Alexis Bonte and the Fate of eRepublik
beebeam
Hey, so the other day, someone sent me this link to an article about eRepublik written by Precious Box and told me that Stillfront, the company behind it, is having a shareholder presentation on July 21st. Someone that sent me that link was like, " We should participate and present your article" That got me thinking, if we really wanna expose that issue, we gotta back it up with solid proof, right?
But then the question hit me: How the heck do we get that proof? Well, the simplest way seemed to be doing it ourselves. So, I whipped up this basic script to fetch some citizen data and planned to scan through the whole ID list. Now, I know what you're thinking—is that even legal? Well, for certain purposes, it seemed like a legit move.
The script was super simple, just asking for citizen data and grabbing stuff like "is_alive," experience points, and the ID creation date. As a test run, I started with citizen IDs 178 to 250, just to see how long it would take and if any errors popped up.
But here's the bummer: Instead of completing the task, I got this warning from Cloudflare after trying a bunch of times. So, I decided to call it quits. However, when I went to check the data I had managed to gather, some interesting things caught my eye.
Here’s the data from my first try
First off, some accounts were still labeled as "alive" even though they had been permanently banned. Like, seriously? Take ID 178, for example. It made me question what was really going on with the game's account statuses.
Then, I noticed there were accounts that seemed to be lost in the abyss. I mean, whoops! ID 218 was a prime example of that. I couldn't help but wonder how these accounts just vanished into thin air.
Now, let's talk about this citizen named Alexis Bonte. I didn't know much about him, but I found some (not-so-important) info on the eRepublik wiki. Apparently, he's the big shot behind the scenes, heavily involved in developing and running this game.
Naturally, I wanted to find out if he's still in the game or not. So, I check his newspaper to dig up some dirt. And what do you know? The last article he published was on day 3049, around March 26, 2016. That's a whole year before Stillfront even acquired eRepublik. Interesting, right?
But here's the kicker—based on the citizen data I managed to snag, Alexis Bonte's last battle participation was like two years ago, around June 15, 2021. Now, I gotta ask, where the heck is this guy now? Is he still kicking it in the game, or has he moved on to other things? Is eRepublik even alive and kicking anymore?
So, my friend, we find ourselves in a bit of a mystery. With banned accounts labeled as "alive" and the game's mastermind seemingly absent from recent activities, we're left wondering what's really going on in eRepublik. Will we ever get to the bottom of this story? Only time will tell as we navigate the twists and turns of this virtual world.
Comments
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Is this game still alive? Well, let's just say it's on life support, with players counting their fingers and toes to see if anyone's actually online.
oh no, kamu ketahuan
tutor kabur dari inspeksi cloudflare
alexis99
https://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/3470197
paramex datang pusing kabur
komeng
I have seen this not-dead issue occur to a lot of actually dead accounts, but no idea why this happens.
if they don't define those accounts as Active citizens then it's okay
In the presentation on the 21st. They'll justify their salary from the board with the excuse that "We have so many active players".
No shareholder will approve budget if they found out that a handful of people are generating a lot of revenue through multiple accounts.
Because it would show that, just one person's loss world mean a loss a revenue from multiple accounts.
And you cannot make financial models out of people using multis.
Of course you can if you know they're multies. One card spending 1000$ on 1 account is NOMINALLY the same as that card spending 100$ on each of their 10 accounts.
With pay to win bundles like erep has, 10 accounts has to be even better.
If you're analyzing raw data like spend per account you're probably not trying too hard to get useful information anyway. 😃
Lets hope for change..
ada akun belong erepublik property
In the presentation on the 21st. They'll justify their salary from the board with the excuse that "We have so many active players".
No shareholder will approve budget if they found out that a handful of people are generating a lot of revenue through multiple accounts.
Because it would show that, just one person's loss world mean a loss a revenue from multiple accounts.
And you cannot make financial models out of people using multis.
Petition to ban beebeam because leaking COO auto train script
VOTE SUB 🙂
Interesting article
Erepublik' X File revealed
Written by chat-gpt
Ban him!
Also Stillfront has to hire some goons in Indonesia
Artikel yang menarik
I was just doing something similar actually and sent a ticket last week where I asked them to explain why certain accounts had a national rank that preceded the number of citizens in the country that the citizen has citizenship in. I.e how a citizen can be alive and have a national rank of 50 000 in a country with a population of a few hundreds. No response yet.
I was also bored and looked trough all accounts created from January the first to the last of May. Roughly 300 accounts are alive (~3😵. Then I looked at the alive accounts created in January and roughly 13% had a national rank around 50 000
I think they keep accounts alive at the same rate accounts are dying, thus creating the illusion that the game has a steady player base of about 34-35k. In reality we are probably below 10k
Anybody can just search for a three letter string in the search citizen field. The return list of the string "aaa" is 200 accounts. Now look trough them and probably 195 are alive but should be dead.
