The Economist ~ 1000 days

Day 1,394, 11:08 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313

tl;dr I am 1000 days old, buy me a beer



Dear friends,

After a bit of seasonal silliness yesterday, I’m coming right at you with a nostalgia article. Today I am 1000 days old, and I feel every day of grinding repetitive misery 😛 So rather than keep it to myself, stewing in my oldfag prison in ONE’s evil fortress in Budapest, I am going to sneak out and pen a long article and foist my misery on the rest of you.

So, I was born long ago on day 374 (I think), which in real terms is 18th December 2008. Back then we had trivia, UK was the 5th largest country, Poland was protected by Sweden and Dishmcds was President (that bit hasn’t changed so much). For a detailed account of my first year, you can search through my articles, I wrote one at some point I’m sure. What I want to talk about now is how the game has changed since V1 really.

The first thing I want to tackle is the changed nature of gold. It is kind of the “biggie” so I’m going to talk about that now. In V1, wellness packs were limited to 80 per day, and hardly anyone actually bought gold regularly. The few who did were definitely outliers, to the point where if someone had a lot of gold quickly you assumed he was cheating rather than buying gold. Because a tank couldn’t do a HUGE amount of damage, hardly anyone tanked. Because gold could be donated, most tanks were owned by countries, who funded their fighting directly. Because companies were less important, Q5 weapons were less used, and people fought less, hardly anyone had high Q companies, even though the cost has gone unchanged.

With lana, we saw a drain on gold. This drain could only be answered by people buying gold, and eventually that’s what happened, though currency became worthless along the way. Training with Napoleon cost 54 gold a month, 648 gold a year. Considering the amount of people who gold trained (evidenced by the number of tanks alive now) this is an enormous amount of gold. Gold became, suddenly, really rare.

At the same time Q5 companies became massively common. When I first started playing, there were probably 3 Q5 weapons companies in the entire UK, and none of them were owned by the government. Now I own 3 myself. Out of the top hitters in the UK, only one or two don’t own Q5 companies. This too is a huge outflow of gold.

Basically, the nature of gold has changed. Whereas once it was a currency, used to buy products (and therefore exchangeable for other currency- basically the national currency of Adminland) now it is a product which you buy to enhance your game experience. There is a vague nod in the direction of the old system in the form of the money market, though really that is becoming more of a joke each day, and it is not only unfair but inaccurate to judge economic strength by tax income or currency value any longer, which is the main contributing factor to me stopping my country analysis articles.

Nowadays success is bought. I am not necessarily saying that is awful- I’ll leave that up to you to decide. I have bought gold before, and I am sure that the great majority of involved players have too. Nowadays the whole game is geared towards it, which is why non-gold buyers feel so isolated. I have designed ways to get rich quickly, to maximise profits, to direct capital investments etc. But in fact these things are all merely ways in which you can self-supply, or fund training. The whole concept of wealth is basically irrelevant. In one day a tank like Romper can spend more gold than my entire net worth, more (in currency terms) than I would gross in a month, even if I could convert it all (which I can’t).

The other major change (in my life at least) has been the collapse of the dual alliance system. When PHX collapsed it saw countries which had fought together since the beginning of the war module suddenly on opposing sides: Bulgarians fighting Serbs; Poles fighting Romanians; Spanish fighting Americans, and so on. As someone involved in ONE (if only in a minor way) I find it interesting to see the political and cultural traditions of 3 EDEN and 3 PHX/PEACE countries mixing in the new alliance. It in many ways produces a kind of improvement on both, but in other ways there will always be a certain element of confusion as frames of reference adjust. Jokes and chat which reference things that happened in PHX are immediately picked up by Serbs, but the ex-EDEN countries don’t really get it, and vice versa. In Terra the situation is similar I guess.

I feel like the level of communication from the admins has gotten steadily worse too. In the past, they pushed a few articles out which nobody really read, sure. But their main form of contact was through CPs, oldfags, and community mods. Someone would ask a question (either in IRC or a ticket) and someone would find them and answer it. Then the info would spread through the community. Nowadays, that doesn’t really happen. I found out about “captain elections” in MUs this morning when I logged in and saw it. There is no way to feedback about module changes, no consultation, no beta period, no game testers. In this, eRepublik is completely unlike all the other successful MMOs.

In addition, although gold buying has risen, community size has shrunk. The UK has maybe 200-300 active players who work and train and fight each day. There is also a shifting group of 100-200 people who join the game and quit in their first month. One and a half years ago we had probably 2000 active citizens. It’s always struck me as weird that the admins have always relied on the communities themselves to recruit members. The impetus being (I suppose) that if you do so your imaginary country wins a war with some imaginary version of a real life enemy. Countries like the UK and Germany don’t really have any RL enemies, but we have lots of rich people who could buy a lot of gold. Even with our few hundred citizens they probably milk quite a lot out of us. You’d think they’d invest some of that in actually advertising the game, but yeh, they don’t. Back in the day there was an ambassador program, which basically recognised recruiters, but even that has been scrapped.

A lot of things have gone downhill, and I am sure you’re all really depressed now. But the one thing that has only grown stronger is friendships 🙂 Friendships with people and between countries. I was talking to Lonestar the other day (DIO DIO DIO) and despite being pigdisgusting we agreed that after 2 years+ of fighting each other, it was fairly easy to become allies now. That’s because if you fight someone long enough, swap enough banter and friendly insults, you basically become friends. I think that is the main reason ONE was even possible- Serbs and Poles might have been enemies, but they respected each other.

In the new world, friendships are going to form between all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds. I am currently serving in the Macedonian government as a lowly advisor they can poke if they need something, but a year ago I counted Bulgaria as one of my closest friends. I don’t hate anyone in Bulgaria now- I still count a lot as my friends. Anyone who can play the game without bringing racism or hatred into it I will have a good chat with, and I think that community and friendship is one thing which really has survived everything the admins have managed to throw at us so far.

I don’t know if I will survive another 1000 days. Each day I log in I think “this one will be my last” but somehow, I am still here. No breaks, no “holidays” no deaths. 1000 days, over 40 (I stopped counting) months in 5 countries governments, over a year in alliance leadership positions, and I am still alive. One day though I will wake up, and all my friends will be dead, and I think that will be the day I quit.

Until then o7

Thanks for reading 🙂

Iain