The Nameless Plague...

Day 4,142, 17:41 • Published in Netherlands Poland • by Gwom


My dear fellow eDutchmen,

I have made a strange and potentially harmful discovery today that I would like to share with you. I'll try to explain how I discovered it and what I are the consequences for us as an eCountry in this article. If you don't feel like reading the whole story, there is a summary at the end.

The Discovery
I noticed a small strange detail a time ago in my MU feed, but at the time I did not decide to investigate it further. I saw that an increasingly amount of people who joined my MU had no name (or well, they have this default eRepublik name 'Citizen NUMBER'). But eNL had recently been trough a surge of activity so I was not alarmed yet by these new people.
However, today I discovered that there is a tool again to track new players. I used a similar tool in the past to track activity of new players and send them the welcome message personally as Minister of Education. So I thought lets pick up this project again to see how our new players are doing. And then I noticed the 'nameless plague' that has entered our country.

The Plague
It appears that in the first week of March alone 18 of these Citizen NUMBERs have joined eNL. In comparisson, when I was tracking the birth rates it was normal that 16 new people joined eNL in a whole month, of which on average 1 per month was a Citizen NUMBER. I played around a bit with the dates and it seems that every week tens of these nameless players join eNL! It is a good thing to get a lot of new players right? But I found it very suspicious that so many nameless players appeared out of nowhere. Since I knew that this wasn't the case in the past, I tracked down the date when it all began, which is the 22nd of November 2018. Nothing special in my eyes? Maybe one of you know any special events linked to this date?
Even worse, we are not alone! I checked other eCountries as well and they have the same phenomenon starting around the 22nd of November! It varies between countries, where some receive only 5 of these Citizen NUMBERs per week and others up to 20 or 30!

So what is the harm in this phenomenon? I personally think that is is really suspicious to see such an increase in new players all around the eWorld starting from the same date. And the fact that all these new players don't take the effort to enter a name doesn't make it better.

Summary
So to wrap it up real short: An incredibly huge number of new players have been joining eNL and other countries from the 22nd of November 2018 that don't bother with entering a name for their account. I have no cause or consequences yet, but I think it is highly disturbing. If anyone has an explanation please share it with me.

Kind regards,