The Economist ~ Coda I
Spite313
Dear friends,
Last night I landed in the UK after returning from RL Romania, a trip I’ve wanted to make for over five years. Whilst I was there I thought a little about the game, as the date of my last login (18/12/2014) approaches. It really was one of the most novel ideas, and revolutionary products in the history of MMOs. I remember at one point we worked out that a significant percentage of the population of some countries have played this game. Something like 2-3% of the population of Serbia have logged in at some point statistically, for example.
The concept is still a great one, but the major problem is that the game has no opportunities for new players anymore, catering as it does to existing older gold buyers. A few months ago we were asked by the admins whether or not we’d play a second server if one was introduced. At the time I was strongly opposed to this, as in my eyes it would divide the community and leave most older players here alone. Now, from near the grave, I’ve changed my mind.
When a change is embraced by everyone except the oldest players, that change is a good one. The purpose of the game shouldn’t be simply to continue to extend the lead of a minority, it should be to be dynamic and changing. Look at the top levels of government, alliance leadership and MU leadership and you see a lot of old souls. People like myself who have played for years, or younger players who have bought old accounts.
This is simply because retention in the game is so poor. New players have nothing to play for, and it’s something everyone involved in the game at any level is aware of. A second server, reset to base, would provide the opportunity for renewal, allowing new players to start afresh. What’s more, with eRepublik’s vast previous membership, they can contact old players to let them know about the refresh. I’d guess a lot would come back to give it a go. I’d be surprised if the active number of players didn’t double.
The main opposition to this is that old players, namely “customers”, have spent a lot of money getting where they are in eRepublik and if they left the game would lose revenue. There are two responses to this as I see it:
Firstly a refresh wouldn’t necessarily kill revenue. Many new players who are potential gold buyers join every day. That’s why there’s such a brisk trade in buying accounts, because these gold buyers want to have a strong account to make it worth it. With a new game these players would have a chance to be in the lead from day 1. Older players advantage on the battlefield is significant now, but still a 100k strength tank will always do more than a 100k strength non-tank. So their advantage in that regard will be unchanged.
Secondly, eRepublik 2 or whatever the second server is called shouldn’t be a carbon copy of the game as it exists now. If the game is sufficiently different, then it will be possible to get enjoyment from playing both games. There are key concepts which must stay the same: real life countries, media, political elements and economic ones. A battle module of some sort. Those are very broad parameters however. A lot can be done within those kind of boundaries.
A small, talented team could build a game like this in half a year, with minimal direction. At present, eRepublik’s team have to spend a disproportionate amount of time managing the existing game. With the kind of customer base we have here, doing so is a massive job. Problems rise left right and centre- as we all know. Most of the time the team is fixing problems rather than anticipating them, and there is certainly no time to code a new game. That’s why it needs to be an entirely new project, with a team separate from the main eRep team. They can be merged later when the new server launches.
It’s the kind of thing that might even tempt me back.
Just a thought
Iain
Comments
You need to come back and be the scumbag this game badly craves for. Your UK and myself are waiting for your return evil Overlord.
Really good article,... for a change.
2 hours and just 15 votes. on on of your articles..
Hmm.. game is truly dying.
Anyway, glad to read you again. o/
Why a new server bad idea?
Reasons:
1,Forum voting about new server:
Do you want a new eRepublik server?
Yes (255 votes [30.91%] )
Voted No (570 votes [69.09%] )
69,09% against the new server.
Most of old players said they are insta quit if new server opened.
Although I am a new but I also would quit,there is no pint playing a game where your achivments get resetted every 2 year with a new server
2,Who would join to old server after a new one opened?There is only d4 going to be left, everyone else will start from scratch
3,It would create more problems than solve
4,Didnt a miserable copy of erepublik tried this move a lost almost every player?I heard only 10% playing from original players there
5,New server will destroy the strongest element of eRepublik - the community.
I agree.
I don't disagree with you that something needs to be done to bring new players up to speed, but if you look at a (not dissimilar example) with eSim, when they split the server they basically killed the game.
I think splitting eRep would be the death of it.
Game will be dead within 1 year. Fact.
