Rewards and Bounties Spending - Daylight Robbery
Mr Woldy
Citizens!
Last month Betafoxtrot asked me to take a look at the expenditure and alternative approaches to the eUK fighting rewards system. The policy that came from that was a single fighting offering bolstered by an ‘eUBI’, but you can read more about that here.
Some of the figures I compiled and reviewed in relation to the Ground and Air reward schemes were quite surprising. As such I have spent some days compiling the data for the rewards issued between December and March, and following a tip off have also requested and reviewed the information on the eUK’s bounties/hunt the hunter/open season/DVS special reward (who even knew that one was a thing!).
The bottom line of this review is that the rewards systems and bounties are not delivering value for money, do not appear to be achieving their objectives (which I have always understood to be, supporting and encouraging fighting) and are only succeeding in moving large amounts of the eUK’s tax income to a small number of accounts. They need to be made dramatically fairer.
At no point does this article intend to criticise those who claim rewards - go for it. There’s no reason not to if they are on offer. However, this article does intend to question why the policies are the way they are and highlight how unfair the current policies are, and how many people pay for the benefit of so few.
The analysis that follows refers to the months December through to March, for the purpose of this review these are not calendar months but are aligned to the payments of rewards, i.e. they are four week periods from mid November to mid March. All references to income or taxable income are based on the eUK’s tax revenue. We return TW income and this is the bulk of our income. The low amount of money from concessions and any income from MM trading are not factored in, but they are not large enough to materially alter the findings of this report. Furthermore, as ground rewards are paid in guns I have used 80cc per unit as the price to calculate the cash equivalent of ground rewards. This is lower than the average price for the period reviewed.
Enjoy and please contribute to the discussion by commenting below.
Air and Ground rewards
The two biggest things I would draw attention to in relation to the Air and Ground rewards are that in terms of actual pay-outs they send a significant chunk of our tax-based income (over half of it) to a small group of players. Additionally, the claim-rate for rewards is not very high, which means that those who seemingly need support and encouragement are in fact missing out, whilst those who to all extents and purposes do not appear to need support and encouragement are receiving hundreds of thousands of CC a year.
This shows the allocated rewards distributed across all qualifying fighters;
As a reminder, Air Rewards is based on 6cc per kill capped at 15,000cc; and Ground Rewards is based on 5% of your kills being issued as Q7 guns capped at 125 guns (valued at 10,000cc). I do not think there should be two different schemes, I think one kills based on would suffice (see the bottom of the article for some suggestions). This does however cause a small injustice as it does mean Air kills pay more than Ground kills. This may be desirable if, in principle, people are to be pushed toward air - but I think a better principle is people play how they want and are rewarded equitably for their fighting.
The chart itself somewhat unsurprisingly shows that the most rewards go to people with the most kills, which in itself is not particularly unfair. But the size of the reward pots is where things start to go a bit wonky (there are already hints of this in the above in the steepness of the graph). But before getting to that, there is another factor to build into our understanding of how reward money is used - claiming. The next cart is as above, but shows only those who actually received their award by commenting on the relevant article.
When taking the data for December-March as a whole, 111 people (yes really!) qualified for a reward on one or both of the schemes. 52 people claimed their reward - less than half. To my mind the first question this raises is what work is going on to promote the scheme and to encourage people engage with the articles… but there is a second larger question. If the rewards programs are to encourage activity and kills, and the Government accepts the general ethos of not telling people how to play, why do we require people to comment at all? If there allocation is calculated, why not send it to them. They have done the kills just as anyone else, if they miss the article (or don’t read them) it seems punitive to not issue them a reward which is billed as being for fighting, not for commenting. Likewise a threshold to reach before getting anything is counter-intuitive.
The most-rewarded players never miss a beat on claiming their rewards, which means those players less engaged with the media or less ‘active’ generally (i.e. those who may need encouragement and support from the rewards!) get nothing, whilst the actual distribution of awards across qualifying citizens skewed more in favour of the very very active (and less in need of encouragement). This can be seen below, the top 10 fighters by reward value are allocated around one third of the reward pot (which you may say is already too high - wait until you see the numbers!) but when claiming is taken into account this grows.
