EI March 2008

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We have a President on our team

Published on 27 March 2008 - Day 128 of the New World

Dear Citizens,

Starting today, we have a new member in our team. His name is Cristi Badea, also known as Cristesco, the President of Icon-Romania.png Romania (and recently e-wed). He will be our Community Manager in charge of improving communication with the Citizens of Erepublik. Basically, he will be the gateway between the Erepublik team and the community.

Today he will resign from his Party president seat and will no longer have a political affiliation to maintain neutrality.

His first challenges will be:

  • coordinating the implementation of the Erepublik Forum Moderators module. As we said in an early post, this is one of the first steps taken in order to create the future Law System administrated by the Citizens;
  • create a more efficient communication line between the community and the admin. You will have a new tool to report problems, suggestions and feedback to us;
  • coordinating the implementation of the “private forum” module, where you can discuss private issues concerning your party/company or just keep in touch with a few Erepublik friends selected by you;
  • create an official wiki for Erepublik with the community’s support;
  • keeping closer contact with the country's Presidents.

As Erepublik will continue its growth and the team will become more international we will keep trying to hire new team members from within the Erepublik community.

The War system

We can officially state that the War module will be live on the 7 April 2008 (give or take a day). We considered that it is better to allow Presidents to start wars after the 1st of April elections to avoid a precipitated World War.

We will be back with a new post and a tutorial to cover this subject in the following days

Since the war module is coming soon and countries will need more soldiers, we will give today 3 more invitations to each Citizen.

We look forward to your feedback and thank you for your support.

The Erepublik team

Overproduction solutions

Published on 21 March 2008 - Day 122 of the New World

Dear Citizens,

It's pretty clear that the Erepublik economy has an overproduction problem. This is causing a high unemployment rate in some countries and a difficult time for many companies. We've worked on it, brainstormed with some of the Erepublik Presidents and here are the immediate solutions that we have implemented:

  1. Until today we gave 5 free food units on registration to each new Citizen. Even if this helped the Citizen survive easier it also represented a negative interference with the e-market that was affecting the companies’ profits. So starting today new Citizens will no longer receive free food on registration. A new Citizen will start with the usual 50% wellness, which will allow him to survive for 10 days. During this period, he will need some money until he finds a job so we decided to impose in each country a minimum Citizen starting fee value of Icon - Money.png 5 CC in local currency.
  2. Also, many Citizens stated that Hospitals should not help in times of peace (at least until we implement a disease feature) but should help during the wars. So having a hospital will not give you extra wellness each day but will be very useful later, allowing soldiers that lost fights to come back faster onto the battlefield.
  3. Each time you will train you will lose 1 wellness point (no matter the strength level)
  4. Companies can upgrade their products to quality 4. Employees working in a Q4 company will lose 4 wellness each time they work; at the same time, the offer will be more diverse than now. The cost for the upgrade is Icon - Gold.gif 100 GOLD and you will need at least 7 employees to upgrade but the importance of wellness will increase greatly with wars. (We are also working on other ways to differentiate your products then simply price and quality).
Price of Gold

After discussing the Gold payment system with the community we saw that many Citizens were concerned that it could affect the virtual economy and give an unlimited advantage to some. We analyzed this issue and the conclusion that we reached is that a limitation would be recommended, so a Citizen will be able to buy only one pack of Icon - Gold.gif 20 GOLD per week. The price will be Flag-European Union.jpg 1 € = Icon - Gold.gif 2 GOLD. We believe that a good implementation of the gold payment system will help the economy and bring the correct amount of additional gold into the New World. Keep in mind that this solution is an intermediate one and has 3 big benefits:

  1. We can test a payment system and its impact on the game before the launch of V1 and fine tune it further.;
  2. It will create a revenue system that will start helping us cover some of the expenses and allow us to progress faster. (Donations are not a valid option and neither is advertising at this stage, merchandising we will be doing later and we don't think premium accounts are a better solution for the game).
  3. With the Icon - Gold.gif 20 GOLD per week limit, newcomers with deeper pockets can't just buy their way to Erepublik economic success or destroy the economy since gold keeps being a limited and precious resource. (Additionally, for V1 we are working on experience based limits)
First marriage in Erepublik

We are happy to announce that a new and original event took place in The New World. Cristesco, the President of Romania, married (e-married) elena.coman. Here is a complete coverage of the event.