Perhaps. With "92,508" accounts at the moment and given the current loss rate of 30% it will be down to somewhere around 60k in a year. We aren't seeing the spike in new accounts during the summer anymore (at least in the eUS) so it doesn't look like there's anything to reverse that trend, but I'm not sure at which point the minimum viable community will have dwindled to the point where they can't keep the lights on anymore.
tl;dr a year seems a bit too fast I think. They probably have a bit more time than that.
[removed]
That's certainly true with eSim - 1 was good, 2 was ok and didn't bother with 3
Like Oblige said, splitting eRep would kill it.
Divisions based on strength would solve the problems new players face. The current system is even worse than the old one. Now there are super-strong players in every division. A new player comes and sees that his full health bar worth of hits inflict less damage than one kill of a player who spent years two-clicking to save XP. How boring!
That combined with allocating more points to Divs 2 and 3 seems reasonable.
This could make people stop at i.e. 2999/3000 to stay in their div.
It could be cool only with big surge of new players and good ballanced BH rewards, where some poeple would stay in D1 at 2999/3000 str making gold for their secound "jump" to D2 etc., when richer players would get to D2/D3 14999/15000 faster so they could have bigger impact of the battle (since D2/D3 gives more points, theyre are (should be) less people and they get bigger rewards from BH, get more rank points etc.)
This could make people never advance to D4 (or whatever biggest division would be), so you would need some special rules for it ( V1 style of slower str addition the more str you have [d4 only rule] could do the job, tho it shouldn't end lineary too quick like it did in V1 ).
With modified training grounds and contracts removed or revamped this could be ok (along with making few more changes to economy, actually smart Q8 that wouldnt just overwrite Q7, or rescalling/buffing Q1-Q6, tying land back to region, bringing back country monies and minor changes to how wars/NEs works).
Sold account nothing to see here
I won't sell my account, I just changed the name as I'm leaving soon, and it's my real name
No reason for Spite to travel to Bucharest. So, Iain, how did you find the place?
It was amazing
The game has a structural problem that got be fixed. Gaining XP is bad for your account unless you are in division 4.
Without first fixing that there is no point in making a new server.
That said, it surely COULD be fun to have a new server where the nations had a similar number of regions and without so much pay to win
Well it's too late now I think.
I feel that game need another V 3 only to get back to V 1.75 with re-scaled STR and few minor modifications (old companies plox, mby some kind of gold and companies re-scaling, str re-scaling, basically opportunity for "new start" by soft - restarting the game just like V2 did it (tho it killed many players, but I feel that rescaling the str. wasnt the main reason of player retention) and other changes).
BTW: When you wrote about possible combacks of many players, I came up with the idea of bringing players back via giving them some kind of the baseline strenght based on their register date (and maybe time they were active if admins posses such infos?).
I agree that restarting the game (or creating the 2nd server) without any changes would be quite bad. We need both mechanical and society changes (moar playerz!) to not only break the stagnation (but again, lets not do another shapeless V2!).
I feel that to the some extend we need to come back to V1 features like wars that cost monies, gifts that force players interact, companies tied to ground to make political/global events shape economy, not the "events", str and item revamp (str rescale, div HARD rescale, item "Q7-not-the-best" rescale), companies/productivity rescale (maybe actual gold rescale? or adding "1 platinium = 1000 gold" and Q8's? There are already so many WQ7 in game that making changes could be hard).
I feel that using WQ7 once per 6 months was cool for the players, but reducing productivity by 10 and forcing them to change habits and make people with lvl 50-70 fight on the daily basis with WQ3-WQ5 could starts the riots 😛 Adding WQ8 could start them too xP
I believe that its impossible to change systems without upseting the players in some way. If you add WQ8 - you will upset some of them that remember the promises about Q7 as last Q. If you reduce the productivity of companies you will hurt the people with "lets fight with best weapon in any battle and go to bed". If you re-scale STR that people with 3 months and enough monies would catch them in STR - you would upset them.
In theory we could try to continue BS that admins served us so far by adding new stuff that would increase the numbers without breaking the promises.
Need to give players something to spend gold on? (suck gold off)
Need to make new players gain str faster?
