Join the new world

You have probably noticed that since Rising came along, eRepublik is facing significant drop in active players. I'm convinced that you also had several good eFriends who left the game in the last month. What is it that makes people leave the game? And what was it that used to bring people in the game before and made them visit eRepublik every day, even to wake up in the night or early in the morning, to help in an important war or elections?
I believe that most of you would like to bring back V1, but as much as we want it, it is not realistic because of big effort and huge amount of money invested in project called Rising. We can see it was implemented too soon, too many things are changing, and even the changes seem to be made - too little too slow.
In this article I will present to you some critics, but also some ideas, and I would like you to do the same in the comments... who knows - maybe someone hears us.


- ECONOMY:
- First, I would like to say what is from my point of view big improvement compared to V1, and it is customization points. Fact that all the companies of same quality are not equal is big improvement and it brings additional twist for company managers, but also for everybody else when they go to market, they can really watch different offers and buy what they like most.

- What's wrong with the economy? Well, several things:

1. Too high productivity.

Do you have similar problem?
- Formulas are simply not well thought of and too many food/weapons are being made, for which you can't find enough buyers.
2. All raw companies are quality 1.
- This is even simplified compared to V1. You dont have to think about which quality is best for you, and customization points avoided this branch of industry.
3. From 1 and 2 follows 3, which is the fact that prices in raw sector are almost everywhere 0.02-0.03 dollars, pounds, or any other currency....

The first problem is that company owners cant lower their price 'a little bit'. Because when they see they cant sell their raw products with price of 0.03, they are forced to lower price to 0.02, which is 33% discount. And production being too high, soon they will be forced to lower prices from 0.02 to 0.01, which is 50% discount. And what after that? Well nothing, all raw products will be sold by identical price of 0.01, because you can't go lower than that....

4. Too little difference between old and new players.
- Did you know that 2 players with skill Coordinator(skill 5) produce the same amount of products as someone who is skill Guru*(skill 10)?
- And did you know that you need about 15 days to reach Coordinator skill, while you need more than a year to reach skill Guru*?

In my opinion, it is OK to reduce the differences between old and new players a little bit compared to V1, but this is way too much. One of the things that made me personally to log in eRepublik every day for the last seven months and click on 'work' and 'train' is the thought that one day I will be as strong as fib or RupeTot and make large amount of products which will give me a good salary which I would use to buy the best weapons...

- WARFARE:

1. Huge difference between Q1 and Q5 weapons, and if you stay on the battlefield without weapons, it was better for you that you never entered the battlefield. No matter how strong you are, you've got no chance of winning, not even versus new players...
Average Q1 weapon has following characteristics:
Damage: 1
Attack: 15%
Defense: 15%
Durability: 10
Now lets take a look at Q2 weapons with last 3 characteristics identical as mentioned Q1 weapon, only stronger damage:
Damage: 6
Attack: 15%
Defense: 15%
Durability: 10

From here, you can see that Q2 weapon can be 6 times stronger that Q1, so while player with a Q1 takes 15 health from the other player, the second one takes 90 from the first (assuming that they have the same skill, rank...). 🙂 I don't even want to mention what a player with Q5 weapon will do to a player with Q1 weapon, even if the second guy has much higher military skill... 🙂

2. Too low influence of military skill and rank:

- click on image for full size
This is me(Nemesis, skill 9, rank:General) with Q5 Helicopter fighting against a multy who plays eRep for one day(Rookie, skill 2, rank:Corporal), but has Q5 Tank. I've lost in this fight btw...
This is similar to the part mentioned above. In Rising it's not too important if you are a field marshall (the one thing we all dreamed to become in V1) or a general... It's all about strong weapons. Who has Q5 weapons will win, even if he's playing eRepublik for only 20 days, and the one who can't afford stronger weapon - will lose... In my opinion it's very depressive. How can a person, who can't afford 3 golds for a good helicopter, look forward to go to war, when he knows what's going to happen to him as soon as he puts his foot on the battlefield?

3. How can I fight when there are no opponents??

If one side is much stronger that the other, no matter how hard you want to try your expensive Q5 weapon, you simply can't find opponent anywhere on the map! And than if one shows up, everybody attacks him and you simply are never the one who attacks him! Even more boredom, and also training wars are obsolete because of this...


4. Tactics
Even though some people(the optimistic ones) use to say that we will have much more fun now that we have all field of hexagons instead of V1 wall, and that the tactics will be more complex and more imoprtant than ever, I'd say that they were terribly wrong.... As far as I can see there are two things in V2 tactics for the attackers:
a) If the opponent has a hospital, as soon as the assault was launched you should have prepared your army to storm to the hospital asap while the enemy is not even deployed on the battleield and after that defend the hospital to the end of the battle because it's more valuable than 3 capital cities and 4 defense systems, because whoever controls the hospital, can fight countless times...Even when he gets killed, the hospital will immediatley return him enough health so that in next turn he can redeploy, as much times as he wants.
b) Attack at the time your enemy sleeps depending of which RL time zone they are in. By this, attacker not only has adventage of sudden attack(conquering all important parts of the battlefind in the matter of minutes), but also the fact that battle lasts for 24 hours, so when the battle is ending, the vast majority of the opponents will be in their beds, sleeping and won't fight, which will attacker use and almost always win.

5. The only thing that matters is last 2 hours of the battle
Except in the cases when you desperately try to secure the hospital, it is totally unnecessary to fight 20 hours before the end of the battle, because it's all deciding in the last 2-3h, and probably even less. In V1 at any time during the battle, you could fight 5 times and you knew that your damage will count. Now, it's not the case...What's the use of me killing 3 opponents, if the battle is ending at 05:00 A.M. while my countrymen are sleeping, and than 10-20 enemy soldiers come and clear the map by themselves while nobody is there...


- POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

- ECONOMY:
While in the economy module changes can be made easily, simply by correcting formulas, first of all by reducing productivity of players, especially of those with lower skill, in military module there are more serious problems.

- WARFARE:
One of solutions that seem correct to me is to return the wall, but with some changes. If the simple V1 wall would be returned, than whats use of different military types, tanks, artillery, infrantry and air units? What's use of weapon's customization points...

For example, it could be done like this:
a) To implement four different walls: one for infrantry, one for tanks, one for artillery and one for air units...
b) The one who wins in 3 out of 4 walls - wins. Otherwise, the overtime will be played
c) Anyone can hit any wall he wants, but of course, he will do more damage on the wall for which he has higher skill.
It could look something like this:

click on image for full size
d) Weapon still has all the characteristics... Two that would remain the same are Damage - increases basic damage(but they should be using formulas from V1, where there is't huge difference between Q1 i Q2, and others too...) and Durability. The only tricky part is what to do with attack and defense. But that could also be solved in several ways... For instance, guns with higher attack should be more useful when you attack, and high defense for defending a region, they could increase critical chance when you attack or defend.... There are many different things that could be implemented in attack and defense, this is just one of them.

There are some problems that we cant remove, or even assist or help in solving them. By that I firstly think about security and frequent hackings recenty, but that is something administrators have to take care of. The thing we can do is to say what we like and what we don't like.
If you liked the article, please vote and shout, comment and tell us about your suggestions.

P.S.
I have to say I'm sorry for my bad English, I hope you could understand everything.