So to run through what we can observe so far;
- The top 10 rewarded players have received the equivalent value (CC and Guns) of 44% of the funds spent on rewards.
- The remaining 56% is shared between 42 players.
- 49 qualifying players received nothing.
If we take this in the fiscal context of the eUK, the figures become slightly more shocking. During the period covered by these rewards, the tax-based income of the eUK was £6,425,860.00. “Not bad!” you may think, but the value of rewards received by the ten most-rewarded players in that same period was £3,439,260. Over half of our tax income went to ten players via rewards (it goes to less players when considering bounties too). I do not believe this can be justified, and is a sure sign that the rewards system as it is, is inequitable and too expensive.
So to recap where we are - the Air and Ground rewards scheme have paid over half the eUK tax income to ten players, with a further 42 players getting the rest of the reward pot and 49 qualifying players having received nothing. You might be worried about how expensive this all is - and you would be right to. Buckle in though because the worst is yet to come!
I mentioned above that of the funds spent on the scheme, 43.7% is spent on those top ten players. I have also just mentioned that those same funds sent to those same ten people was over 53% of our tax-income (53.5% to be precise). You don’t have to be Pythagoras to know that means it is costing more than our taxes bring in. The below shows the proportions of the tax income for the period, and the congress donates made to fund the schemes, which went to the top 10 players and everyone else;
Uh oh! Whilst this considers tax income alone, the total spend on both the rewards program for the period examined was £7,865,990.00. As a reminder our tax income was £6,425,860.00. - over 1.4 million pounds less than the cost of the rewards, a gap difficult to make up via MM trading, and the money that comes in via our concession agreement does not touch the sides (as it were). The rewards scheme cost 122% of the eUK’s income between December and March, and exceeded the eUK’s tax income in every month but March where we had a nice spike in import tax to save us.
You’ll also note in the above that the scheme is costing more than the donations Congress has made to the orgs which fund it. This highlights how useful it is to have dedicated orgs which Congress can donate directly to as it allows for an easy comparison of what has gone in, and what has gone out. The donation schedules approved by Congress and budget requests made by the Government don’t directly align with these reward periods, however the ‘ask’ for these reward pots is usually two donates per program a term, four in total. Taken as a whole (I can disaggregate the data for those interested) that means £6,400,000.00 was requested to fund these schemes - 99.6% of the eUK’s tax income.
So far we have seen that:
- Ten players received the equivalent of over half our tax income via the rewards scheme.
- The rewards scheme is costing more than our tax income.
- Lots of players miss out due to not commenting (or in fact don't qualify in the first place!)
Remember when I said it gets worse? The Government also runs a bounty program, whereby desired actions on the battlefield are rewarded (more or less). For the purpose of this section, I shall refer to bounties, hunt the hunter, open season, and the DVS special bounty that wingfield introduced, all simply as ‘bounties’.
For the same period covered throughout the report, December-March, the below was paid out in bounties. Do not adjust your screens, these figures are indeed in the millions.
These are staggering sums of cash - do they represent value for money? During the reporting period, £4,135,000.00 was paid across these programs. The biggest question of course is whether it is appropriate that such mind boggling sums are paid out to only five people … or if you’re being mean, just one person.
It is pretty obvious that extremely tight caps are needed on these programs to manage the cost, but also to prevent very small numbers of people benefiting disproportionately from the eUK’s income. I would actually suggest most of the programs here should be scrapped - very few people are using them and they are evidently exploitable. Hunt the hunter makes sense to me, but again needs a cap. As exciting as I am sure it was for 11ue to chase dvs39 around the country to police his medal snatching, rewarding him £800,000.00 to do it is objectively crackers and the result of poor policymaking - this particular policy seems to have flown under the radar as I cannot find any announcements in-game about how or why it came to be.
The Winners
The biggest winners (by a country mile!) are 11ue and Lucy28, who, between December and March were rewarded with £2,599,520.00 and £957,970.00 respectively. This is across Air, Ground and all the bounty programs.
This article is by no means a criticism of that, they have done well in their fighting and should get some rewards. However, the current programs distribute far too much money to the top end of the rewards table, and do not adequately support or encourage the overwhelming majority of players. In other words, they reward a small number of players a disproportionate amount of our income.