Need to make people use even more WQ7 so prices (increase demand for WQ7)?
You cant do this by adding Q5 to training grounds (cause SS) or WQ8 (cause "last Q")?
Make houses increase health refill by huge margin, add fifth type of training ground that would be more costfull (it could be building cost, upgrade cost or simply daily train cost) with decent gold/str ratio so new players could use it to boost their str fast too).
Something like House Q4 +10hp House Q5 +20 House Q6 +30 House Q7 +50 hp/6min and even bigger health pools, and training grounds that cost - lets say - 500 gold to unlock, 5-8 daily cost and 30 str at Q1.
Actually, even adding multiple trains in old training grounds could be good (like "you can train 2nd time in facility of your choice!"**😉. It would make new players be able to train two times in free one boosting their progress, and make richer players train 2 times in their 1,79 boosting their str, and eating more gold from them. You could make "you can train 3 times in facility of your choice for 200g forever!" or like contracts "you can train 3 times in facility of your choice for 10 gold for next 30 days!" so newbs would train 3 times in free one and gain more monies (free on Q4 gives you 20 daily = 600 monthly = over 10 gold), when rich players would both gain str faster (and catch old players faster) and spend more money (the richest would do 3x 1,79, so they will spend extra 2*1,79= 3,58 - 1,6g from SS = 2 gold more daily. Not all players could afford it, but thats the frecking point. We have to sucks gold from the game somehow. Nowadays almost every player "produces" more gold than he uses. With 4/4/4/4 + HW you need only ~0,05 gold daily from other sources - when having ton of ways to "produce" gold - TPs, FFs, Mercs, BHs. Players with tons of gold dick around building more and more WQ7 (even if it doesnt bring much money, what are they supposed to do with it?), buy energy bars and stuff.
***-50% or -90% contracts shouldnt change price for extra trains, you could make some kind of BS that this extra trains are actually done in private centrum, and arent done with Lana so contracts doesnt affect them etc.
In V1 gold was ated by... wars. Wars could eat all the gold in the game. The more gold was in game, the more battles there were. Fact that cost of wars was based on number of players (and fact how MPPs worked) made world stabilise at some points, but this - and Health Packs - was way to suck gold from the game. Players were supposed to fight themself cause of their reasons (like fighting with your nemesis, breaking the super stronghold etc.), not cause of events and stuff. With defender's adventage (MPPs, cut-offs and wall based on DS/players in region) this made people always had dreams like "lets conquer this bastion" or "lets get and secure high resoruce in X", where even in 60-40 influence splits these attack would mean massive risk (massive fun!) and tons of gold burning.
In early V1.5 people was building they training facilities, first WQ7 and stuff. Gold was sucked this way. Now we got TP FF and Mercs, and nothing to spend on except energy bars. Cause of their price, and fact that we get so many of EBs from events (and fact that battles doesnt matter ) people ignore it, create more WQ7 and make economy die. Too much goldz. In theory houses and AS were supposed to change a bit but with no hp refills and no important battles (in the long run) they both failed. Change that made some of the monies from conquered lands come to country CT was actually quite cool, COs were quite cool too.
heck, in notepad it wasnt so long 😛
Dodaj parę przypisów i można bronić jako pracę magisterską.
eRep is dead - and actualy it would be funny (I bet specially oldfags reaction) when all accounts would have been restarted to 0.
I guess the biggest problem was that the game had great ideas behind it but investors noticed that there was a glitch in the system :it won't provide a lot of money ,the game was built as a game and not as a money maker .
I guess the decision was to move the experience from ER including resources into building new games which have from the beginning the money making "feature" into their DNA.
3 player agreed with new server idea and thats being generous.
Players already said they dont want a new server with 69 % against it,thats majority in better places
NO TO NEW SERVER!
My only hope is that someone buys ereplabs, boot out this incompetent team of admins and make a really improvement in the game.
With one fraction of the money they spent developing that pile of shit so called "tactical heroes" they would have fixed the game.
MEOW my friend 🙂
U'll never be forgotten ♥
I'm reading this many days after it's written and your idea is great.