Where to now eRep ?

Day 1,315, 09:10 • Published in China Australia • by venja

Does anybody remember Plan C ?

It seems like a long time ago. V2 was launched on Day 960. Plan C was the virtual abandonment of forward game development just 2 months later.

Many pundits didnt like the complexity, buggyness and gold whoring of V2. They yearned for the simplicity of V1. So they did a user survey and Plato spawned Plan C.

So how has the game gone since then ?

The guts of the plan was (quoted from EI)

...Your Goals for eRepublik
Make eRepublik simpler (like V1), more intuitive and less Gold intensive!

How do we intend to deliver on these goals?

Step 1
Simplify the New World Economy and make it more efficient and accessible to new users
→ Done: manual food consumption, change productivity formula, remove professions;
→ To be done: remove happiness, time management, leisure and study, improve the adviser with daily missions or quests that serve as guidance and a reminder (remember daily tasks?).

Step 2
Improve the user experience in the first days of eRepublik and support countries to make baby booms easier by simplifying and improving the registration process, improving the eRepublik homepage and making fighting faster paced, more entertaining and easier to understand.

Step 3
Improve the military module based on learning from past mistakes as well as research and feedback from the community:
→ We will remove: turns, flash player, critical chance, tiles, many of the boosters;
→ We will keep: PvP, various types of weapons, military skills, military rank;
→ We will ad😛 speed of play, experience points, more hero medals, more free fights for every player, more intense battles.
In short we keep the good sides of Rising (yes, it did have some) and bring back what you most loved about V1.
... end quote.

The results:

Multiple food eating
More fighting (lots more)
More medals
Missions (for the sake of argument I count this as a positive as lame as they are)
No more professions
No more different weapon skills
No more hex map and flash
No more happiness score
No more time management
No more boosters for fighting or working

Along the way, EI died, cheating has prospered, adverts have been shutdown, articles severely limited, political system debased, economy burnt, money market screwed and the in game forums shutdown.

To be fair, most of Plan C was implemented but I am not so sure it was the right result.

I personally quite liked the V2 game concepts and would rather have seen the problems dealt with by fine tuning the forumlas, rebalancing the weapons, reducing gold usage in boosters and getting rid of the lousy "redeploy anywhere" rule.

I liked the different weapon types and skills, multi player PvP, different economic skills and the opportunity to follow various pursuits in the game.

While there are some good features about the current game it fairly dumbed down, still full of bugs, still encourages rampant cheating and changes seem adhoc and probably based on some loose rambling from disgruntled users.

Surely its time for Plan D.

Bring back user input to game design ideas.
Bring back beta testing.
Bring back Erepublik Insider.