EI February 2009

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The New World runs more smoothly

Published on 26 February 2009 - Day 464 of the New World

Dear citizens,

February has been a good month for the New World. The war module has been restored, and warriors have had little time to rest ever since. Also, our team was inspired by all the warfare in eRepublik and managed to reach the final stage of a local laser tag tournament. Unfortunately, our football team has been on a losing streak for the whole month.

Getting back to serious matters: Do you remember the fight for Southern Great Plain? A record of 1100 online users was reached during that battle. Lately, there are consistently one thousand users logged in at the same moment, and no serious downtime has been experienced in eRepublik during the entire month. Our team has been working hard on bug fixing and scalability, and the results are starting to show. However, there is little time to celebrate. The population of the New World has increased by more than 50 percent this month, and our efforts to keep eRepublik running smoothly will continue next month.

Tactical Borders

This month we have also reviewed the regional borders in eRepublik. These borders have a great influence on military tactics, and on many occasions, the tactics used in a war proved as important as the strength of the army. Because of our great admiration for wise generals, we had to be sure that the borders are placed correctly, and allow optimal tactic possibilities.

The result of the analysis has shown that a proper connection needs to be implemented between Japan and some original regions of China, and also in the case of the original Indonesian regions that are not properly interconnected. We have also detected missing borders like in the case of "The Northwest", a region of Mexico that has only 4 borders when it should have 8 neighbors.

Next week, on day 468 of the New World, the required corrections will be presented in the "Updates" forum topic. The announced New World borders will be implemented on day 470.

Later Edit
We have listed the regions that will be connected on the 470th day of the New World - www.erepublik.com/en/forum/topic/81534/erepublik-updates/2

Regards,

The eRepublik Team

Community Coverage

Published on 21 February 2009 - Day 459 of the New World

Dear citizens,

It seems like we are witnessing the birth of New World power. Icon-Hungary.png Hungary's population increased nearly five times in the last two weeks, reaching a total of over five thousand citizens. This population boom propelled Hungary to fourth place in the New World rankings, just above Icon-Indonesia.png Indonesia.

The four thousand new Hungarian citizens certainly did not enter eRepublik quietly, as their presence was felt both in the media and on the battlefield. A new episode of the six-month war between Icon-Romania.png Romania and Hungary started today. What could have been a fierce battle, like the one two weeks ago, is no more than a joint training exercise. The Romanian President dsalageanu, and his Hungarian counterpart Quicksilver, agreed to start a friendly battle as a stimulus to the economies of their countries. More than 10,000 fights were recorded in the first eight hours of the conflict. Romania still occupies five of the seven original Hungarian regions, so it will be interesting to see how the relations between the two countries develop in the future.

Some other interesting events took place in the New World recently. Icon-Israel.png Israel and Icon-Greece.png Greece regained their independence after fighting their Icon-Turkey.png Turkish conquerors. ATLANTIS generals congratulated Israel for their achievement in this article, as they were preparing for another attempt to liberate Greece. This conflict raised tensions between PEACE alliance members and Turkey - who has announced its withdrawal from the alliance. The following day, after a hard fought battle, Turkey lost the Thrace region, which was returned under Greek control.

But it was not all about fighting in the New World. Valentine's Day was celebrated with a special contest. Citizens were invited to describe what love is to them, and the community officers had the hard task of being the jury of the contest. As they were unable to pick only one winner, they decided to award the prize to three citizens: Ananias, Matthieu Bonne and Jon Malcom. As you take a break from your daily eRepublik activities, you may read their description of love here.

Regards,

The eRepublik Team

PS: Today (day 459 of the New World) researchers have considered a planned downtime at around 9 am eRepublik time for about two hours. Thank you for your support and sorry for any inconvenience.

Citizen survey: A survey for a better New World

Published on 18 February 2009 - Day 456 of the New World

Dear citizens,

You might have noticed a new button on your homepage today, inviting you to respond to a survey that we have released. With your help, this survey will be an important step in the future development of eRepublik.

