EI May 2009

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Several eRepublik updates

Published on 28 May 2009 - Day 555 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The Icon-Spain.png Spanish translation process just entered the final phase. Our team is preparing for the release on Wednesday and is setting up the final details, especially the technical ones. We know that there are many of you who have friends that you would like to play eRepublik with, but their level of English keeps them away from the New World. This will be the first step in allowing these citizens to have an eRepublik experience as well.

Shortly after this release, another update will install several improvements to the ticketing system. Also, a group of private moderators will join our team next week as we will begin testing home-based moderator positions. This is the first step in expanding our team with members from all over the world, which will greatly improve the quality of support services offered by our community department to the citizens of the New World. We'll keep you posted on the development of this project in future Insider articles.

Our researchers have started working on finding a new forum platform that will replace the existing one. Along with new features, this forum platform will also provide new positions within our team as forum moderators. Citizens interested in such positions will be able to apply for a place in our team within the next two months. Stay tuned for more information!

We have concluded that some of the regions in the New World require better names. This is due to the fact that many regions have similar names, which has led to some rather confusing situations. We would also like for the regions to have representative names for the area they cover, and for the country they belong to. For example, think of the way Bavaria or Transylvania are representative of their countries. For more details regarding the renaming of the regions, and how you can suggest a new name, please visit this forum topic.

The division of the raw materials in eRepublik has been scheduled to be reviewed in two months. If you have any documentation regarding resource distribution, please send it to raw.materials@erepublik.com. We are also looking forward to hearing your suggestions about the next country or set of countries that will become part of the New World. If you've got a good argument, visit this forum topic.

A few members of the eRepublik Team will be in the San Francisco Bay Area during the week of June 22nd. Our marketing manager is particularly looking forward to this meeting, as she is a US citizen herself. If any eRepublikans happen to reside in or around the area, and would like to meet up, please let her know at san-francisco-meeting@erepublik.com.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team

Say “Hola” to the Spanish version!

Published on 26 May 2009 - Day 553 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The process of translating eRepublik into Spanish is nearly complete. The release of the Spanish version will take place on June 3rd, and it will only be the first step in providing eRepublik in multiple languages.

Like any first step, this was the hardest one to make. Lots of technical modifications were done in order to create a “backbone” that will support all future translations of eRepublik. We are very enthusiastic about reaching the end of this process, and we will be waiting for your feedback on the Spanish version of the interface. We will create a new subject in the contact form, named “Contacto Español” (Spanish contact), especially for this event. If you find mistakes of any kind, bugs, misspellings, or even bad choices of words, we would be glad to receive your corrections. However, please be advised that our community department is not offering support in Spanish yet. This contact form subject is the only one where, for a limited time, you may address our team in Spanish. For all the other contact subjects, please use English.

Our translation team was helped by several Spanish citizens, so we would like to send special thanks to Allyenna, Zhuge Liang, and Sabi2 for their support in translating eRepublik. This was no easy task, as there are thousands of unique text lines in eRepublik. Only reading them could take hours!

The next set of languages that will become available in eRepublik has not yet been established, but could contain French, Portuguese, German, and Russian. What is certain is that the Spanish version will bring more of the 330 million people who are native Spanish speakers into the New World. This will especially aid in boosting the population of South America, as on June 10th, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, and Uruguay will join eRepublik.

And finally, we will sign off as usual, but in Spanish:

Saludos,
El Equipo de eRepublik

Later Edit:
The Spanish version will be released on June 10th. The launch date has been delayed for one week so that the Spanish interface can be deployed on the eRepublik servers along with some high priority patches and bug fixes that will enhance the security of currency and item transactions.

Citizenship brainstorming session

Published on 19 May 2009 - Day 546 of the New World

Dear citizens,

We would like to announce that our team will soon begin developing the highly requested citizenship module. Currently, eRepublik citizens are free to move to any country and participate in the political life of that country. Also, there is nothing binding a citizen to his or her real life country, nor to a New World country. This means that smaller nations can easily become a minority on the political stage of their very own country. Adding the module is a great idea in theory, but it brings up a few questions: Should this module remove the overwhelming advantage of large nations over smaller ones, or should it provide certain tools that allow small communities to put up a fight against large groups of oppressors? Should it also provide citizens with a sense of nationality?

