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Hello guys,

Today I want to discuss the game design and issues behind the game and explain why this game will most probably make me quit it for the 2nd time and most probably for good, unless something changes and try to cover why new players in the game are useless and cover the bad Game Design.

First I would like to go in a bit of defense of eRepublik and explain that it's completely understandable for them to be unwilling to take the risk of changing their design moto. They are a company and as such they need to pay salary, servers and cover many other expenses, so it's important for them to keep a good, stable income.

However, I would like to express my disagreement with the game design in this game and explain both to new and old players why this game only keeps me for 1 min a day to login, train > work and log off and almost never to go pass that. To cover this, I need to describe how I started and what happened.

My "eBirth" as people like to call it was Aug 13 2013, about 4 years and 9 months ago. During my first 9 months of game when I started the game was relatively new. I still remember the epic battle that resulted in the first "God of War" rank military. During this period it wasn't much different then now in regards to Economy, however at least on the military ground every single citizen counted. There were daily orders like today, but it was very coordinated in order for damage not to be wasted, because even a fresh new account a month or two old was useful. It was important. Now wars are decided by a group of 6-8 players. The discrepancy between top fighters and mid level guys like me is 1:10 000 and between people like me and completely new players is 1:10 000 making a new player completely useless to the game.

Why is that? How did this happen? Well, it's a simple mistake of Game Design. It was the lack of a wall and lack of diminishing returns. You could easily see that even in the most basic initial game. The idea of double modifiers that are multiplicative to one another. Basocally the issue comes from the infinite str with infinite ranks design. When you have a variable 1 (Str) that provides base damage on hit that you can train one time a day and has no cap and no catch up mechanic for other players, this results in endless growth for original players and endlessly makes new players less useful in battle. When you combine that with a second mechanic (rank) that also works in the exactly same way, however provides multiplicative bonus, you can immediately see a problem.

In my younger days, right after I graduated high school I worked for a Gaming company by the name of Gameloft later on following with a few others as well. In there I was able to observe many issues and managed to learn how to see problems early and I managed to see this issue of the game almost instantly. I hoped that the eRepublik team would notice that as well and consider it worthy of addressing, so I continued playing for a few more months, however 9 months in I quit the game.

This brings me directly to 2 months ago when I decided to login again and check what could have changed during those years and see if maybe they after all decided to address those mechanics and hold and behold, here I am seeing that my predictions turned out exactly right. 5-10 players per country are stronger then all other players combined. The new players are rapidly quitting. No longer is the game played by tens of thousands, while now most probably it goes around 700-1000 players. Every day I see people that are on a much greater status then me leave the game, not because of people leaving, but because even they that have played the game almost since start cannot close that gap. That made me think about leaving too multiple times, however for now I decided to stay on and think on this and how it can be resolved. Unfortunately, this article got too long for now and most people will probably not even read it, so I will continue on with a discussion in a greator detail on the different problems in the different sectors of the game (Economy,Politics,Military and Social) and address different methods on how to address them.