The Losers
The rest of us are the losers. When factoring in bounties, 6 million cc of the eUK’s taxes went to just five individuals between December and March. So next time you hit the work buttons before heading to the battlefield, don’t forget your clown uniform!
Suggestions for a better, fairer rewards programs
In conversation with Huey who provided me with some of the data for this article, he mentioned that he had suggested some changes back in October.
I do not think these changes will help. Fundamentally what drives the inequity across the rewards offerings is the large caps. I would strongly recommend rolling both programs into one so ground and air are paid the same. I would also strongly recommend then lowering the cap. Here’s why:
- Over the last four months the most people to hit both caps (Air and Ground) in any one month was five players.
- As such, raising caps only benefits the same tiny group of players already earning lots from rewards.
- These will add a lot to the cost, as those players hammer the battlefield!
- As such, it will also mean that the distribution of funds across the qualifying population would still dramatically favour a tiny group of players.
Instead, a single offering with a higher price-per-kill and slightly lower cap would mean that the spend across the rewarded population would be more equal, whilst still reflecting how many kills people have.
When I ran the data for Beta’s manifesto (which proposed a fighter reward of 10cc per kill, capped at £10,000.00, and a Universal package of £5,000.00 to those who earned a low amount of exp) I found that when applied to the qualifying population in January only 15 people (those at the top of the table) would be worse off. 7 of those 15 were worse off by less than 10k.
I actually thought Beta was being generous, albeit the spending there was nothing close to the spending across the bounties program. But for comparison a offering of a eUBI of £2,500.00 a month and fighting cap at £7,500.00 a month would be comparable to the spend on the current program:
However, the suggestion for UBI was that it would be paid without a claims process - i.e. automatically. So it would cost more. I suggest this approach be taken for fighter rewards because they are there to reward fighting, not commenting. The commenting is a cost saving measure (as seen above) and we should make sure the policy is running within our means rather than look for cost saving measures at the expense of our fighters. This would require a lower cap, but as mentioned, very few people hit those caps month on month!
Additionally we should challenge the thresholds needed to get any rewards. If we know people have earnt kills, why can’t we reward them? Would rewarding them not encourage them to do more? Excluding those fighting the least seems counter intuitive, they presumably would benefit from the support and encouragement at least as much as anyone else, if not more.
As such a universal, automatically paid rewards system should be what we reach for, and we should seek to distribute the reward funds more equitably across the population with a lower cap and higher pay per kill. That steep slope in the very first chart in this article should be much flatter, and we should stop funnelling funds towards a tiny number of citizens who do the most fighting (and as such get the most BH gold). We should even consider a fixed-cost approach, and paying rewards pro-rata based on a set budget. That would manage variability and escalating costs.
Lastly, I will vote yes on donations to the Ministry of Defence, Department of Munitions and Strategic Command so the government can pay its obligations this term. I will vote no from the start of next term, albeit I support their inclusion in donation schedules and the rights of others to vote how they please. However I won’t support the current programs without dramatic reform, as they appear grossly unjust and expensive to me. I will encourage my congress-colleagues to consider doing the same.
Ta!
Mr Woldy
Comments
I forgot to update the title, I now have
The fact that the rewards use our entire income PLUS some reserves, is not a good thing. And I'm pretty sure that most people are just not aware of this thanks to the extremely low amount of transparency from the Government about where money actually goes.
Personally I think rewards shouldn't be using that much tax income. At the moment we have reserves so using a bigger proportion would work, but even then it shouldn't be ALL of it.
I think the measures of lowering the cap and increasing the price would work, although seeing the data on that would be helpful.
Separate comment as it's a separate point.
Those same top 10 people are the ones who are complaining that some people suggested a practice war and said they wouldn't fight.
You're taking the vast majority of our tax income yet wouldn't spend it where those of us who have actually been elected want to spend it?
Very eye opening. If the tax money goes anywhere else but their own pocket, they wouldn’t fight for the equal, or would perhaps leave
Makes me even more proud of my decision to vote no on all congressional funding of the government.
It’s actually ridiculous.
