The Economist ~ Four more countries

Day 2,332, 06:02 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313




Dear friends,


So we’re going to get some more countries- I guess a bunch of you are interested to hear my opinion since I’ve had a few messages about it. First of all, let’s look at some background. The admins have decided to add four countries and allow us to pick two. The list you can all see does not necessarily include the two the admins will pick, it’s just a selection of candidates we ourselves put forward in an unpublicised spam thread on the forums. Now call me Mr. Cynical, but in my opinion what probably happened is the admins decided to add two countries, came to some sort of advertising deal in their RL counterparts to cause a baby boom, then as an afterthought decided to allow us to pick two.


Why would they do that? Well let’s look at the history of added countries. The “first wave” of added countries included the likes of Croatia and then months later Serbia. This first wave was based on numbers of players accessing the game from those countries, and the admins knew from experience there would be thousands of players coming out to play for them. After that first wave the admins added countries based on speculation only- and as far as I know only in MKD did that speculation pay off with a baby boom. The baltic states were initially PTO’d but since then have become small but powerful communities. Taiwan also managed to get its shit together although they’re not a very vocal or outward looking bunch so you rarely hear from them.





Every other small country- New Zealand, Thailand, Montenegro, Philippines, Egypt etc had one of three fates reserved for it.


PTO- a term with mostly negative connotations, PTO is to me simply when an external group (in eRep case people not from the country IRL) come to dominate the country. An example of this would be South Africa during the Hungarian PTO. This is because a large group of Hungarians moved there and dominated the country without involving any other groups. Similarly Thailand and New Zealand were both “PTO’d” by Serbs and other south slavic players. New Zealand would deny this, since their population is friendly towards people of any RL nationality so long as they go there with good will. However nevertheless it is not a native majority country, which is what I mean by PTO/Colony.


Proxy State- a Proxy state is one whose fate is so tied up with another that it can’t formulate independent foreign policy. I guess the most obvious example of this is eMontenegro which is effectively a Serbian proxy. Although there are many native Montenegrins in the country, its citizens are interchangeable with Serbias and many of its leading citizens have been leaders in Serbia too. This partly comes from RL, where a lot of Montenegrins would identify as Serbs and the place was actually a part of Serbia until fairly recently (about 18 months before Kosovo declared independence for those of you that enjoy article comments full of nationalism).


Resource colony- pretty straight forward this one, a country whose entire existence is its provision of convenient bonuses to neighbouring real countries. Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt and the Arab states are all examples of this. What small population they have is almost entirely native, since there is nothing sexy about being in those countries ingame (unlike for example Mother eRussia which had a large foreign population due to the “cool” factor of being Russian).





So where do the likely new countries fit in?


Cuba will almost certainly be added now, as it is leading by a considerable margin. Cuba has just over 11 million people, about a quarter of which have access to some form of internet. Of that quarter a small fraction fit our target demographic as a game. Naturally there are large numbers of ethnic Cubans living in the United States who might choose to join their old homeland, but nevertheless I expect at most a hundred or so native players. So why add Cuba? I guess the votes come from a mixture of communist/anti-American types wanting to role play as Che Guevara and more practical types wanting to create their own Cuban missile crisis by opening another potential front against the USA.


Ecuador is second, and again is a poor country with little internet access. About one in five has regular access to the internet, mainly through mobile phones. Only five percent have actual broadband internet connections, mainly in the capital. For me this is a clear resource bonus grab by the other South American countries- currently bordering Chile, Argentina and Colombia a future Ecuador would be ideally placed to take the pressure off those countries who currently have to hold territories outside South America to maintain their bonuses.


Georgia has a lot of votes and is coming up nicely. Of the countries so far, I guess Georgia has the best chance of actually forming a real country. Being an orthodox country with strong nationalism seems to be a good basis for forming a country in eRep, though Russia has always been underpowered for its size. I guess most of their votes have come from the other Orthodox countries in the Balkans. Russia and Bulgaria could both use the country for resources, as could Turkey. I guess if Bulgaria decides to be friends with them, they’ll survive as Aurora MPPs will prevent Turkey snipping bits off.


Iceland is the fourth country with a chance of sneaking in, though again it's unlikely. Though nearly the entire Icelandic population has internet access, there are barely enough to fill a medium sized city in Britain so I really doubt there will be significant numbers there if it’s added. I guess Asgard will add them as a core member, just because they’re Scandinavian, but the chances are Iceland would be a PTO target.





Of the others, Palestine is getting a lot of votes because of people bringing RL into the game and the country would just be full of Western beardy lefties. Similarly Jamaica is getting a lot of votes basically because of its association with Rasta culture and marijuana. Luxembourg probably just to make the map a bit more tidy, its neighbour Belgium is many times as big IRL and only survives because of good foreign affairs.



Of the rest, let’s speculate on who the admins will add? Out of countries not yet added, let’s look at the list of countries by internet users:-


Nigeria ~ 55 million
Vietnam ~ 36 million
Morocco ~ 17 million
Kenya ~ 14 million
Uzbekistan ~ 10 million
Bangladesh ~ 10 million
Kazakhstan ~ 9 million
Tanzania ~ 6 million
Algeria ~ 6 million
Syria ~ 5 million


Obviously there are a lot of other countries with less than this, but most of them are added or are African countries with poor internet access who are unlikely candidates. If we consider which countries the admins are likely to add, I think we can dismiss the central Asian countries. Bangladesh too seems unlikely based on the response from Pakistan and Indian populations. For me personally I wouldn’t add any of those countries, since I’m not particularly convinced any of them will succeed with a baby boom. However I guess the two most likely are Nigeria (because of its size and it being the largest economy in Africa) and Morocco, because of its high level of internet penetration. However none of them are particularly gaming communities.


If I were the admins I would add a couple countries and use them as experiments. We have Saudi Arabia which is a one party state, why not have other countries with unique political systems? It could provide a way for admins to experiment for the much neglected political module, and let’s face it there’s nothing better to do with these new countries.



Iain




Ps. Admins really need to decide what defines a country, since they’re adding the Palestinian territories in there. Not that I’m necessarily opposed to that, but they seem to have a very strange policy when it comes to unrecognised or partially recognised territories.