[Interview] SG of P.L.U.T.O

Day 3,205, 13:50 • Published in Norway Denmark • by Joshua Morriseau


1. Greetings Your Highness, can you begin by giving a little bit of background information about yourself?
Greetings, citizen. I’m Andrew, a 21 year old History student from Luxembourg, male (I get confused for a women a lot, probably because of the avatars). I absolutely love playing video games, currently I’m into Overwatch.
Musically, I like Pop-Punk, Pop-Rock, my Top 5 favorite Musicians being (from 1-5): Blink-182, Angels & Airwaves, Better Luck Next Time, Ellegarden, Avril Lavigne.
Being from Luxembourg, I speak 5 languages (German, French, English, Luxembourgish and Portugese) and if you look around the Internet you’ll find both a (very old) picture from an eRep Meeting and a bunch of videos where you can hear my voice.

2. You are currently the SG of PLUTO. Can you tell us how you came to be the SG and some of what your duties are within the alliance?
I have been the first SG of PLUTO when it all started because we lacked a leader who wanted to get stuff done. So before the election, I declared myself interim-SG and organised everything for the vote. After 2 terms I ended up passing the torch to new people but lately we have run into activity problems and I hav taken over as SG once again.

My Duties revolve around keeping the Alliance Documents alive, organising the communication between members, leading talks with other countries and alliances and making sure that PLUTO follows the orders of the Member CP’s.

3. Two pronged question here for you. Are 'space names' for alliances overdone at this point? And did PLUTO ever consider a non-space name? Come on, live a little!
Alliance Names are the hardest part of making an alliance. I was firmly against Nexus as an alliance name and proposed a bunch of other, better names to go against the trend, but sadly Nexus stuck around.

Still, I don’t have anything against space names, it appears to be the thing that most people can live with. We did consider other names but we ultimately fell on PLUTO as final name:

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4. PLUTO is a relatively small alliance in the grand scheme of things. Is your alliance actively searching for new members to join your cause?
PLUTO started as a small alliance and expanded a lot during the first few months of existance and that brought in issues. Our big Master plan was always to get more members so make it a stronger alliance but call it Faith, Stupidity or whatever but it never ended up becoming reality due to certain countries etc etc.

When Pluto started, we were 4 countries who had been working together for a few months before we even officialized the alliance, this helped us a lot because we knew we could trust and work with each other. When new members joined, we didn’t really know if they would be there for us as much as we knew with the first 4 (3 since Ireland went batshit crazy). I think currently, we are working on improving our communication and slowly approaching new countries and see how we can work with them. Once we feel comfortable enough to see them in the alliance we will certainly ask them to be part of it but for now, it is best to wait and see how well potential members can work in and with the alliance in order to avoid any future issues.

5. The last day an article from your alliance was published was Day 3,062. Does a scarce media presence signal a lack of activity from your alliance?
Yes, let me be Frank (and my name ain’t even Frank) but we are suffering from a lack of activity and communication issues which is influenced by the general decay of eRepublik and the different time-zones our members are in. It is very hard to keep an alliance like PLUTO alive if there is no-one to help or talk with. I thrive on having discussions witht he members and talking about their issues and their plans for the future so that I can adapt PLUTO to it and work to achieve said goals. I don’t want to dictate the alliance, because I feel that goes against the whole principle that PLUTO is, friends that know they can trust and rely on each other. I’d certainly wish to get more people in that actively participate in the alliance business but until then, PLUTO is mostly just day to day business ona silent basis but we have everything set-up to become active again once we see a spark, that might be the End of Summer or even just an active new member.


6. Can you tell us some of the biggest problems that your alliance is currently facing?
Activity is the biggest problem we have as I described in the previous question. The UK leaving ment that we lost a number of active people that contributed to our alliance talks and it being Summer emant that not many people show up. Due to paraguay and South Korea being in different timezones, we also have an issue on talking and communicating with them in an efficient way (especially for holding meetings). With Sumemr coming to an end, I hope activity returns, either in the form of people becoming active again or new members bringing in the enthusiams and activity that PLUTO had when we started.

7. If you could add any nation in the world right now to you PLUTO, who would you choose and why?
Personally, I would like to see the Brotherhood of Macedonia and Bulgaria being part of PLUTO. They have made huge sacrifices for Spain and this shows to us that they are able to work with us and be there for us when we need them as every PLUTO member is for their allies. I’d also love to see the UK back in PLUTO, we are certainly missing a vital part without the UK.

Other candidates would be Switzerland, Indonesia and Nigeria, though my personal relations and knowledge are not as good as Bulgaria and Macedonia. If you are willing to sacrifice your country for PLUTO / your allies, then PLUTO will sacrifice their countries for you. That’s how friendship works.

8. Asteria has been the dominant alliance in eRepublik for sometime now, however over the past year we have witnessed members leaving. What opportunities has that provided for your alliances and how have you capitalized on it?
I would hardly call Argentina and Brasil leaving an important thing. They’ve been replaced by Iran and Peru pretty easily which shows just how important Argentina and Brasil were in Asteria (Hint: not very much). I don’t think Asteria has slowed down at all, in fact it is Adriatica that has massively slowed down, which is surprising to say the least. When PLUTO was created, our main goal was to fight Asteria and be anti-Asteria but now, we are very much on good terms with Asteria due to Adriatica and their members and allies attacking us and our allies. Considering that a few months ago, Asteria was our enemy, I’d like to say thank you for helping us. Puts Asteria in a whole new light for me.

Concerning PLUTO, I think we did a good job on stabilizing ourselves, not extending to much.


9. Today we see that the days of mega alliances are coming to a close and instead replaced with smaller to medium sized alliances with there currently being 7 in total. Can you tell us what distances PLUTO from all of the others without using the words 'brotherhood' 'strong ties' 'goals' or 'mutual?'

Brotherhood, Strong Ties, Goals, mutual.

I think what makes PLUTO unique in the sense is that we started the alliance only after having had the opportunity to work together and feel ourselves. I think that gave us a lot of information on our future alliance members and if we could trust them.
The next thing we have seen is probably sacrifice. All our members have sacrificied a lot and are willing to sacrifice more in order to help our allies. That is probably what makes PLUTO so unique. If we see an ally in need, we’d spare no cost to help them as it is our duty to do it.

10. I usually wrap up my questions by asking which nation you would like to see added to eRepublik (if any at all) next however since I believe most know which country you would like to see added next I will instead ask you if you have any goals in eRepublik that you haven't ever accomplished? And if so what do you believe you need to do to accomplish them?
Well, on the 5th of September, I will have been Reigning MoFA of eBelgium for 1 year. I’d love to run with it for as long as I can since Diplomacy is the part of the game that still keeps me going. It makes me thrive to talk about stuff like this and with the activity in the alliance decreasing I feel closer and closer to not giving a damn anymore.
Another goal would be to finally become King of eBelgium, I could already have been King but I don’t want to be just yet as I have some complicated inheritance issues (My Heir is British and I don’t want to lose the Throne to the Brits). In order to become King, I’d either need my eDaughter to return from the dead or get eMarried and eAdopt a suitable Heir to take over once I am gone.
Finally, I’d love to see Belgium do sth significant. We already formed a bigger alliance, which I am very proud of. Now if we just could maybe win a war or sth 😛




Thank you to everyone for joining me on Part 2 of the Alliance SG Interview Series. Please subscribe and share with your friends! In a few days time I will roll out part 3 none other than the SG of Pacifica himself Nalaja!

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