Of course it was brought in to reward the higher fighters it is a shame to see we are now doing it at the detriment of the eUKs finances as a whole
People forget the psychological part of it. When you see that only the top people get rewarded, it doesn't really make you want to keep trying to get better. They forget it took them years to get where they are now, it's not like we can just click our fingers and be top strength.
So yeah, they have something we don't. And I respect that.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be investing in the future. We can lower the top's rewards by 10-20% while increasing the growth of the younger citizens by a larger amount. We'd see more growth which means more total damage for eUK.
It also means less players leaving when they realise they're being treated as second class citizens just for being new.
My main thought is it could definitely be distributed better across the fighting population, shave some K's off the top recipients and send it down the chain
air is payed per kills cap at 15k, nothing stopping any 1 get the max pay out other than not doing the kills.
I'm aware, I think that's too high. If it was easy to hit more people would do it 🙂
your rite its not easy or cheap, 15k dont go any were near to covering the cost.
All the more reason to get the right support to the right folks
: and punish those that put the time effort and expenses to achieve what they do?
It's not punishing anyone. Gov rewards are not a right - they are supposed to support and help people. Fairly.
There are people at a lower level, nearly stuck in terms of growth, and they're grateful for the help they get because it stops them being fully stuck.
Yet those who get even more help are so ungrateful.
@frag you've reported people 16 times for overhitting and claimed open season six times, that is literally punishing people. Distributing the rewards more evenly across the fighting population is not 👍
yea, i stop claiming that , as you say 16 times i was over hit to me getting 6 back ? wasnt working.
That's why we should put that money somewhere else 😉
[removed]
Let’s also not forget the important part.
You aren’t being rewarded for the number of kills. If that were true the rewards would be claimed more and sent out.
You’re inherently being rewarded for commenting o7 on an article
o7
noice .o?
when it comes to not enough engagement from ppl ifind it ironic that the more articles with 5 page essays get published, the more ppl will be turned off from even checking the national feed. STOP the SPAM of the NATIONAL FEED so citizens can SEE the INFORMATION that they need to SUCCEED. When it comes to the amount of money that is rewarded to the top citizens, get good
I haven't posted this on the national feed o7
who says iwas talking to you? bit defensive today arent we >.
You replied to his article, it's fair to assume you were talking to him.
I find 90% of what you comment "SPAM" but i will never tell you to stop commenting.
Not in the slightest - it doesn't look like anyone has posted it in the national feed but I will soon o7
"Get good"
The point is that it's difficult to "get good" when you're not being supported enough by the Government.
Congratulations on missing the *entire point of the article*.
Seems like it is good time to comeback to UK. I miss those days fighting with 11ue actually.
But as i said million times, hunt the hunter program should be reworked. Reward should be paid only to guys who constantly overhitting UK citizens, if battle is empty for an hour, there is no need to pay for overhitting guy who just dropped his FF there.
And for those who don't know dvs39 came to UK BECAUSE of that program, so UK gov wouldn't spend money for mine head if that program didn't exist in current version. Just imagine if there are would be dozens such dvs's? 🙂
Hunt the hunter is the good one, you get rewards for going after people sniping UK medals. Your beef was with was the bounty system, which is esentially state sanctioned stealing.
If equal distribution of UK tax income or rewards funds across our active population is your desired outcome, why the half measure?
A 1,000 both ground and air kills cap with no requirement to comment/interact with the government to receive the reward (if I've read correctly) seems a low requirement.
Why not just provide all players who earned a low amount of experience each week a pro-rata amount of UK tax income a week, say if 111 players are active they each get 10k a week, this would vary depending on our tax revenue income and number of active players. Some weeks players would get more or less.
This perfectly distribute the reward funds equally across the population.
Why set the 1,000 kill limit, which some players may still be unwilling or unable to achieve?
I know you are comparing it against the current rewards policy which provides incentives up to 2,500 kills in Air and 2,5000 in Ground in order to reward those most active in growing their aircraft and military rank and in theory should provide encouragement to others to try and reach these targets. Appreciate some of the feedback that these target seem unachievable for some of our citizens.
