[Series] Visiting eRepublik Labs [Part 04]

Day 3,319, 06:39 • Published in Germany Germany • by Master_rg
Hello fellow citizen,

you are reading a part of my series of articles about my trip to eRepublik Labs from 07th to 10th dec. In order to make it more easier for you to get in touch with every topic, this table of contents can be found on top of every article. It will directly link to the specific topic you click on.


Table of contents

1. Preamble and some rules
2. Clarification about some used terms
3. How did it come to that visit

4. What happened during the days
4.1 Wednesday
4.2 Thursday
4.3 Friday

5. Problems eRepublik is currently facing
5.1 Community
5.2 Economy
5.3 Military
5.4 Politics
5.5 Newspapers

6. Some quotes of players which appear regularly
7. Conclusion


#4.3 Friday

Again I arrived around 08:50 at the office. During the morning hours I wanted to get in touch with the community support in order to see their point of view and also to see what they are actually doing. Some of you may have experienced it already: You create a ticket and just wait for days until you get a response. I mean, I experienced it on my own in the past and was like “what the hell are they doing” or I received an answer in the support ticket which just  felt like a bad joke - just like the supporter didn’t really care about my issue.

So I went over to the support area which was just like… 5 metres away from the developers, where a beautiful lady, Adina, already took care of your tickets. She explained the support interface and answered all of my questions. Basically every supporter has his/her area where they do their stuff: Some are working on general things in game support, others deal with bugs, next with payment problems. So.. there isn't just Adina, there are also Lucia and Carmina - and even though you may have seen their signature in your support tickets already, well: They really exist! (and are also two very beautiful young ladies). Stuff like ticket support takes quite a huge amount of time from time to time. I served in the armed forces as an IT officer for quite a while and if you have ever been to a department which has to deal with support - oh man, if there are some places you really want to avoid to work in, then believe me: It’s exactly the support area.

Most of the time you deal with problems of the community, which of course isn’t the real issue, but it becomes an issue if you sit at your desk, day by day, and also have to deal with the frustration people get from the game and channel towards you. Of course, I understand if people are in a bad mood due to in-game problems, but many tickets are in no relation to that: Insults, hate, and even threats are a problem from time to time - so please remember that there’s still a human being sitting on the other side of your support ticket 🙂.

I asked her where stuff like that comes from, if it’s a general problem of the game or if there are just some mad people running around from time to time. I also asked her about the way they deal with tickets in general, I mean: Is it just a preset answer they paste in the answering field or are they really treating each case individually.

Well: Seems like they really doing their best taking care of the players. At least from my point of view they answer literally every ticket on their own, taking care of your specific problem. BUT: There COULD be one issue. As I mentioned it in the beginning of this article, there are also unpaid moderators who take care of your tickets which may have to fulfill a quota. Speaking from my point of view and without offending anyone: I experienced issues with SOME of them on my own. That doesn’t mean that all of them are bad or stuff like that, it just means that such a problem exists. Also, for clarification: Nobody is perfect - so not only moderators but also members of the team make a mistake from time to time 🙂.

Personally, I think that most of the moderators do a really great job, they invest their time into the game in order to help other players basically for free (even though they earn some extra gold by doing their job), however, it seems that from time to time the quality of the support tickets MAY fluctuate as you can have kind of black sheeps in mostly every situation. In my eyes the question is: What are you able to require from persons who do this kind of job for free? I don’t have a real answer for that, I just can tell you: eRepublik Labs should take care of the tickets properly, in case of problems (which of course exist), they should may increase their quality management - regardless who dealt with the ticket.

Nevertheless: They are ALL doing a great job. The discussion with Adina continued for quite some time and then, again: Daily meeting. Everybody reported what they’ve been doing, what they were focussing on during the day and what people should be aware of.

I switched over to my desk in order to take some final notes of things which could be improved - including some possible solutions. Then again, something interesting happene😛 A player found a bug and reported it via the support ticket system. The support desk directly got in touch with the developers and discussed the problem face to face. After some minutes the problem was identified and a fix was ready for release. Well.. that didn’t fit into the picture of a support which doesn’t give a single “you know what i mean”. It was nice to see how people interacted with each other in the office, not only to handle problems, but also to discuss possible new features or just to inform each other about things that are currently taking place in game.

Especially this last thing is interesting: I mean, again, you got this typical picture on your mind, nobody cares anymore, everybody just doing their stuff. No! They also discuss in game events very detailed. A country lost an important battle? An interesting article was released in the newspaper? Someone tried to steal money? Yeah, they are talking about it and to be honest: I would have never thought about it that way. I mean, I am sure they would discuss things in general from time to time but it felt different, they really took a closer look into the details, monitored battles in specific situations, extracted issues and point of views out of articles - well, it was a great experience for me.

