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Hello dear eRepublicans!

How's your week going? Got all packs from Plato? Did you got your Prestige Hunter Medal yet? Have you ... ah forget it, who cares.... Personally I had a pretty sh*tty week. Started the week with a headache, continued with some internet speed that makes Hungary look like some civilized country, got someone on my nerves and almost killed him (and I really mean it) but ‘till Friday I haven’t done anything stupid … and then I’ve got home. Daily routine: turn notebook on, connect to internet, search some…stuff, j*ck off to it, get some entertainment videos on going and do the basics in eRepublik… it isn’t a priority anymore so yes, eRep is no more number one (since actually a long time, giving that I was e-dead for a while but got some free time now and I haven’t forgotten the ol’ Romanian guard and stuff happened)….deal with it. I was fighting for eBulgaria to get some influence for them against eGreece and then boom: Server maintenance.
Woooohooo, our friends from eLabs are still alive and kicking some updates/fixes in this game. Well, I was a bit excited to see that screen and for a moment, the server got back online and let some of us to get a preview of what will come…and oh baby what was coming: those markers with some names are real towns now….like for e-real…they got even some banners for the regions. They did some graphical changes (and pretty good ones from my point of view). But I think that here stops for most of you the positive side of this update.
They introduced Residence. Nothing weird here unless you read/explore the update further: Now you are required to get some kind of an e-real e-Hometown, or at least a Town where you e-live. As a standard for every e-town you get a +2 recovery bonus (+2 more energy/6 mins) and some bonus for the energy pool (+ maximum amount of avaible energy to train, work, move and fight) BUT if you move out of your hometown to go fight some random RW for RH/Mercenary Medal, you lose the recovery bonus AND after 30 mins you lose your bonus for your energy pool too. Well it seems legit, you can’t go outside to punch someone in the face and still have access to your fridge full of beer while doing so (except your Russian and you have your fridge on your back). The weird stuff is that in real life you don’t really have to pay the local authority to get a home/authorization/permit/whatever (not that I remember) but it looks like you need it in eRepublik, not to mention that you have to pay for your actual property (your houses q1-q5) to “move” them from nowhere to your first hometown and then from your first one to your 2nd one and so one. This money will get in the e-city’s account to develop further the e-city. How much will it cost, what you actually need to do to improve your e-city, is still unknown (actually the only known fact is that only the mayor and the local council can do something with that money). Out of what they told us in the updates you can understand that there will be some kind of upgrades for your health pool. Yep, no recovery bonus for you. You have to be kidding me: you are increasing the energy pool but not the only thing that fills it…I’m not going any further into detail of this update because I don’t want to lose my mind again and go ranting with one of the admins.
One of the disturbing things is that with this update, they changed the Houses too. They are now providing you with more recovery bonus. Well it isn’t that bad, it’s actually good. You just fell in their net. In a article published not long ago, they were asked (Q5) “When will perception training arrive?”. The developers answere😛 “We don’t currently have a timeline for this. We are not convinced that adding perception now would benefit the game in its current state as it would lead to greater gaps between new and veteran citizens.”. ARE YOU KIDDING US? I understand you had the mayor system coming faster than the perception TG’s but look at this update! You have done the thing that you didn’t want to do: you made the gap between the newbies pool and the older ones BIGGER. What newbie has thousand of CC’s (earned legally and without buying gold, packs and so on) to buy all houses and compete with the others in battles (ground/air) for BH/CH/SH not to mention that all must pay the same taxes? WUUUUUUUUUUTT?

For those who don’t know me very well or the MU I’m now commanding: I’ve got the job to teach the newcomers of eRo what eRep is about. As I still was just some officer, we had like 30-50 newcomers to feed, hell we had to do it 2 times a day (afternoon and evening), we had our meeting every night on chat going all at once in a battle, sc*ewing our enemies, changing the course of battles in matter of seconds, we fought together with FAR, FSR, LU and many other big MU’s of eRo who made history and miracles happen. Well that was the past…now there’s rarely anyone joining this game. Out of all players who joins someones country 50% are clones(or newbies that make clones and get banned), 20% are newbies who rejoins eRep to see what’s going on, 25% are lonewolfs lasting for 1 month (maybe even less) and the rest are actually newbies of which maybe 1 % remain in eRep more than 1 month. Out from my experienced we:
- increased the prizes
- gave them more weapons and food
- gave them money
- hell some of us began selling packs to get money to help the newbies
… we have done everything we could to hold them in eRep.

I know, there are other MU’s in other countries who have done the same as us, yet they experienced the same thing: newbies leaving, getting tired because they can’t do one thing properly in eRep: the war module is cramped with old fighters with tons of packs and resources fighting to get more gold (ground and air), politic module is well … you aren’t someone important or submit to the will of the party leader or have some money to “buy” your place, you aren’t going to do ja*k sh*t. New parties are vulnerable to TO’s from the older ones, newbies are simply brainwashed into believing one side is good and the other awful or even used as simple voters or to make the party bigger etc.

What can a newbie to today? Be active in media? Who reads media in eRep today? The update that was introduced a few months ago has done what? We could see in the top news some articles that have been published 1500 days before! THAT’S AROUND 4 YEARS AGO! And just because some nuth*ads commented on them…this is the update WE wanted? A very good idea was the introduction of the endorsement system: to encourage the newbies to make goodlooking articles with some interesting topics but:
- he can’t publish something about RL because it’s against the rules
- he can’t actually publish something about a political dispute between 2 sides and not get insulted, offended and threatened from one or both sides
- he can’t publish something about 1 or more ongoing wars because he can’t understand why or how the war has started, etc..

The economic module? Well this is another story… you want to get some newbies involved in economy, you need to give them something else then just this…thing that we have today. Like can a newbie with 1-2 weapons companies compete with someone who has 20 weapon companies? The one with more production/companies can drop the prize, when he wants, how much he wants and still get some little profit, but the newbie can’ t do that without getting on -. You can’t just ask for respect from any sellers because you won’t get any: they will simply ignore you, put the prize he wants and maybe even lower than the prize of the newbie or even do it on the black-market (donate weapons for CC) saturating the already overfilled market.

So, what can a newbie do today, with today’s rules, today’s eRepublik and today’s modules? Under today’s circumstances, a newbie can’t do anything that will actually matter. This game needs major improvement for all its modules. And like the title of this article says, I’m more of the type: criticize, but give a better idea (or even more) too. You can’t just criticize and expect the developers to know what you actually want. So I’ll start a series of articles that will bring my ideas to your attention and maybe to the developers attention too. As for now, I feel like playing a beta p2p game. But let's make the things better shall we?

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[EN] Constructive criticism Part 1:
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2641150/1/20

Untill next part
The one with the long name