The Economist ~ Open letter to the game owners and admins
Spite313
Dear game owners and administrators,
Let me start with a story, a little snippet of my life. When I started playing way back in the last days of 2008, the eUK was the fifth largest country in the game by population. A game barely out of beta with no advertising managed to attract over five thousand British players, a significant amount of which were active and involved in the game. Over time I’ve watched as the game grew and grew- and then collapsed suddenly during the build up to v2.
Let’s not get confused here- V2 was a death blow, but I can understand why it was done. Not many around today remember the crippling economic troubles leading up to V2, but trust me they were bad. Without a major change the game was going to become completely deadlocked. Unfortunately the change was massively unpopular and killed of a significant number of players.
On the plus side for yourselves, the owners, most of the dead citizens were just “two clickers”, in other words they made up numbers but didn’t really noticeably affect gameplay. The monetisation of the game as gold buying increased compensated for the overall drop in numbers, and your strategy reflected this turn of events, appealing more and more to individuals rather than countries. eRepublik slowly became a one player game.
Now I’m not here to talk about that, I’m here to talk about the effect that has had on the community. As the co-operative aspect was removed, many of the meta-game aspects have withered and died, which has left many nations struggling. In the UK when I joined, our national forums regularly had hundreds of posts a day. Of late, we are lucky to see twenty posts in a week outside of the “spam” forums, and even those are slowly dying.
How do you judge the healthiness of an eCountry? I guess you can judge it by the quantity and quality of it’s players. A large user base means you can do damage, but it’s the quality of players which determines its organisation and differentiates between a mass of clickers and a country. Unfortunately the changes you made to the game are slowly killing the “quality” part of the userbase.
On an international level, I’ve noticed over the years a major decline in the numbers of strong candidates for leadership coming forward. It’s got to the point now where it’s like pass the parcel between people who have already done it, and when someone new with a modicum of talent comes along people are waving flags in the streets in celebration. In the eUK we’ve elected god knows how many lacklustre, incompetent and untrustworthy people simply because it was a toss up between two bad choices.
In fact it has got to the point now where the eUK probably has - at most - 30 ‘quality’ citizens who are actively organising. After that there are a bunch who are slightly more active and help out, but don’t use IRC and so can never advance beyond the level they’re at now. Of our 30 active quality citizens, the great majority are busy either in government (here or abroad) or internationally. That means people no longer have “time off”. Burn-outs are increasing and the available pool of talent is shrinking every month.
In bigger countries it might be less noticeable because they have more people to begin with, but here in the eUK it is starkly obvious. We can’t even field 5 strong parties anymore- at best we have three that are noticeably different from my eyes. No doubt people will complain about that assessment, but it’s how I see it at the moment. The gradually shrinking talent pool means that when someone burns out, we have a choice to either abolish the position they hold, or put someone incompetent or inexperienced in their place. In some cases that has worked out spectacularly well, but most of the time it hasn’t.
So where am I going with this? I think you seriously need to think about the future of the game, yes. I’m not telling you to change all your modules, or to radically reverse policy. But your focus now has to be on making the game challenging and deep enough to retain those “quality” players, because I’m telling you if we don’t have an influx soon, countries of the eUK’s size are going to drop off the map in the next year.
Once, long ago, you approached us about organising a possible eUK baby boom. Nothing came of it- I believe in the end you went for a bunch of (badly) targeted Facebook ads which did a total of nothing. As a stopgap measure- which will by no means fix the problem but will alleviate it somewhat - you could run a serious advertising campaign to attract new players to the game. Lots of other browser MMOs do it, very successfully. France, Germany, UK and the Scandinavian countries are a big market when it comes to gaming, and they’ve been totally neglected. Even the USA is a tiny fraction of what it should be by it’s potential userbase.
If you want to make this game something good, you need to act to save it now.
Iain
Copied from a ticket sent to the admins 19/03/2014. Please send your own.
Edit: Reply from admin team
Although it is against game rules to post correspondence with the admins, they have contacted me to say everyone in the office read the article, and that they would pass it to appropriate people (ie other investors). They also intimated that they would take action to improve the situation in the near future. Here's hoping
🙂
Comments
Pole.
perhaps the first keers' article I agree 100% and that doesn't need any corrections (at first sight).
It's very bad manners to reply to someone else's post just so yours will be at the top you know.
there're worse things in life than posting replying a comment in a game .
voted
Podium
Voted! Great article!
v
Voted!
well said, I've tired a lot of things to keep this game interesting because I love the community aspect. I've taken month long breaks, recently started a new account and now I'm 2 clicking until a see a prolonged period where I can really make a difference.
