A Demographic Tale of 3 eCountries

Day 3,614, 00:03 • Published in Ireland USA • by Kevin Sheridan

This article is a part of the Plato's Foundation writing contest in category [Analysis I suppose...more like casual statistics ]

When I encountered WTR promotion of a writing contest I had a sudden urge to make a brief comeback to an old hobby of mine, gathering vast amounts of data from erepublik profiles and trying to find interesting trends and (ir)regularities.

So, I decided to focus on the populations of Ireland, the USA and Croatia, the first two because they've been my playing ground and the last one, well I'm not sure...maybe I wanted to score a few points with the competition administrator.

Anyway, most if not all of Eire's population were surveyed, around 1400 eAmericans and 1200 eCroats (Plato says there are more...but I can't account for them, maybe that will be my next project). I think orgs are probably part of the Plato count.

Here are some insights in no particular order. Oh and this is a very casual, light-hearted article, so treat it accordingly...

Classic DIV/Strength Warm-Up



Well not very interesting, a recent new player surge in Croatia is evident maybe..

Want to Climb the Political Ladder? Choose Your MU Wisely

So I checked the correlation between party affiliation and CP medals (of active players) in all countries, results were not very interesting. The correlation between CP medals and MU affiliation offers a bit more.





In some countries the relationship between MUs and politics is straight forward, but even if that's not the case, dominant MUs will still sometime become a more powerful political hub than parties.....(in large part due to players with foreign political experience joining in, not all of these medals were won in one of the surveyed countries, a lot were not)

Politics of PowerPacks

I looked into the population of players currently holding a powerpack



Well Ireland as a small country has a larger proportion of PP holders...should they be happy? Doubtful, as it probably only goes to show that small countries are increasingly reliant on an ever shrinking core of power players and a very thin layer of F2P players.



It is also interesting to note that although one (at least I) would expect P2P players to be more commonly found in leading political parties, this isn't quite the case. It appears that these players can be found in large numbers in parties which are not routinely politically dominant. This is true in the USA and Ireland and to some extent in Croatia too.

The Grey Zone

All of us,every now and then, come across a profile who by all accounts should be dead, no MU no party no XP no medals, born in 2009 right? I set about mapping this phenomena.



My definition of an "undead" profile is that it was created before 2017, has no party affiliation (more than 40% of active accounts are not party affiliated) and doesn't seem to be gaining strength or XP for a long while. At least 10% of active profiles comply with this criteria...the actual number will certainly be higher because it's very hard to accurately map all or even most of these. So what are these? Multis? Lurkers who occasionally stop by? Or just a publicity trick to keep the numbers high? I'll keep tracking and share my conclusions...if I don't get tired of it.
Newbie stats

Finally let's have a look at new players, I wanted to see which country allows for more new players to gain prominence in its political system. Honestly the numbers are imo abysmal



This table illustrates how many of the (living) profiles which joined the game since 2014 (rows are year of game birth) have made it to Congress. Croatia's numbers look particularly bad, being toe to toe with little Ireland with only 3!! new congressmen in two years. I didn't even bother with a CP table.

Well that's it, maybe I'll go at it again in one month to delve deeper into the undead profiles mystery and understand where hundreds of missing profiles are hiding...but than again maybe not.

Cheers!

[The Plato Foundation]:
The Writing Contest Is On
erepublik.com/en/article/2653159
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