During the past months, we have received a lot of suggestions and requests for new features. The “Open letters” and “Suggestions” topics in the forum have been particularly successful in gathering lots of ideas for improving eRepublik. We would like to thank you for all the feedback that you provided.

This survey will take things one step further. Your responses to the survey will help us determine in what directions to concentrate our efforts to improve the game. It will also provide us with a lot of insight regarding the citizens of the New World: their age, their interests in eRepublik, their favorite features of the game, and so on. Additionally, it will give us information about that “something extra” they wish to see in eRepublik.

The survey consists of two sections: A page containing questions regarding yourself and your eRepublik background, and two pages with questions regarding your game experience. We kindly ask you to answer all questions, as they are all important.

As a final word of advice, we would like you not to get overexcited and expect new features to be implemented overnight. There is still a long road ahead of us, but we've already come a long way in the last months, and we couldn't have done it without your support. Our main priorities for the moment consist in solving bugs and scalability issues, as these are vital in providing a better game experience.

Please click here to take the survey. If that doesn't work, copy the following link in your address bar: www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=uDXPYCiOFxcKchztq6Hkng_3d_3d - You may complete the survey until February, 23 (day 461 of the New World).

Best regards,

The eRepublik Team

New Entity Laws

Published on 16 February 2009 - Day 454 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Starting tomorrow, day 454 of the New World, a new set of entity laws will be implemented in eRepublik. As we have previously announced, the community officers have created specific laws for organizations, companies, and parties.

Organizations can be a helpful tool for citizens, but their managers and creators should be aware that, according to the new laws, they are responsible for the actions of such entities. However, the forfeit points system will only apply to eRepublik citizens. The new laws also state that company owners and party presidents can be penalized if they select an inappropriate name or avatar for companies or parties.

The full text of the entity laws is available in the Forum and in the eRepublik Wiki. We hope that this new set of laws will help the community manage the New World more easily.

A new country joins eRepublik

The New World has greatly expanded this month as Serbia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore joined eRepublik. Next month, eRepublik will continue expanding, as Bosnia and Herzegovina will be added. This country is an important piece of the puzzle in the Balkans and it will fill the gap between the newly added Serbia and the already well established Croatia.

You can help the researchers by contributing to the documentation that is gathered for this country by sending an e-mail to bosnia.herzegovina@erepublik.com

A contest, held in the forum, invited citizens to guess the next country to be added to eRepublik. The winners of this contest are TheFico, ImHoTeP1907, carlosdn and Paradiziac. They will be awarded Icon - Gold.gif 10 GOLD for their correct prediction.

Regards,

The eRepublik Team

Be My eRepublik Valentine

Published on 13 February 2009 - Day 451 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Valentine's Day is coming, and since most of us are still trying to convince our girlfriends to play eRepublik, we want to organize something nice for them on this occasion. We are going to buy them something like flowers and chocolates (or else, things could get nasty), but what can we do in eRepublik, offer them q5 gifts? There must be more to it, something related to the essence Valentine's Day. Just have a look at the images below:

Love 1.jpg
Love 2.jpg
Love 3.jpg
Love 4.jpg
Love 5.jpg
Love 6.jpg


We are going to show that the overwhelmingly male community of eRepublik can find the answer to this difficult question: “What is love?”. Of course, all women playing eRepublik are expected to tell us what love is to them as well. After all, this contest is also dedicated to the ladies.

Post your answers tomorrow (day 452 of the New World) in this topic of the Forum. The eRepublik officers will be the jury for this contest, and they can't wait to find the most beautiful definition of love. A special prize will be given to the winner.

Thanks to Bong for creating the images above.

Happy Valentine's Day,

The eRepublik Team

eRepubliks of Serbia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore

Published on 11 February 2009 - Day 449 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Today, we are welcoming four new nations to the New World. From now on, you can visit and even decide to live in, Serbia, Malaysia, the Philippines or Singapore. While Serbia is in Europe and is connecting Croatia to Bulgaria, the other three new countries of Asia are connecting Indonesia and Thailand to the regions of China, now a part of Pakistan.