*tried
v
It's not all that often I entirely agree with you Iain, but this is definitely one of those times.
However I do think we as players have had a part to play in this as well (though nowhere near as much as the admins). After all it's hard to create interest and spur activity with a shrinking selection of players to take part.
vote !!
🙁
v
"I’m not telling you to change all your modules, or to radically reverse policy" Ourgh Keers. That's EXACTLY what we need though, something's got to happen! I hate how they think we're supposed to attract new players, it's unlike any game I've ever experienced. Seriously, hand over the keys to your business and I'll fix it for you, I don't even know what the 30- something hired people at eRepublik do.
Anyways, it's not going to help anything Keers, they just won't listen.
Ye well they've listened to a lot of stuff I've said before.
...and even implemented some of it, very recently 😉
Alright, but small changes I assume. I think what we need is much larger changes. Also, as a business the only way eRepublik can profit is by players buyig gold which isn't sustainable, I don't even get something extra per say for my gold, I just get richer and can buy more stuff.
They should just get a lot more players and go for an advertisement business model.
I don't even know how they can have like 30 employees and give them a monthly salary, I don't believe that out of the 100.000 players or so, that so many people spend so much money on this game.
This ended, Bonte are thinking of another game: Tactical Heroes
good point, but I doubt you find a quality listener on the other side.
In bigger countries the situation is also getting worse. We have 5 parties that are for almost 1 year in top 5, with challengers very far behind. Until some time we always had a fight for entering top5 for the Congress election. Also party numbers are shrinking.
This is only a sign, there are quite many signs of decay. Does somebody from the administration care?
And another thing. Its a shame that they relay on us for baby booms. Its their game, their business, let them spend time and money to advertise the game
V+ agreed
v
As an active eAmerican I too am saddened by the slow and inevitable decline we've seen in our playerbase for the past three years.
I know Tadhg Kelly has done some consulting for eRep over the years, and I am fairly certain he would agree with much if not all of what Iain says.
Was having the same thought about the top5. Not sure if even more than 5 countries have enough HR to fill more than 3 parties. Even the eUSA would benefit from reducing the congress from five to three parties imo.
voted, good article, one of the things they can do to make the game better is to stop the cheaters using automatic scripts to buy the cheapper wrm, to fight, etc... this distort the truth and it's not a fair play, I'm sendig tickets about the scripts on wrm market at 1 year ago, monthsly and the answer is always the same, "we are solving it"....
To be fair, it's not that easy to detect automation, considering that this is a browser game.
1 year and nothing changed? they could just insert a captcha.. easy..
I'm sorry for your finger when you click fight button 5000 times.
Needs a plain-English management summary, with easily identifiable action steps. Then you might get traction on this, too. G'luck.
v
So true - even medium countries (like Brazil) are struggling to find good player for key leadership positions, either in government or MU management. Gotta do something to change that soon...
I still never understood why they never took the long time power players up on our offer to vet updates for them. When they do ask/leak things, feedback is outright ignored.
Word.
Spot on.
Great article! V!
too late
V+S
100% agreed!
"As the co-operative aspect was removed"
WHAT? Have you lost your mind? I hope admins wont read it, last time they had changed way divisions work, and screwed a lot of newcomers (i was helping bunch of them, and due to division changes they got like from TOP 40 Poland to TOP 900 Poland in D1, and were heavily demotivated, some of them even quit the game).
Luckly this time you ask for "something bigger", without even pushing this one way to another, and Admins are smart enough to not do anything too foolish, as they know how V2 has ended.
People !!! STOP MAKING CLONES and everything will get better 😉 how can a new player enjoy the game when all the odds are with the clones ?
V Plato killed the game!
Great man and great article as always! o7
Check this out and tell me if they need your advice: http://doingbusiness.ro/financiar/raport/985514/erpk-labs-srl/
Well considering according to that their net profit in 2012 was -30,000 then yes I'd say they need advice.
Well, it was worse in 2011. And also the annual turnover was bigger. We'll see 2013 data in some months...
Not being funny but a company that measures it's profits in the tens of thousands isn't a success. I mean I know market stalls that make bigger profits seriously.
The business looks unsustainable.
Thanks for sharing, really interesting...
Hopefully someone from UK can share the balance sheet of Eprk - if it's public.
Are these figures in Euro or Lei? And that loss means almost nothing, Ian. Smart companies don't make "taxable profit" much.