As often: Time flies and I received a message from the support desk: The team wants to go out for lunch and asked me if I would like to join them. I mean, it’s friday, the last day of my visit - of course! We went out to a beautiful restaurant and had some funny and interesting discussions - not only about eRepublik but also about people in general. For me it was a great feeling as it also showed a huge team spirit you don’t find in every company.

After a delicious meal (again thanks to Lucia for being my translator😁) we went back to office while enjoying some funny moments in Bucharest.

Back in business I started to do a short presentation I prepared before and during the visit. Again we had a very interesting discussion about different ways to handle situations and problems that exist in game. I never got the feeling that they just tick the issues I mentioned and forget about them: Again, we discussed every single page of my presentation in order to find a way to improve those certain cases or situations. The team itself was aware about many of the problems I mentioned and they are already preparing some interesting updates to fight them (you won’t believe it, I have already seen some stuff which is literally close to release).

Afterwards we started to discuss our idea from the day before: The whole dev team was debating about it, it pros and cons, things you need to be aware of, the influence on the game - and in the end we found a first, basic solution. Even though I am not allowed to go into detail as it’s not a polished solution (and not ready for implementation yet), well: I can at least tell you that it was about politics and, in the longer run, connected to regional/local politics.
Again it was great to see how people discussed this topic and took care of pros, cons, possible problems in order to create this concept just out of a more or less simple idea.

While my phone was already ringing from time to time as Clopoyaur became more and more nervous about our small interview in the evening, I joined the first basic testing of a (hopefully) soon to be announced feature. Nothing special, just a first check if the backend is working, exceptions get triggered properly and if there’s space for possible abuse of the system.
Some problems were found but still: Nothing too special. Now it’s the job of the frontend developer to create a handy implementation. Especially that is a quite intense job, because, like we mentioned it already, if you have to describe a user interface, it’s a bad user interface. Again we had discussions about the user flow in this interface, what features players would like to see, how we could add more and more information without making everything too big - we’ll see if they took my ideas into consideration when it’s released 🙂

After some ongoing discussions Clopoyaur arrived at the scene and was welcomed by everyone who was still at the office. Again, it was quite late already but some people were still working - on a friday evening. After 30 - 45 minutes of debates about new features they’re working on, we said good bye and left the office - time to move to Clopo!

What shall I say, traffic in Bucharest can be a real pain. I’ve seen it during our short trip to the restaurant I mentioned some lines before: Cars are just blocking the streets, huge traffic jams, nowhere to move - but people are still honking! Again, for me as a german guy, this was a kind of funny experience, even though I don’t envy the people who are sitting in their cars and wait for stuff to move. However: The traffic wasn’t that hard to deal with, Clopo got us to his apartment on time and without bigger accidents 😛 😃

So, we arrived at his apartment (beautiful one by the way), I made myself comfortable, Clopo prepared his hardware, we had some snacks and then, well, the stream started. Years ago I was streaming about programming stuff on my own, so it wasn’t something completely new for me, however: I was kind of tensed - but not in a bad way.
We had a beautiful interview with some very tricky questions, while having..  “some drinks” and very tasty stuff to eat. So, at this part I would like to say thank you to Clopo for beeing such a nice host - apart from his questions in the end 😛 😃

During the interview I was also aware of the situation that people would have loved to get a very detailed insight into eRepublik Labs but for me that wasn’t an easy task. Some people now may think “omg eR admins told him to don’t tell anything about his visit on stream” but.. no. It was my decision as I needed some time to put all those pieces together into one bigger picture, but also to just process this huge load of information.

However, I really enjoyed the interview, hopefully it wasn’t that boring for you and sorry for not answering all of your questions - I hope you noticed the lack of time as we could fill a whole day with just talking about eRepublik-Deutschland.de and a even week or more by talking about eRepublik itself.

After the interview we continued with smaller discussions, I received 2 lovely T-Shirts from Clopo for my girlfriend and myself which I - again - really appreciate (and also my gf loves the shirt, maybe we get her to eRepublik somehow). Later on, Clopo brought me back to my apartment and the day was basically close to its end.

The next day, saturday, was no working day. However, to give you a few lines, Clopo picked me up at my apartment and drove me to the airport. Again we had beautiful discussions and he also showed me some parts of the city which was a great experience for me. I hope to get the chance to visit eRepublik Labs again in future, but then I will try to extend it with a short vacation in order to see some parts of this very beautiful city.

At this point, again: Thank you very much Clopo for taking care of me!



Offtopic: I am planning to start to release the articles about the problems of eRepublik tomorrow (day 3,320). One article per day in order to have some discussions. Are you okay with that?