However I'm just genuinely interested why keep a "guise" of rewarding for our fighters and pilots for their activity and not just perfectly distribute the reward funds equally across the population. What makes a 1,000 kill cap optimal for UK players and any longer term UK player development strategy?
Also a side question in your view would we still have a minimum kill count to qualify for the scheme? (i.e. currently it's 300 kill on the ground and 100 kills in the air?)
*2,500 in Ground (Sorry typo!)
I shall break the reply down into bullet points - let me know if I have missed any thing :
- the reason I am not doing any of it because I am not the president 😛
- I don't think distributing the eUK's income between everyone equally is a good idea and this article doesn't ask for that
- I have suggested here that minimum entry requirements and commenting for rewards both be scrapped, they serve no purpose (except to facilitate huge sums of money going to 10 people)
- There's no guise, this is all about rewarding fighting but doing so in a way which isn't giving huge sums of our cash to a tiny slither of people. The eUBI proposal was/is a universal payment that would reward anyone who earned 4+ exp, you can read more about it here :
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2777221/1/20
I think the question on long term strategy is more interesting if you try to answer it about the current schemes. Bleeding the eUK dry for a small group of people whom also disproportionately benefit from BH gold (and some of whom have said they may not even fight if a war started) does not sound like a good long term strategy. Encouraging fighters more equitably across all divisions would go further in keeping people engaged at lower divisions and rewarding the efforts of a wider cross section of society - removing eligibility criteria would encourage more people to fight harder. I'd even suggest premiums could be added to reward MU coordination but that sort of thing is being discussed elsewhere.
Thanks for the reply
So your preference is all fighters / players to receive between 5k to 15k weekly support in the form of player rewards* instead of the 0k to 30k range of weekly support for all fighters / players currently offered*
(*excluding new player schemes, national giveaways, bounty schemes such as hunt the hunter and the possible introduction to initiatives to better support Military Units)
You feel this would keep players engaged more at lower divisions.
I'm still somewhat missing where the incentive for players to really push their own account development comes which is the basis of the current strategy from however I do have a better insight into your suggestions o/
I wouldn't be tied down to any view before having a look at the data. But what is really obvious is ten players getting over half the national income is, in my view, quite rotten. Do you think it is justifiable?
- Bounty system works perfectly fine. it was enacted to enforce the UK policy that medals in UK TWs are for UK players and their TW partners and to discourage 3rd party buggers from farming in UK TWs..Almost all countries have the same rules for TWs.
It`s not the fault of those who receive the bounties that they cash in most of the money. It`s fault of the lazy players that they don`t receive anything. If they`d help those few bounty hunters in keeping clean our TWs the funds would be distributed more evenly.
And by the way, the bounties often not even cover the expenses of the bounty hunters.
It rather seems that you want to take the money away from those who actually do something and help the gov to enforce its policies and instead give the funds to some lazy cunts sitting at home doing nothing. That`s quite hilarious.
You heard it here first folks, all but five of us are lazy
Most people don't spend all day on eRep because they have a job and a life. Rather than being a lazy cunt sitting at home playing eRepublik all day.
Pretty sad bro. Get a life.
Guys give KA ZETRO a break. It's hard work running all the multis he has.
😃
I was gonna inb4TRSdogpile but here we are
How many of you silly sods can actually enforce bounties?
The meta bounties are meta enforced by only 5-10 people and they receive a disproportionate chunk of the treasury for doing so
Don't call the vast majority of the eUK lazy cunts, and you won't get called out for it.
I’d argue you’re the lazy one who clearly has nothing to do all day but play erep.
Now look at all those barkings dogs. Seems my comment is 100% correct and fits perfectly. How many of those silly spammers do enforce a gov policy? Oh, wait. You can`t. You don`t have any weight on the battlefield.
Did you buy this account after SYS was banned or were you operating them simultaneously? Because if the former then boasting about battlefield prowess is not that impressive
Why should we be enforcing Gov policies? That's the job of... wait for it... the Gov.
Woldy, even with SYS I could outgun every spammer in air.
If you pm me the names of your other accounts I can aggregate them into one column for you and we can see if you climb up the table
My view is that known multis like yourself should be banned from any eUK rewards anyway