It can probably be useful to remember the controversy started by the first political takeovers that took place in eRepublik, in which highly organized groups of citizens, led by experienced leaders, would travel to smaller countries and gain control over them by winning the elections. Some citizens claimed that these were shameful and cowardly tactics, while others saw them as intriguing new possibilities offered by the game mechanics. The keyword of the debate was “fairness,” as it was argued that it was not fair for a group of “mercenaries” to take away a nation’s right to rule their own country. It should also be considered how much of this talk was propaganda, and how much was real concern toward the lack of defense of small nations against larger ones.

Scientists have carefully analyzed the issues that could be solved by the citizenship module. They have also considered what other improvements the citizenship module could bring to the game, and how to achieve this without creating other potential problems in the game mechanics.

The beginning session of the actual module development should consist of: setting up the final details and implementation plan, making the design changes that will be visible from the front end of the website, start coding the module, testing it, and integrating everything in eRepublik. But before scientists start working on this and creating the technical specs, we are interested to hear how you think the citizenship module should work. We don't want to influence your opinions, so we are not going to release all the details discussed in the internal brainstorming sessions. However, we can say that it is nothing close to being as simple as one of the suggested solutions: Require a citizen to live in a country for a predefined number of days before an election, in order to be able to vote in the elections.

You can be as creative as you wish, as the most important aspect of this module is its potential for improving the game, and not how easy it is to implement. If you would like to join the brainstorming session regarding the citizenship module, visit this forum topic.

Jammu and Kashmir changes original owner

Based on the feedback of a citizen, we have analyzed the status of Jammu and Kashmir and reached the conclusion that this eRepublik region should belong to India. This country will become the original owner of Jammu and Kashmir starting tomorrow, 0:00 eRepublik time. The current original owner of this region is Pakistan, but it is currently occupied by China. This will not modify the current owner of the region, only the original owner, and will give Indians the option of starting a resistance war in Jammu and Kashmir.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team

The battles on the 541st day of eRepublik

Published on 14 May 2009 - Day 541 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The New World order might change as three regions were lost by Romania in one single day.

The Romanian soldiers fought bravely on five different battlefields: against Hungary in Donbas and Podolia and against Indonesia in West Siberian Region and 2 other regions.

The West Siberian Region battle was by far one of the most intense ones in the history of the New World. With an average of over 2100 citizens online during the entire day, the battle lasted much more than the usual 24 hours, with thousands of casualties from both sides. Even though the total damage done by Indonesia was decreased by more than 200.000 units during the day as a result of a thorough investigation, the attackers proved to be a greater power than Romania could resist this time. They kept the defenders in the City or in the Administration Center for many hours during the battle, and after 24 hours the Romanians could not push back the battle line.

A separate war was fought by some Romanian citizens that, in order to find a parallel method to win the battles, made pressured they will quit the game if the war wouldn't be stopped by the scientists of the New World. Our position is that those kinds of actions will never help a country win a battle.

In conclusion, no citizen can influence our decisions and intimidation actions will not be addressed in any way. Our goal is to make sure that every battle occurs correctly and we would appreciate it if you will always express your doubts and reports using the contact form (we know we have an issue regarding the answering time and that is why we are hiring new members – see the new positions available in the team.)

Congratulations to all attackers, especially to the Indonesians who won a rich region holding large amounts of resources. We also send our respect to the brave Romanian soldiers who fought today.

Future challenges

If we are talking about war, we just want to announce that while our engineers are working on different modules (code improvements, debugging, citizen ads and citizenship) we are already starting to analyze the concept of the next war module that will include Player versus Player and more tactics.

Thank you all for your support throughout the day,

The eRepublik Team

LATER EDIT: We kindly ask you to post your comments in English.