The current citizens of the New World that move to these new countries will not receive any citizen fee, as they have already received it when their citizenship was originally granted. But those that have come to the New World for the first time will receive 50 units of local currency. Depending on the country they request citizenship for, they will receive Serbian Dinar (RSD), Malaysian Ringgit (MYR), Philippine Peso (PHP) or Singapore Dollar (SGD).

All the treasuries will receive Icon - Gold.gif 1.000 GOLD and Icon - Money.png 100.000 CC. And, once the first general elections are finished, each president of the new countries will be granted access to an organization with a local currency account of Icon - Money.png 50.000 CC.

The borders of the new nations will be protected against any offensive actions until the 28th of March, in order to allow enough development time.

We welcome all Serbians, Malaysians, Filipinos and Singaporeans and we send them our best regards.

Further countries are to be added to eRepublik every month. Many citizens have participated in our contest by naming the next country that will be welcomed to the New World. All the citizens that guess the right country will be rewarded.

Regards,

The eRepublik Team

Amazing fight for Southern Great Plain

Published on 11 February 2009 - Day 449 of the New World

One of the most expected events in February was the fight for the Southern Great Plain between Hungary and Romania.

The battle lasted for 16 minutes and citizens from different countries brought their high-quality weapons and strengths in order to make a stand. More than 3500 fights had taken place during this battle. An average of 220 fights per minute shows clearly that this was one of the bloodiest conflicts that took place in the New World. Other stats show that citizens who fought in this battle managed to reach an average damage of 77.6.

A new record was reached when more than 1100 citizens were online during this event. The servers were overloaded, but even though there were some issues on the way the battle could be finished without major breakdowns.

All important statistics gathered during this battle will help us a lot in our future analysis regarding why the loading time was higher than normal. Our main challenge is to improve the server's scalability and to continue optimizing the code. The goal of these improvements is to make sure that events like this will run smoothly in the future.

Thank you all for your support and congratulations to all soldiers that fought in this battle. They will surely have an interesting story to tell to the next generations of citizens in the New World.

The eRepublik Team

Future community plans

Published on 10 February 2009 - Day 448 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The eRepublik Team is divided into several departments including: development, testing, design, football and basketball. Also, the crew in charge of keeping the community of the New World happy (community officers), is formed by members that were once citizens of eRepublik. Since March of last year, eight citizens have been recruited to the team and the journey has just begun.

What is the community department up to in the near future?

Their mission is to represent the community on behalf of the entire team and vice-versa. In order to keep a steady road to achieve this goal they have a strong relationship with the rest of the departments, this way they can confront challenges easily.

To better organize the feedback received from the New World citizens, one of their future tasks will be to provide a ticketing system, which will offer you the ability to view the status of your message, suggestion or report at any time. This is one of the next steps the community department is taking in order to continue the process of optimizing and improving the communication between the eRepublik Team and the citizens. Future projects strongly related to this process include the implementation of other communication tools such as private and public chats, and a new forum system.

Along with the development of this cool ticketing system, several administration modules are being integrated in order to have a clean and complete environment for future community moderators who will be recruited starting this summer.

Maybe one of the most challenging projects this year is translating eRepublik into other languages. For this the community officers will closely collaborate with several citizens that have expressed their will to help us bring multi-languages to the New World. The first set of languages include (but are not limited to) Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Swedish and Turkish. Further details about this complex process will be announced in the Insider articles this March.

The three major tasks stated above are just a small part of what the community officers are aiming for in the next couple of months. Other assignments that they will focus on are:

  • New contests updated on a regular basis in the eRepublik Arena and also many improvements in the contracts area. Last week a contract model concerning transferring products between citizens was added.
  • Continue expanding the idea of contracts as a foundation of the future Judicial System. The experienced members of the community will help with consultancy for this project. Tools that will be provided will keep the “power to the people” as citizens will be able to manage their own community.
  • Integrate new entity laws – Community officers have already given a lot of thought to this new set of rules and most likely the entity laws will be made public by the end of February. Thus, citizen laws will only be used for citizens and there will be specific laws for organizations, companies and parties.

