Join the new world

It's been something like ten days since v1 came live, and it seems to at least be working at a reasonable speed and not too many bugs now (not many more than the beta, at least); so I think now is the right time to do what I refrained from doing last week: giving a detailed and fundamented opinion of what's Good, Bad and Ugly in v1, compared to our always to be missed Beta.

The Good.

- Raw materials: They add an extra factor to the game which makes it more interesting. Despite the problems in the beginning (mainly the fault of pig-disgusting capitalistic managers who just care about their short-term benefits), I think it's a good idea.

- Resistance wars: A long-awaited feature, I'm sure we all agree that this is an improvement. Yes, I know, the wall is too big, but the general idea is good.

- The trivia: I know I'm against the majority in this one, but I actually like the idea of the trivia. Granted, some of the questions are absurd, some aspects could be polished. But the general idea is nice. It doesn't take much time, it's a challenge, it hurts illiterate trolls, and it can be skipped if you really don't feel like it. I'd definitely have loved a beta with raw materials, trivia and resistance wars.

- New wellness formula: It is more complex than the previous one and it has made some people rage because they couldn't keep their wellness levels, but it actually makes sense. Being able to live in a permanent 100% wellness state while eating crappy food just because you had a house wasn't very realistic. Now you can keep a decent wellness with standard products but you need quality material to be in the ninetys, this will be good for economy making high-quality items more valuable and worthwile to produce, and approaching it more to a real economy.

- The world map: It looks much better now, the previous one was just broken.

- Being able to use some text formatting in news articles.

The Bad.

- The most important Bad point for me is charging real money for inventory slots. I think this makes the game unfair. I honestly have nothing against paying for games, in fact I have payed for a webgame in the past; but I definitely don't like paying for getting unfair advantages (or for not getting unfair disadvantages, which is more or less equivalent). I would pay a moderate amount for a subscription to eRepublik that would let me surf the site faster, have a bigger avatar, have more shouts, get rid of banner ads or things like that; as other web games have done with great financial success. But in order for the game to be interesting to me, it has to be fair, I have to know that I'm doing well (or not) due to my own (lack of) skills and not due to having paid more or less than other people. OK, beta already did some of this because it let you buy gold with real cash. And I already didn't like that (and signed the petition against it). But at least, for a political career you didn't need gold, and to fight decently (not at uberman levels) you didn't need a lot either. Now, the real money that you have in the real world is much more important in-game, and I don't like this at all.

- I don't like charging gold for being a candidate to elections either. For a simple reason: it's no longer a real democracy if you do that. Wasn't this game about democracy?

- Much less political information in the interface than before. Where have the party descriptions gone? Where have the press releases gone? Where is the list of parties in my country (I think this is actually still there, but it's not at all easy to find). This kind of things were what many noobs used to know what parties where doing and decide which one to join. Now, they have to check the news and be lucky enough to find news about the parties that they're interested in among all the other stuff that can appear there. This makes the game both less appealing to existing player and much more confusing for noobs, especially taking into account the next point, that

- News are much harder to find than before. The previous interface made it quite easy to navigate the news of different countries and your own. OK, it had severe shortcomings, for example you couldn't see the top rated news in a country that wasn't your own. But the new interface seems even much worse, needing more clicks to find the information, and using the space in a less efficient way.

- The newspaper descriptions have disappeared, just like the party descriptions. Why? It was informative and nice to have descriptions of things in the game. No one forced anyone to read them, but I used to read them.

- Profiles are much less complete now. Where has the political history gone? It was quite informative, even if it had some problems like showing new party names for parties that had been renamed after you being in them. Even that way, it was still informative. Also, something even more basic: how can I see the gender of a player? I would really like to know if certain people are guys that have pics of hot chicks in their profiles, or, well... um... guys that have pics of hot chicks in their profiles BUT they also want to you to believe that they're actually female. That's an important difference!

- It was nice to see people's nationality in the forums.

- The search function now seems unable to find companies. Searching for companies was useful in beta.

- The new productivity formula in terms of number of employees is just absurd. Now a company with 20 employees produces less than a company with 15, not only in relative terms but even in absolute terms! What kind of sense is that supposed to make?

The Ugly.

- The site follows the web 2.0-ish trend of using a smallish column of info an leaving quite large blank spaces at the sides. Yeah, I know, this is fashion. But everything seems to contain much less information than in beta, everything seems to be more clicks away... it's just like comparing Windows XP to Vista. In Vista you feel you're losing your time because you need an extra click or two to access everything. And this wouldn't be bad if XP didn't exist before, but it did.

- I don't like using icons for everything. I now have a skill of six point something in "anvil and hammer", but what's anvil and hammer? Well, I think it's manufacturing and it's good for weapons, food or something else, but that's because I am an active player and used to read the previews about v1. Icons can be good for some games, but not for eRepublik, in my opinion. eRepublik is a social game where the most important thing is talking about everything, discussing in the forums, trolling, countertrolling, propagandaing and counterpropagandaing. In eRepublik you are using language all the time, and I mean written language. You can't take the words from the game and expect people to say "hey, I have 6 skill in anvil and hammer"

PS: I just got an image-related error when posting the article and this turned the text in the form into a wall of text without newlines. This is definitely Bad, too.