We want to take this opportunity to thank you again for all your feedback, we are trying to create something that didn't exist before and it is not an easy task. We know that by not doing exactly what some would like us to do or by not copying what already exists we are taking a big risk. But it is impossible to please everyone in the short term and at the same time build something for the long term that can stand the test of time and be truly unique.

And by the way: we implemented the voting system for the newspaper articles. This will help the community find easier the best articles. We are expecting your feedback on this subject.

The Erepublik team

Message from Erepublik cofounder

Published on 15 March 2008 - Day 116 of the New World

Dear Citizens,

My name is George Lemnaru, one of the co-founders of Erepublik. I am also the guy that came up with the Erepublik concept which was improved over time with excellent ideas from the community, the team and the other co-founder, Alexis Bonte. Creating a "New World" with economical, political and geopolitical rules based on how things work in real life is something that I am really passionate about.

Still, the Erepublik idea has one weak point, technically speaking the project is very complex and costly... and our plan is to make it huge one day! In order to achieve that, we need to constantly improve it, fix bugs, come up with new features and allow the community to grow. Not implementing the proper revenue system would make it impossible for us to do so.

Our plan is to launch this summer a better Erepublik version (V1), with fewer bugs, better gameplay and great new features. Our team is twice as big as it was in November when we launched the beta, so as you can imagine, our costs have grown accordingly.

In practice, besides helping us fund part of the growth of Erepublik, the e-payment system will allow Citizens with less time available to still reach some of their goals. This will also increase the demand for virtual goods sold by companies in Erepublik. Combined with the new war implementation, it will resolve at least partially the overproduction problem that we have at this moment in certain countries and industries. Everyone will benefit.

We already created the system to track gold consumption and movement in Erepublik so that we can fine tune it in order to maintain the economical equilibrium of the New World.

As you know there are lots of subscription based online games. Our goal is to keep Erepublik free as much as we can so that everyone can play and that those who invest time and effort in it can do as well or better than those who prefer to buy gold to grow their Citizen. This is why we want to implement the Gold payment system in the beta phase so we can fine tune it to achieve this goal.

Again this being a beta that we are all building together, things are not set in stone. I look forward to your ideas and to discussing alternative implementing solutions with all those who want to give us feedback.

So please don't hesitate to comment on this article or send me a direct message concerning this.

Thank you,

George

LATER UPDATE: Concerning this matter, I will try to keep a constant dialogue with the Citizens using the comments of this article.

Official country alliances

Published on 14 March 2008 - Day 115 of the New World

Dear Citizens,

In the last 2 weeks, the team focused on 2 important directions:

1. The War system

There are many modifications to how we saw it a few months ago. One of the biggest changes is that there will be no paid Guardians. The Soldiers (every Citizen that is training) must first secure their regions before they try to occupy enemy territories. Some other important aspects:

  • When fighting you can lose strength;
  • When your strength reaches 0, you have lost the fight (you don't die, you are just very tired)
  • You can't enter into a fight unless your strength is higher than 0;
  • If you own a weapon of quality 1, you will automatically consume it in a fight but it will bring you extra power, the better the weapon the higher the power bonus. (Power is a mix of your strength and other variables that we will let you discover).
  • Losing a fight will make you lose 10 wellness points;
  • You can participate in several fights in the same battle for a region (as long as you have strength)
  • A battle for a region will last at least 24 hours. Only after that period of time has passed can the region be occupied or secured (once there are no more defenders or attackers)
  • A country can have soldiers fighting all over the world on enemy territories but it can't declare war or occupy territories in another country that is not its neighbour.