Thank you all for being a member of the New World,

The eRepublik Team

Important community event
A turn of events took place in Spain, where the new president is alvoske. Complete coverage can be found in the official statement regarding this issue.

Times of War

Published on 9 February 2009 - Day 447 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Today, you had the option of starting the quiz system for the last time. Starting tomorrow, accessing Trivia will no longer be possible and temporary bonuses will be given to all citizens until the entire system will be reanalyzed.

All the citizens that will be working and training tomorrow will feel the effect of these temporary bonuses on their productivity and increase of strength.

In a previous Insider article we have explained the changes that will occur during the fights. All soldiers should be well informed on this matter. Also, they should make sure that weapons are not missing from the inventory and that wellness is at high levels.

Because on the 449th day of the New World, they could go to war. That's right, two days from now the lands of the New World will be again transformed into battlefields.

At least 3 battles will be opened on the 449th day of the New World:

  • The Resistance War of Northern Territory of Indonesia, at 0:15 eRepublik Time, will last for at least 14 hours
  • The battle of Algarve in the war of Spain versus Portugal, at 0:15 eRepublik Time, will last for at least 7 hours
  • The battle of the Southern Great Plain in the war of Hungary against Romania, at 2:15 eRepublik Time, will last until the border is secured or the administration center is conquered.

Other battles can be started on the 450th day of the New World.

Fight well, and remember Plato's words: “Only the dead have seen the end of the war “.

Regards,

The eRepublik Team

Later Edit
We need to correct the information provided. The correct facts are:
  • the Resistance War of Northern Territory of Indonesia will last for at least 7 hours since the moment it was started - 0:15 eRepublik Time
  • the battle of Algarve in the war of Spain versus Portugal will last for at least 14 hours since the moment it was started - 0:15 eRepublik Time

We are sorry for the error that occurred in the article.

Presidential election coverage – February 2009

Published on 6 February 2009 - Day 444 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The voting polls for the 15th presidential elections in eRepublik were closed a few hours ago. Here are the newly elected presidents in each country:

Not many citizens have been betting on Uncle Sam to win the US election. Those who did - David Rojas and Raikael have won Icon - Gold.gif 10 GOLD each in the forum contest.

A very tight victory was registered in Switzerland, where Dio Brando came up with 5 votes in front of the second runner.

Other tight victories have also been recorded in Belgium, Bulgaria, Ireland, Sweden and in Mexico (a single vote difference between the top two competitors).

In Mexico and France, the people have again elected giles and Papa Frantz - experienced citizens that will most likely help the development of their countries.

Do you remember this speech? Well, Grev Per is now back in the highest office in Denmark.

We would also like to give our encouragement to fariba_112008 - the runner-up in Iran - that is now going through some hard times due to its special medical conditions.

Congratulations to all the winners and thank you all for your support,

The eRepublik Team

Hot news on the Trivia Bonus and the War Module

Published on 5 February 2009 - Day 443 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The following days will be the last ones in which you might improve your in-game performances by starting the quiz system. We have taken into consideration all the requests and suggestions received over time and have decided to replace Trivia.

The first step will represent removing the quiz system option. This will be done sometime next week. Once Trivia is removed, and until another feature is implemented, working, training and fighting will be done instantly without having the option of starting or skipping Trivia.

Yes, you have read correctly. The War Module will be restored next week as well. There will be announcements concerning the exact moment that the interrupted battles will begin.

Now, removing Trivia would normally mean that its optional bonus would also be removed. But, we have decided to repay your support such that you will receive temporary bonuses for the actions of working, training and fighting (but only until another feature is implemented).

