The Economist ~ 5 simple game fixes

Day 2,305, 12:55 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,


I’m going to keep this brief. In this article are five ways the admins could improve the user experience for their customers with no actual gameplay changes and nothing which could potentially affect their profits. So really, they’re just nagging things which I’m sure annoy many of you as well.



1. Fix the borders

This is annoyance #1 for me. I remember the big fanfare surrounding the admins introducing the new “dynamic” map which was supposed to be so much better than the old. Why then do we still have the old map? Because the new one is inaccurate. There are times when borders clearly touch (such as Wales and South West England) but there is no actual border. Bukovina and Subcarpathia in Ukraine clearly do not border, yet they border in the game. There are lots of examples of this and it is just sloppy. Either fix the map, or fix the borders.



2. Get rid of popups

Seriously, the internet got fed up of popups in about 1999, and we all installed adblock plus on firefox to get rid of them. Since then, popups have plagued less honest websites. When I get popups on my phone telling me to download the latest cool game I mentally blacklist that website. So why do you insist on popups admins? The popups telling people that battles have been opened can go into the “recent events” box which used to sit where military campaigns is now. Make them red if they’re new if you like, just don’t make every login begin with me closing a load of boxes before I can see my screen.



3. Get rid of all the flashing, animated crap all over my screen

I can count several on the homepage alone, more in the “my places” section and the battlefield is a mess of glowing bouncing words and symbols. I get that these things are meant to draw attention to something, but do you really think it’s so important? eRepublik has been suffering serious performance issues of late. Although I have a good internet connection at home, if I log in on my phone at work or on the train or whatever I’m spending the majority of my data plan downloading animated rubbish that nobody could possibly want. At least make an option to disable all the fancy graphics.





4. Integrate tools and scripts into the game

From the earliest days of company calculators and IRC, out of game tools made by amateurs have made the game playable. The admins standard response is to break the official api and ban players who use those tools. But really, without stuff like eGov and the scripts (which I don’t use no fp plox) which everyone uses, we’d all be floundering blind. Is it too much to ask to look at these hugely popular scripts and integrate some of the basic features into the game? Even being able to see the current points without physically going into a battle would be nice.



5. Fix the elections page, for God’s sake.

I remember this being broken for as long as I have played, and it still hasn’t fixed. The ways in which it breaks are many, but here are a few. It doesn’t normally default to the last election. It often doesn’t load the results, or results in chicken. Choosing options from the drop down menus usually results in chicken. Trying to find any historical elections usually ends in chicken. I mean it can’t be that complicated to make the links work properly, especially after all these years.




I’ll leave it there, I’m sure many of you feel the same way I do about these failings, and all of them save 4 are pretty easy to fix. 4 is just a case of actually talking to these evil script kiddies about how to add the code into the game and some testing. Really not too hard. Feel free to copy the text or just the link into any tickets you may send.



Ciao o/


Iain