Change We Could Believe In

Day 1,911, 17:43 Published in Germany Germany by Skalg von Tuari


Music

Hai gais, there I am, once again, talking about stuff. Well, so the admins decided to give erep a nice facelift. We all know how old it is, how many things have stopped working internally, but it is still running, makes more money than ever, and now looks a little bit prettier than before!

So, did I get rid of anyone who is bored of all these admin-hating articles? Good. I have some things to criticise that would actually be reasonable, need little effort and therefore have a chance of being implemented (usually, its only one of those two).

Lets start with the map. Yay, looks nice and after many years, we finally have a map that actually shows the world how it is. Well, as soon as they get rid of some bugs, but its better than before! However, one thing is missing.



There, you see that? The DO can be accessed directly from the map. Now, it is nice to have a DO, but the CotD has been neglected by players for such a long time - why not put it next to the DO, maybe in green? I'm sure it would look pretty and actually help people to see what it actually is.

Oh, and please, please make the map optional. Have you seen how you can hide the map? The problem is, it is open by default. Now, the ones of you who can afford a decent computer probably didnt notice, but this map can slow your computer down. I'd much prefer to open the map only when/if I need it, so the page loads faster and the browser crashes less often.

Apart from that, it looks nice (kinda like risk) and seems decent. Well done.



Now, do you remember how MPPs used to cost 30-100 gold? With the exchange rate being around 1:25-40? That means, in the end, you paid about 3000 currency. But alas, the admins decided two things. First, they totally wracked the economy, which means that we had a lot of currency on the market, which dropped the exchange rate to less than 1:1000. It was even 2-4k at one point! So in order to get money out of the system, they made MPPs for 10k currency, the model we are using right now.

That worked fine, as the states suddenly had enormous amounts of money and did not know what to do with it. This would not last. Since more and more people become self sufficient, there is very little trade - why would you buy something you can produce yourself? And since you can work in your own companies or even a commune, why work on the free market? The result is, the state gets less and less in taxes, bot income and VAT.

For a while, it worked. But now, currency is taken out of the system, and the gold price is going up. Good, you say, right? Many people made a fortune by selling the currency for gold! Well, that is the individual. The state actually needs little gold, mainly to pay for treaties or stuff like that. But since people have lower incomes and sell for lower prices, the state gets less money. So a) transactions reduced rapidly and b) the size of these transactions is dwindling.

We have seen many countries reducing their once enormous MPP stacks. Good! It means that you have to think strategically. But now we are at a point where smaller countries simply cannot afford enough MPPs to engage in alliance warfare. We are not totally there yet, but if the state income goes further down, the big countries will be even more important in alliances than they already are and than they have grown in the last two years.



Do I have to remind you of how almost every rulechange since the end of V2 has been in favour of big countries? MPPs work in offensive warfare; DoW is for free with NEs; various things that force you to fight for your country and so on. If middle sized and small countries can not afford MPPs, they will be excluded from alliances, from world politics and warfare.

So please, either fix the economy (a lot of work) or reduce the price for MPPs, lets say, to 1000.

One final thought. Having comments on different levels? Awesome, now you can actually follow discussions. But a vote button? Really? Thanks for allowing dozens of people to like comments from over a year ago!

It would be really nice if you would not get alerts for these votes, or if they were optional - let people decide whether they want to know about alerts or not. That way, people would not miss important things for something that does not even matter.



maybe I'll start playing again when small countries don't get instant occupation
Skalg von Tuari