.8 28.6 12.4 0 0
10 100 N/A 100 100 87 69 51 33 15 0 0 0
9 100 N/A 100 99.4 79.2 59 38.7 18.5 0 0 0 0
8 100 N/A 100 92.5 69.5 46.5 23.5 0 0 0 0 0
7 100 N/A 100 83.5 57 30.4 3.8 0 0 0 0 0
6 100 N/A 100 71.7 40.3 9 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 100 N/A 93 55 17 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4 100 N/A 78 30 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 100 N/A 53 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 100 N/A 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 100 N/A 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

This equilibrium chart nicely illustrates the happiness deficit which I previously described. For instance, if we start in row 10 (indicating the daily use of a 10 quality Food) we find a significant decrease in equilibrium as we move from column 9 (9 hours of relaxation) to column 8, to column 7. The transition from each column indicates a one hour drop in relaxation, similar to the example shown in the scenario with Bob. From column 9 to column 8 there is a drop of 13 happiness; from column 8 to column 7 there is a drop of 14 happiness; and from column 8 to column 7 there is a drop of also 14 happiness from your equilibrium level. The leftward equilibrium decrease becomes more profound as one moves down the chart to the lower quality Food + House rows. So for instance in row 5 the decrease from column 10 to column 9 is 38 happiness!

The chart also shows a decrease in happiness between rows. The lower the quality of food you consume, the greater decrease in happiness at any particular number of hours relaxing. So in column 10 there is a 50 equilibrium happiness drop between a quality 3 food and a quality 2 food. This only underscores the importance of buying the highest quality food as possible on a daily basis.

More practically, this chart is extremely useful to help players determine which combinations of time relaxing they can undertake along with their Food + House Quality in order to reach your equilibrium level at 100 happiness. In my opinion, every player should make 100 happiness their goal in order to assure that they remain a highly productive citizen. While I will explore appropriate daily task break downs in my third noob guide, most new players will not be able to afford to buy houses, nor should they waste the money on them in the early stages of the game; therefore, depending on the quality of food they can afford, the optimum equilibrium level for new players is either at 9 hours relaxing with a 10 quality food or 10 hours relaxing with a 6 quality food.

Equilibrium Health

Unfinished

Other Calculators
CCCP Health/Happiness Calculator
eRepublik Hostei

Special Thanks
- I’d like to thank whoever created the eRep Hostei Calculator because the visuals of the health and happiness lost assisted me in the early stages of my calculator development.
- I want to give a special thanks to Robert Loggia for testing the initial stages of the calculators and for funding advertising for this article.
- I’d like to thank Kazeal for putting in a ton of time editing this article and leading in the graphic design of the calculators; they’re pretty user-friendly, I hope people take advantage!
- I’d also like to thank Jewitt, Chris Shnitzel, DanielCD and all the other players who tested the calculators.
- Finally I want to thank Ligtreb who recently told us we are all noobs and encouraged all of us to take advantage of this moment to further our understanding of the game past the old “experts”. Let’s just say that that article was an inspiration.

Take Away Points

Unfinished