Investigation Day

Published on 14 May 2009 - Day 541 of the New World

Today the admins and the testers focused almost 100% on checking the correctness of the way that the current wars are fought. Besides small details on other battles, the main issues appeared when checking the battle for the West Siberia Region. We checked separately: the gold spent in this war, the possible fakes and the weapons used. Our conclusions are:

  • one user is under investigation for using the Gold exploit in March;
  • besides finding a big farm of fake babies in Romania that haven't yet reached the fighting age we haven't found any major problems with fake citizens fighting. The damage dealt in active battles by accounts that are permanently banned for being fake accounts is automatically removed.
  • we found on the attacking side the proof that a big amount of Q5 weapons were used from the product exploits that appeared last week (and already fixed). The total damage influenced by these weapons, for this battle, was 220.183 units

Following this investigation, we immediately banned the entities who used the exploit and temporarily banned other organizations for further investigations. The value of the wall will be corrected by adding 220.183 units. As there are still Q5 weapons created artificially in two other countries (not involved in this war), in the next 48 hours we will investigate them and apply the necessary measures so that the people doing these cheats get a strong message that is not wanted in eRepublik.

A really big THANK YOU to the people that helped us during this investigation as they understand that we are still a small team and we need to administrate and develop a big project as eRepublik. We really appreciate all the help and is clear that eRepublik is much better with you.

Discussions about this topic will take place here.

Maintenance work

Today, on day 541 of the New World, a set of improvements will be done to the infrastructure of the data center by changing several routers, a process done by our hosting company.
During the 14:00 – 19:00 eRepublik time, some citizens might encounter some loading issues plus a 30-minute downtime around 17:00 eRepublik time. The loading time was highly improved during the last months due to constant work of maintenance and the addition of new servers. Also, code optimization processes played an important role in these improvements as this was our engineers' main focus in the last months.

Thank you for your support,

The eRepublik Team

Hungarian speaking citizen wanted

Published on 11 May 2009 - Day 538 of the New World

Have you ever considered joining the eRepublik Team?

In order to increase our international team, we are looking for a highly motivated, organized Hungarian speaking Community Officer, with a strong desire for working collaboratively in a team, and able to complete tasks from start to finish with little supervision.

You now have the opportunity of contributing to the New World as a member of the eRepublik Team.

Thus far, we have members from Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Romania and the USA. The time has come to welcome a new member with strong written and spoken communication skills in Hungarian.

This is a full-time position in Bucharest, Romania, but we are prepared to discuss relocation.

Being aware of the latest technologies and techniques used in implementing and maintaining successful gaming communities would represent an advantage in the contribution brought to our community projects.

Areas of responsibility include interacting with fan sites, supervising future eRepublik moderators, and assisting in various other gaming events such as fan fairs and player gatherings.

The ideal candidate would be an avid eRepublik fan with experience as a member or moderator of a forum-based community, a strong understanding of popular social networking trends on the Internet, as well as a desire to implement new projects. Knowing Romanian is not a must, English is.

If you seek challenge, inspiration, and strive for excellence, then this is the company for you!

Affiliate program
Recommending a person for this job, which is later hired, will get you a free 40 Gold Pack.

For any questions, do not hesitate to post a comment on this article. As for CVs - please send them to hr@erepublik.com

Join us in building the New World,

The eRepublik Team

Investigation of the Gold exploit

Published on 10 May 2009 - Day 537 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Three weeks ago, our team started an investigation beginning with some suspicious transactions of tuput. As a result, four citizen accounts and 11 organization accounts have been suspended.

These accounts have used an exploit in order to obtain Gold. The implications of these illegal actions on the New World could have been really serious, but they were undone thanks to some of the team members that spent last Easter analyzing and fixing the issues. Besides this, we would like to thank especially Jazar and zocky for the help they have provided in the investigation.

The event described above coincided with the start of a full-scale investigation of the transactions of all the organizations from the New World. In the following months, we will close, without notice, any account that has proven to have been involved in attempts of using game exploits. Any illegal transactions will be cancelled and all the illegal properties will be impounded.

We would like to assure everybody that we will not tolerate any form of cheating. If you believe that an account should be investigated, you can request it by submitting a ticket in the contact page to the "Report a bug" department.