More complete rules will follow and we will try to make a simple tutorial when the war module goes live.

Meanwhile, the new Presidential Administration area is now live. We invite all Presidents to try the new features (Trade agreements and Mutual Protection Pacts) and let us know their feedback. Please take into account that starting from today, you can't propose or adopt more than 2 laws per day. So you should choose wisely what your top priorities are. The new features are very important to create country alliances.

Given the feedback from our last post, an additional explanation is needed here: let's say that country A has a Mutual Protection Pact with country B and another one with country C. If country B attacks country C, then country A is no longer an ally of country B and will enter war against it.

2. Buying Gold

Very shortly, Citizens will be able to buy Gold with real money. Yes, we do have a plan after all to try and pay for all those servers and red bull :o). At this moment Gold is needed when creating a company, buying an export license, upgrading a company and creating a party. Soon, Gold will also be needed when declaring war and you will also be able to buy special goodies such as temporary strength boosters with Gold. More details to follow shortly. It will still be possible to obtain Gold from invitations. Gold can also be obtained on the monetary market in exchange for local currency that is earned by playing the game and for this, we redesigned this section to make it easier to use. So you don't have to buy Gold to play, it's just one of several ways you can get it. Of course, buying Gold to create a company for example doesn't mean you’ll be able to manage it so experienced players that don't have deep pockets can still do better than players who want to progress faster and try to achieve that by buying Gold.

Please try the new monetary market and do let us know if you find any bugs. We remind you that every Citizen who finds a security breach or a hack in the system and takes advantage of it instead of reporting it to the Admin account will be permanently banned (and all his gold and local currency confiscated). This is very important to keep a fair playing field within The New World.

We look forward to your feedback and thank you for your support.

The Erepublik team

New President administration pages revealed

Published on 5 March 2008 - Day 106 of the New World

Dear Citizens,

New President administration pages

In a few days, the new President's country administration pages will be live. New features will be:

  • New design for budget administration, taxes administration, new Citizens fee;
  • The President can't submit to Congress more than 2 laws per day;
  • Trade agreements: will allow countries to sign bilateral agreements deciding a custom import tax value for their companies;
  • Mutual Protection Pacts: let's explain how it works using an example. Country A has a Mutual Protection Pact with country B. If country C attacks country B then automatically country C is at war with country A. If countries A and C had a Mutual Protection Pact then this is no longer valid as the A-B Pact has priority (mutual defence takes precedence). Entering a war because of a Mutual Protection Pact will have no Gold costs.
  • Presidents can sign Mutual Protection Pacts and Trade agreements without submitting them to Congress vote. Only the acceptance of both country Presidents will be required.
Extra invitations

Yesterday we gave 5 extra invitations to the Citizens who had run out and sent 1000 more invitations to the people on the Erepublik waiting list.

The Erepublik Team

Elections and moderators

Published on 1 March 2008 - Day 102 of the New World

Dear Citizens,

Erepublik Moderators

Next week we will start selecting and implementing the Erepublik Forum Moderators module. This is one of the first steps taken in order to create the future Law System and Police System administrated by chosen Citizens (virtual judges and policemen) in every country. We will post more details about this module on the forum and announce it again in this newspaper.

Election campaigns head titles all over Erepublik

As the first day of the month is the universal Presidential elections days, newspapers all over the New World comment this event, parties are presenting their candidates and their promises. Erepublik monitors 24 hours the events from all over the world, and prevents any attempt of electoral fraud, banning multiple accounts that voted. Therefore, all we can add is Don't forget to vote, it is your right to make a statement, to support the leader you consider best for your country.

Good news source

US News and Classifieds is a newspaper that it's interesting to read as it summarizes the top Erepublik news. It presents the most important and interesting events in Erepublik in a short paragraph allowing Citizens to access a link where they can get more details. We hope that its number of subscribers will grow.

The Erepublik Team