There has always been a gap between "Active citizens" on society page, and real amount of active citizens, but, in eReps case, it has at least always been rooted on some form of activity metrics, there are actors far worse than that. When Stillfront acquired eRep Labs, its not like during due diligence process board members created accounts to see what information they can gather. They were given access to all data and could have seen for themselves. To be honest, eRepublik as game, with its 300-400k a year revenue(not profit), was an afterthought. Stillfront is a billion dollar company, their reason for acquiring eRep Labs was not eRepublik, but the talent and experience within the studio. Even if they missed those 10k barely active people that don't do anything, the change in valuation probably would not even cover coffee costs around their offices for a year.
I would wholeheartedly welcome updates to the game as well, so that it can be promotable to the masses again, but I do not understand what is the approach for the communication. Blowing steam on non issues like these during that meeting will most likely seem to everyone like "Just Stop Oil" fanatics throwing soup cans at art galleries or gluing themselves to the road, it is not rational form of communication.
Now, if we could get a large portion of the most active citizens(like 1000 of them), agree that they want serious changes to the game, that they are willing to give up strength and stuff like that for the possibility to make a fresh, modern version of the game that can be promotable to the masses, with things being laid out on paper how they would want to see them, then, I believe there could be a discussion, but unfortunately throwing soup cans at pieces of art and yelling "CHANGE SOMETHING" never leads to anything good. That is my unpopular, but realistic opinion about this.
If we would like to cooperate as global player base on this issue, I would like to jump aboard for trying that.
"Inside the game nobody listen to us"
- Precious Box
I agree with that statement..
I have reported a lot of bugs, but the admin just forwarded it to the developers and till today only 1 bug they have fixed. I also volunteered to be a translator but they didn't even reply to my ticket since almost 2 years ago
I think, the only way to force them is from outside the game
I agree that nothing serious can be done via the Ticket system. For suggestions and bug reports, they might as well set a standard no-reply system message as response. Articles achieve nothing as well. You are right that there needs to be communication externally, but I am not sure about the approach. I might be wrong, I might be right, kudos to you for trying, if it does not work, as I said, I would be ready to help with trying to assemble a more global effort for this. o7
"Two comments so far about the article, with ping to Bonte aswell.
https://prnt.sc/2cY1hA3xLpyo
https://twitter.com/jimkats1/status/1679131147282915330
re-tweet
If we keep reposting it outside of the game, it will reach more ears, and more investors." Jimkats1
We are all so tired, if the game is not fixed soon, we will stop playing actively.
Do you like weird stuff? Read these:
From the end of 15 January 2008 to late 29 January 2008 all the players registered in game have the ID ending with 3:
https://erepublik.tools/en/society/citizen-registration/0/2008-01-16/2008-01-16/1
There are no players with IDs ending in 0-1-2-4-5-6-7-8-9 from ID 14263 to 40233. It means the registered players are just 1/10 of the IDs in that range.
After the player 40233, the stuff changed, by there only IDs ending with 1 and 2 were avaliable:
https://erepublik.tools/en/society/citizen-registration/0/2008-01-30/2008-01-30/3
And it lasted really long, I was born in that time, and my last ID digit is the lucky 2.
I said lucky because not every ID ending with 2 became citizen, instead of the 1 that are all citizens:
https://erepublik.tools/en/society/citizen-registration/0/2008-09-08/2008-09-08/3
The strange behavoir misteriously finished on 24 September 2008, after the ID 1197982 everything seems back to normality.
To a simple spectator, it seems eRepublik reached 1 million players in less than a year by launch. But if you consider that more than 8/10 of the IDs don't exist, in a year eRepublik counted less than 40k registrations.
Why this? Big mistery of the game!
However, this is not an accusation, it's a simple statement, after my researches, I noticed Alexis Bonte knew the drill, and in effect he enjoyed the 100k players milestone in the moment when eRepublik REALLY reached 100k players, 3 April 2009:
https://alexisbonte.com/2009/04/03/erepublik-reaches-the-100000-citizens-mark/
And at that time the ID number reached was 1397015:
https://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/1397015
So the question become: where are more than 1.200.000 players?
They simply never existed.
Even the fact that they create 1 account/country for testing purpose made me think, how many account created for a year? How many they made? And how many they will made in the next years?
There are 74 countries, which mean there are 74 accounts created for testing purpose EVERYDAY
Nah, in the last months there are just 40 to 60 new accounts every day. In all world. Most of them will be "dead citizens" the month after.
interesting
hajar
sell perception with euro!!!!
I'm #57 overall strength now, in the world.
100 days ago I was #59.
Even the older/active accounts are quitting.
I have spent a lot of money in this game. All a waste.
sell perception with euro!!!!
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https://ibb.co/znTzCc5
What an excellent idea
interesting!
Hail SOS-BG!
Nice...