Best regards,
The eRepublik Team

Presidential elections coverage – May 2009

Published on 6 May 2009 - Day 533 of the New World

Dear citizens,

The polls for the presidential elections have just closed, and these are the winners:

Elections were held in 52 of the 54 countries in eRepublik, as Belgium and Pakistan are completely conquered right now. More than 25,000 citizens made use of their right to vote which represented a 25% increase compared to last month.

There were few highly contested elections, and most presidents won by a comfortable margin. Exceptions included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, and South Africa, where the difference was made by one or two votes. Of the elected presidents, 14 will be serving a consecutive mandate (the ones marked with “*”), including scrabman, the president of the USA, and the Hungarian leader Feherlofia Koppany. In Indonesia, the Indonesian Defensive Socialist Party has had its fifth consecutive win in the presidential elections.

After a long time, there is now finally some competition on the Greek political stage. The newly created Greek Independence Party proposed their own candidate, ending the streak of presidential elections with only one candidate. An interesting situation was encountered in Thailand in which four candidates “fought” for only 65 votes. The biggest number of votes, 3858, was recorded in Romania, where the winner, Alex Craciun, received his fifth presidential mandate.

We would like to congratulate all the elected presidents and wish them a productive month as leaders of the New World.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team

Announcement

Published on 4 May 2009 - Day 531 of the New World

Dear citizens,

Due to some recent phishing attempts, we would like to inform you that the eRepublik staff will under no circumstance ask you to disclose the passwords of your citizen or organization accounts. Several citizen accounts impersonating the Admin have been created during the last weeks, asking other citizens to disclose the password to their accounts. The Admin is the only eRepublik account administrated by our team (other administrative citizen accounts will be created in the future, but we will announce the creation of each one in the Insider). If you are contacted by any other entity pretending to be part of our staff, be sure not to provide them with any information that could help another person gain access to your account. Also, please report any such incidents using the contact form.

In order to keep your password safe, we advise you not to disclose it to any other person. Other phishing attempts could use domain names like www.erepubilk.com (notice the IL instead of LI) in order to create websites with a similar appearance as erepublik.com. Therefore we advise you to be careful when clicking on links provided in forums or public chat systems, as you may be directed to such phishing websites.

Planned downtime

Due to some maintenance work, eRepublik will unavailable for about one hour on day 533 of the New World, at 01:00 eRepublik time.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team

Interview with a member of our team

Published on 2 May 2009 - Day 529 of the New World

Dear citizens,

We have presented in previous Insider articles some podcasts created by members of the eRepublik community. The last of these podcasts, authored by Dishmcds, Squiddy, and Rayf Drayson features a short tutorial on hospitals, the news from around the New World, a competition and an interview with the eRepublik Community Manager, Cristi Badea.

The interview was an opportunity for the three hosts to approach subjects of interest for the eRepublik community, and it gave Cristi Badea the chance to shed more light on these topics. Therefore we have added a short summary of the discussion further in the article. The translation of eRepublik into other languages, political takeovers, future plans of the Community department and new countries were the topics discussed in this episode.

The first subject of the discussion regarded the translation of eRepublik into other languages. As it is probably known, Spanish will be the second language in eRepublik, and Cristi Badea announced that it will be released sometime between May and June. The next set of languages will consist of four of the most spoken languages in the world, French, Portuguese, Russian and German, followed by the third set of languages which will contain the languages spoken by the most numerous eRepublik communities.

Some new information released in this interview regards the actual translation process. Active eRepublik users helped with the translation of eRepublik into Spanish, and other citizens will be recruited for the translation of eRepublik into other languages. The most time consuming part of the translation process consisted in preparing the documentation and translation kits used by eRepublik citizens in the actual translation, as well as completing all the technical modifications that will allow eRepublik to support multiple languages.

The hosts of the show also inquired about how the eRepublik team regards the strategies known as political takeovers, some of the most discussed events in eRepublik. These tactics help citizens to achieve their goal of controlling more territories, but to the disadvantage of other groups of players. Giving tools to citizens in order to fight against political takeovers is part of eRepublik's development plans.

More detailed information on these subjects can be found in the podcast, which can be listened to at www.erepnews.com

Regards,

The eRepublik Team