Join the new world

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Our conversation is progressing nicely.

Today, let us try to go beyond superficial platitudes which attract unanimous agreement because of their infinite elasticity. The President has expressed the following perfectly fine sentiment, which offers an opportunity for reflection.

“Wars don't just provide territories and resources, they also provide activity, stimulate the economy, provide True Patriot money to our troops, and bring us closer as a community. So do we want a stronger community where we all pitch in and work together or do we want a fragmented nation where everyone is only concerned with what is best for their personal interest?”

For your consideration, I thought to focus briefly on …”Wars…provide activity…bring us closer as a community…where we all pitch in and work together”

I suggest that the activity here described is not the fighting part.

Certainly not only the fighting part.

The war activity which builds community activity and engagement is talking about war, planning about war, arguing about war, learning about war, hypothesizing about war, experimenting about war, writing about war-planning, doing the math of war, creating the art about war, establishing the religion and myths about war. The fighting is almost incidental.

Two articles ago I suggested we “remember when you were there”. In 2009, and for many years subsequent, my attraction to this game lay in learning “how does it work” and “how can it be made to work” and “how can I make it work for me”. There is still a lot of that richness left in the game for new players.

If you really do want to use War as a conduit for increased new player engagement, veterans might consider being honest,forthright and talkative about how things happened, what future action vectors are available, experimenting with strategies which are radical departures from established norms. Using the recent and ongoing taxation discussion as a case study let us try to put a bit of flesh on the skeleton.

First, full disclosure: I have always liked increasing the work tax. I have always been embarrassed at the justifications provided for it. The means by which it was achieved represent lost opportunities.

eCanada needs a mission statement. Becoming a world class military strike force, an imperial presence, a super strong opponent and ally, a dominant military presence: these are not appropriate missions. Look for different vectors. Stop with the silly stuff about a Canadian Reich. Avoid the vanity of “hitting above our weight class”. Make sure new players don’t get confused about who we are. Increasing taxes in pursuit of those missions is not coherent and will not lead to increased community health or activity.


The President has an onerous and difficult job. Usually it is an exceedingly simple one, something not widely acknowledged, but we are at a transformative moment when he bears a great burden: to shepherd the community toward a new consensus of our mission. We have one of the strongest writers in the game living amongst us; we have had players who delivered innovative products; we suspect a wealth of untapped talents. It wouldn’t be outlandish to imagine eCanada’s mission as the top-tier cultural community of eRepublik, committed to defending a haven for sharing its citizens’ entertainment products. Let eSerbia be “Sparta”, we will be “Athens”, or “Urbino”. Raising taxes to defend and promote this vision, or another collective aspiration, is a conversation well worth having.

Let us pray and kind regards.