An Allegory. Fix the Economy.

Day 2,091, 10:23 • Published in USA Canada • by Corrigan Brown

When it was first introduced in 1974, the Rubik’s cube was a smash hit. For those who don’t know, the Rubik’s cube is a 3x3x3 cube with 6 different colors that one has to orient on the same side as the centerpiece. Lost yet? Here, let me make it more complicated. The Rubik’s cube is solved by arranging every piece into it’s start position, and then re-arranging it with algorithms (fancy math word for straight pattern that is repeated). When people first had a look at the cube, it was an immediate sell mostly because the vast majority of the international population had decided that the cube was easy to solve. They were sorely mistaken when they scrambled the puzzle for the first time and attempted to put every color on its proper side. In other words, the Rubik’s cube was popular because of a preconceived notion, and then sat on every disappointed middle-school child’s shelf because it was hard. The cube’s algorithms are fairly simple to learn and memorize, and once the mind has committed them to memory, it is practically impossible to unlearn. Erepublik, among all names one could award the website, is a computer program that is based off sets of algorithms that run through the system every time one person clicks a button. These algorithms take money or gold away from personal accounts; add influence every time someone clicks the fight button, award players with medals then add the number to their profile, change their names, etc. But unlike the Rubik’s cube, one cannot become the master of Erepublik. One can memorize the algorithms and commit them to memory, but they cannot influence them, only be prey to the preconceived rules. I think it is this realization that sends individuals from the game, besides of course, getting permanently banned.

Ever since the economic crash that occurred last year, where gold prices dropped down the drain, salaries lowered to dire minimums and weapon prices reduced below acceptable levels, many players left. The days after the crash were but a shadow in comparison to the glory days beforehand. The economy has suffered much open criticism, mostly in the form of comments on every post Erepublik has the audacity to display saying “fix the economy.” Despite all of the comments and tickets, there have not been any solutions. The simple thing to do would have been to change fixed costs like moving costs to reflect the economic situation of the time. Instead the game lingered on. During this time, new players came and went, old players left and came back and the criticism augmented, but still nothing was changed.

Now, the introduction of the work tax plagues Erepublik. For those with their heads under a rock, the work tax is a tax set for managing companies, set at rates determined by congress.

Take a new player, I recently helped one join the game. Any new players does not have any companies, does not have the means to support himself and is constantly re-adjusting to find the salary that has the highest payout every 3 days. Q7 weapons cost 11, moving costs 20 at every interval and gold costs 210, and this is all on a 20-25 currency salary. This means that all players, new and old (depending on however many companies they own) have to choose between either buying weapons, working their companies , buying gold or moving, when the initial choice was simply between weapons, gold and moving (I chose not to include food in here, it is a relatively cheap expense in sustainable amounts). Looking back at this new player, just about every day they need food in order to recover however much energy they lost working or fighting. Now, we’re telling them that they have to spend the majority of their salary on getting the food they need to work to get their salary? What is the incentive to remain a player of Erepublik if one can’t afford to do the things that are fun? (i.e. fighting). What is the incentive to play, if the game stops you from playing?

And what about MU’s? There is no structure in how an MU gets it’s weapons besides perhaps military unit funding from their respective governments. As a result most Military Units have resolved to use individual players’ companies in order to supply their fighters with tanks or moving money. The work tax now forces those players to pool their own money in order to make the weapons necessary for their individual citizens to fight in the wars started by their governments, who get the money from the work tax in the first place. So what does the government do with the extra money being sent to them by managers?

So the majority of all money to be had by citizens in any country is being taken away by government (or Erepublik, depending on how you want to look at it) and there is not a single thing anyone can do about it. Players have the choice of forking over their hard-earned cash towards a work tax that not only makes previously sustainable players unsustainable, or to leave the game. And so, the allegory of the Rubik’s cube returns. Once you’ve solved the cube, and every color in all six 3x3 grids are back where they’re supposed to be, what then? It sits on the shelf. Once one person has seen all the algorithms there are to see in Erepublik, what else is there to do if all algorithms have been seen so many times that the originality of the game is suddenly lost to you? You leave.

or

You remain. You pay the tax. You live passively and under the radar, not raising any suspicion, not raising any doubt while you endlessly live under the new rule. I predict this is how it shall be. I predict that the majority will stay, and when the currency number hits zero, the players will turn to gold. Gold that has to either be bought by currency or bought with real money. Because that’s all it is isn’t it, a ploy to force players to buy gold. To send their real money to the game because they enjoy it and want to keep any shred of recognition from the past “glory days.”

I can’t claim to have seen as many algorithms as some of the more experienced players, but I know enough to recognize an algorithm that will destroy any past images this game once had that were positive. The work tax threatens to remove all fun one can have in the game, it has certainly removed all prospect of me having any fun.


It’s time for the work tax to go.