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This is the final part of a 4 part series on the Erepublik Economy.

Previous installments

Part I: Oversupply, its causes and effects
Part II: Platobots and The Motivations of Their Masters
Part III: What You as a Player Should Do in the Present Economy

Today:

Part IV: Possible System-Wide Innovations and Their Effects



OK, so up to know what we've learne😛
the problem is massive oversupply
the platobots are unlikely to solve the problem of oversupply because that is not in the admins interest and
the optimum strategy under present conditions is to dump your sham goods and convert them into gold.

Let’s move on. This article will be less fact-based and more speculative.
We can see the problem: how might it be solved?

One of the key “features” of a Command Economy is that you change things without any real logic, and goodness knows that could happen at any moment just as it’s happened in the past. So maybe you want to insulate yourself a little against such a sudden swing by holding a stockpile of some amount, even while you relentlessly dump the rest. But now let’s talk about possible solutions for the game itself (not that they’re listening):

1. Divert effort into strength building. One thing the admins have been doing relentlessly is amping up training facilities and opportunities to pull gold out of the game. Again, that doesn’t solve any problems because there is a real market in gold and it has real value, so decreasing the supply of gold is not in any way a market correction. Let’s call it what it is, plain and simple: profit taking. A number of the top players have recognized the transparency of this move and indicated they will not play along (i.e buy more gold) to stay on with the sisyphean endeavour to keep increasing strength with the latest developments. And in this, they have recognized (perhaps unconsciously) another truth of the game, which is that the entire process of war is a sort of perpetual bread and circuses exercise which never resolves much, and even then not for very long.
So at a certain point, one realizes there’s no greater point in all that, absent some possible esteem in being a God of War or recognized tank.
In any event, my point is that diversion of gold towards training, which is the central feature of the latest changes from admins, solves nothing and may in fact be making the oversupply in other areas worse.

Note that the present dip in gold prices, caused by the influx of gold from True Patriot Medals, is not a true fix because it does NOTHING, NADA. ZIP to correct the oversupply problem.


2. Option 2: Allow demand to catch up to supply. This is where my earlier point that I cannot use all I make becomes critical. I cannot use all I make because the game provides a limit on how much health I am permitted to recover, even if I have the food. This is a function of my house. If that limit wasn’t there, however, I would be able to eat and fight until I had used up all my weapons and food, and then still fight until all my food was gone. The oversupply would be naturally cleared by players converting their worthless goods into experience/influence on the battlefield. The admins could do this a number of ways:

A) The admins could ramp up platobots’ purchasing. If you can see why they might not want to do that, you’ve been paying attention.

B.) They could, as is their tendency, announce a sudden and one-time suspension of the limits on how much you can eat/fight. Let’s say they named July 1 as that day. We could expect to see on that day a massive series of fights that would dwarf everything that ever came before it. In anticipation of that day, markets would probably stabilize as players began to stockpile in anticipation of Fighting Without Limits Day. That might be superior to suddenly announcing it, which might provide a one-time clearing of some stockpiles, but then the problem would resume from its previous point. You want, in a situation like this, to stabilize the market a bit going forward by the suggestion that Fighting Without Limits Day may happen again, although not often.
What they are seeking to do through this is to turn one more or less worthless good (weapons and food) into another more or less worthless good (experience and battle damage).

C) The admins could do the same thing as the above but on a permanent basis. I think this unlikely for a number of reasons related to disruption, invalidation of a gold revenue stream from housing improvements, and ongoing erosion of other gold-based values.

D) The admins could introduce a higher level of housing, in effect allowing some players to use marginally more goods in a given day. I think this one of the most likely coming modifications, but it is also likely to be one of least effective. Many of the top players use 20 or more hours of their accumulated hourly 100 health points as it is, so having a slightly larger bank (say, one that lets you save up 700 points overnight instead of 600) would have a pretty small effect. Whatever effect it would have would in any event be utterly dwarfed to by the oversupply. But it’s not as if Admins have shown a great understanding/respect for how markets work to this point, so I expect to see Q6 houses in the not too distant future.

E) The admins could (re)introduce some form of communal good – weapons systems and/or hospitals.
These would seek to lower the oversupply in the goods markets on three fronts.

a. By drawing effort and energy away from weapons and food and into those new industries.

b. Hospitals: by potentially allowing people to fight more in certain regions (would have to work differently than they used to and more like health packs /energy bars today)

c. Weapons Systems: by allowing players to project influence into battles without using up finite health.
There is danger here that this may create an imbalance in battles, huge walls, or a clone wars sort of scenario.
But we are focusing chiefly on the problem of oversupply right now.

F) Similar to D, the Admins could make each fight you do use up 5 health points and half the effectiveness of food at the same time, so Q1 food would only give you 1 health point, not 2. This would in one swoop almost double how many fights your could fight in a day and so double demand for weapons.


3. Option 3: Pull some supply out of goods and weapons by introducing some new product or subdividing the industries. There are rumours of this, and some historical precedent. Basically, the more differentiated the market is, the more likely supply will be dispersed across those markets, allowing a portion of the oversupply to just sit there and accumulate. Think about how many triggers you have for bazookas, for example.

This solution doesn't normally occur to people because of how deliberately inefficient it would be. But remember, the goal of the admins is NOT to create a functioning, efficient market, but a perpetual demand for gold. So unlike the real world, an amendment which would dead end some production would actual help lower the supply glut, and hoist demand for gold.


Which of these will come?
I wouldn't dare speculate. I have noted many times that the admins don't seem to have any expertise in how markets work, or don't follow the advice of what expertise they may have on hand.
Remembering again their motivation, though, will help to predict some attributes of future changes:
They will make "self-sufficient" players LESS likely to turn a daily profit, or will compress profit margins such that really noticeable progress will require gold purchases.

Remember, with each passing day, those of us who have been playing for years increase our "headstart" on a new player. In order to not discourage that new player and to instead encourage him to "catch up" by buying gold, amendments must be continually made to pull back our advantage.

The most recent changes have dramatically increased strength inflation, so my guess is there is a resetting of that attribute, perhaps not nominally, but in real terms, in that not too distant future. After all, there are a number of us old fogies who now generate 15 free strength (Plus bonus) a day to the newbies 5 plus bonus.
That strikes me as highly unlikely to be allowed to continue.

My own personal hope would be a return of some sort of "communal" or "public" product, like hospitals or weapons systems, but not so much for their economic effects as for their team building exercise. I still hearken back to the old days when a group of volunteers built a hospital just so an underdeveloped area could have one. Did it make game sense? Hells, no. But it was a selfless act, and we felt good about it.
The game has lost a lot of that in today's world of Merc Medals.
Even the True Patriot has unfortunately become a damn-you-jack-I'm-OK isolationist influence in the eworld.





Well, that's our series and we hope it's encouraged you to think about the erepublik economy more deeply. Questions and comments always welcome.

N by NE, Volume 6, Number 4