How will this temporary bonus affect your working, training and fighting abilities? While working, you will have a productivity 50% higher than when skipping Trivia. While training, however, a 100% bonus will be added to the default strength increase. This will give all of you the chance to receive a medal for the Super Soldier achievement more quickly. While fighting, a temporary bonus of 100% of your potential force will also be applied.

There is something else that all of you are probably thinking about right now. What will happen to your wellness on the battlefield? Many of you have been visiting the hospital after receiving severe wounds during the fights. Skipping the Trivia of course wasn't very safe. So, we believe you will all be glad to hear that fighting will be a lot safer for a while. Until another feature will be implemented, you will only lose 10 points of wellness for every fight you participate in.

Have fun!

Best regards from the eRepublik Team

A cleaner New World

Published on 4 February 2009 - Day 442 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Last week, after more than 18 hours of continuous investigations, the researchers managed to determine the results of the exploit that occurred the previous weekend. More than 400 citizen and organization accounts and transactions were analyzed during this process.

First of all, the researchers have determined that this weak spot has only been exploited during that weekend. The donation reports that citizens have suggested being related to this event, including Durruti and several other entities from the New World, have proven to be transactions that weren't related to the recent events. Those transactions have been carefully analyzed in the past and researchers have spent some time in the last few days to determine if the actions taken back then have been the correct ones.

After finding out about the first transaction, which was considered to be illegal due to this exploit, the researchers spent the last couple of days analyzing all the data and logs. The results started to show up as the investigation continued and in the end, all data was centralized. A large amount of Gold has been removed from entity accounts and all actions, like resistance wars or creating and upgrading companies, that were started with money obtained illegally have been cancelled.

The following actions were taken:

  • The access to the New World was permanently restricted for all citizens and organizations that used this exploit in order to create Gold (24 citizens/organizations);
  • Citizens or organizations that received and spent Gold gained through these actions also received a permanent ban (62 citizens/organizations).

Even though the whole analysis involved a large amount of work from the researchers, the consequences were fast resolved. For this, we received a lot of help from the tools that are used for detecting citizens that use unresolved system exploits.

Researchers also wanted to assure all of you that actions against such citizens will be taken in the future as well and they'll do their best in order for your journey in the New World to be as pleasant as you imagine it to be.

Later Edit
Updates regarding the war module will be posted in an Insider article tomorrow.

Thank you all for your support,

The eRepublik Team

A tribute to Wiki contributors

Published on 2 February 2009 - Day 440 of the New World

Someone (we will not name him, because he is still bitter about losing his girlfriend as a result of moderating eRepublik) had some spare time between two tasks and wrote a short list of interesting articles from the eRepublik official Wiki.

Schools and universities are important aspects of a community. In most cases, the educational system is provided by well-established structures. In some rare cases, education reaches beyond the New World. Have you heard about "Falcon University of Creative Knowledge"?

Every country has its leaders. Some do well, while others turn their country to ashes. History is the one that archives all their actions. If you want to find out how Russian leaders handled situations in eRepublik, click here.

Parties are the basic building blocks of the political scene. Party presidents are important to the members they lead. If you ask any of them to tell you what their key to success is, the intelligent ones will always point to organization or propaganda. How is your party doing things?

Studying a country involves a lot of detailed research - economy, politics, society, history, military - and few people have the patience to dig for statistics. Information is available for everyone, but a result of the time and energy given by a few dedicated historians.

A civilization achieves greatness only through culture. The culture of an individual, the culture of a group and the culture of a nation. Some citizens are rewarded with prizes, others remain anonymous. Sweden had her anonymous citizens, but it also had rewarded intellectuals.

We are reading daily debates between PEACE and ATLANTIS members. Wars exist - some for conquest, others for gaining independence. Stories about heroes will always be written and any citizen from the New World has the chance to become one of them.

We have always said that your imagination is the only limitation in the New World. The economy is an accurate domain, but not always, it seems - The Florida Commerce Bank found new ways to attract customers and two propagandists started an interesting project some time ago.

To sum it up, here's a short list of citizen pages that are informative and look pretty good:

Thanks for your support,

The eRepublik Team