User:VSkyzv/Library/An Epic History

An Epic History

From http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgc6tq9n_6fb755zgg

Franco's beginnings

I registered my first account on eRepublik sometime in late May 2008. It was still in Beta and oh, lord, how much I love Beta. For anyone reading this now who is not a Beta Giant, Beta is about 300x better than V1 in every way. But that's not the point. I was registered as ThisGenMedia, named for my somewhat defunct online investment company. I originally never intended to play eRep very much and figured 「what the hell, I might as well join for some free advertising if nothing else.」 Oh lord, how wrong I was. Within a few days (eRepublik was deathly small at this point. I think eRepublikans for Change (RfC, the precursor to the modern-day Conservative Party) was at most 75 members, and we were one of the largest. So, for Party Presidents, each and every member was a major coup. It was a battle for every newbie, and I was one of them, and damn did I feel loved. Right away Benn Dover and Dishmcds (the former is awesome, the latter is a cunt) took a liking to me. Benn was the first to get to me and was PP of the Democratic Party, so to coincide with real life ideology, I joined them. However, soon thereafter, I switched to the RfC. Dish was a more powerful guy and, frankly, I joined because he seemed cooler than Benn. Man was I wrong.

The turning point for every new player seems to be the IRC system. If you can get on IRC, you can be successful in eRepublik. Well, back in those days, we didn't have IRC.. we had flashchat. Flashchat was awesome. It was 10 people, at most, at any given time. Some time, in our national channel, we had 2 people. It was great fun. I met regulars like cowslayeggs, Daphne Lilac, Benn Dover, Dishmcds, and so many others. We didn't talk about eRep a ton, and when we did, it was always in simple terms. The game was much less complex than it is now. It was more like 「shit, how the fuck are we going to whoop Indonesia's ass!」 More on that later. This flashchat is also where the name Franco came from. Throughout my eRepublik career, this is one of the questions I got asked the most. 「What the fuck does Franco mean?」 Well, it comes down to two people. One night, I was chatting with Daphne and Benn. Daphne was proclaiming how tired she was of continually typing out my entire name of ThisGenMedia. Eventually she shortened it to TGM.. but that didn't quite flow, she remarked. So, we were on the prowl for a nickname. What could it be, my oh my, what could it be? I looked down, took a bite of my taco, and had a brilliant idea. FRAAAANNNCCCCOOOOOO! It was one of the most epic Hispanic names ever and I was eating a taco. How fitting. With that, a new man was born. I was now Franco, TGM, and ThisGenMedia all rolled into one.

During this time was also the 2008 NBA Finals. I was a young pup and trying to make my mark. At this point, I wasn't really cheating yet. So, I was trying to make some legitimate money. I am an avid sports better so I figured 「what the hell, why not?」 and decided to try and make the first eUSA Bookie System. I did a simple +/- odds system. I waged one game, which was an NBA Finals game, Boston (-6) at LA Lakers. I don't recall who won, but I remember Esoom (read: Moose) bet 1 gold and he won, so I owed him some amount of money. I didn't really get any more bets (Baseball is hard to bet on and it was summer) so I kind of let it die.

A New President

I was a citizen for the last days of the Nave Presidency. Therefore, just as I left to take a nice real life vacation to Florida, the Presidential Elections came up on June 1st. I didn't get back until the 3rd and was excited to see Dishmcds, my new Party President and friend, had won. I was quite excited. He was a cool dude and a guy I knew, so I saw this as my claim to fame. I could certainly get some sort of pencil pusher position out of Dish and, thus, would enter myself on the political scene. I was lucky enough to get such a position. After Justinious McWalburgson III resigned the position (He was too lazy to do anything), I became the Foreign Economic Adviser to the President. I honestly can't remember if this was month one or two of the Dish Presidency. But he promoted me and it was awesome. Basically, what I did, was change the rates of prices in foreign markets to gold and compared them with US prices in gold. It was long and tedious but I did it well and provided my President with quality advice for exporters. More importantly, this gained me a seat in his cabinet. This was an important part of my growing resume'. It was a front row seat to the inner workings of the American political machine.. and I was pretty excited.

The next month, Dishmcds promoted me to Chief of Staff. This position didn't really have any power besides collecting reports from cabinet members (which numbered like 7, and that was the total staff, total, including military, at the time) on a weekly basis. And even at that, no one besides Pearlswine really did it very often. Pearlswine is probably one of my favorite people in the world, though I've never told him. He never complained and always did his job. Pearl was the national health adviser, because he was the only one of us competent enough to figure out coding, pre-API, to see national wellness. He took funds and gifted people below X wellness and he always did it on time and produced a report on it. He was probably our best cabinet member at the time, no doubt.

I can't remember which month this happened, but something big did happen: Indonesia attacked South Africa. This was my first real war and we were involved via MPP in it. South Africa was a heavy underdog but I wasn't afraid. I was weak, so I kamikazeed myself against the sitting Indonesian soldiers (Player vs Player fighting was still enabled. It's way better). In the end, South Africa lost, but it was great fun. Sitting in the IRC, discussing the screen that never changed (there was seriously 1 fight an hour because no one was ballsy enough to fight, knowing they'd lose). I remember those days dearly. I also remember it because I nearly beat Alucard Bloodlust in a fight. Yes, I nearly beat the best fighter ever in a 1 v 1 brawl. Alucard (read: Dracula) was the first General ever in the world, and that was extremely hard. I would say it is the equivalent of doing 5 million damage in modern day times. Alucard was the best mercenary ever, because he was a real mercenary. He didn't care who you were, if you paid him, he fought. And oh my lord he was rich. Anyway, he wasn't on our side this time.. and he was sitting at 54 wellness, me at 100. I did 13 damaged, he killed me. I was 1 damage away from beating Alucard Bloodlust. FFFFFFFFFF.

Next was more good times: Turkey (I believe now goon-controlled) bribing us to cancel our MPP with Greece. For whatever reason, they wanted Greece bad.. and they paid us 500 gold (that is a shitton back then. Equivalent to probably 5000 gold now) to not renew the MPP.) Dish asked me and I agreed and we did it. I was proud.. we'd just swindled 500 gold. AWESOME.

This was, also, the start of my cheating enterprise. You can read Benn Dover's interview with me some time in January to learn more, but the basic entrails of my fool proof plot with my partner, Daphne Lilac, is this: I had a paypal account with considerable money in it. Back in these times, each new account got 5 invites and every new player who signed up was worth 5 gold. Do the math. Daphne and I made an ingenious plan where we wouldn't be caught and we could multi to our hearts desire. First, I paid someone $1 to make 5 accounts. Daphne would invite the person, they would create the initial account, and then use that account's invites to create 5 multi's. Since the account was tied to Daphne from the invitation, we donated the gold to me. Therefore, unless someone knew Daphne and I were working together, they never knew about the multi schemes. They couldn't prove anything. We did the same thing backwards, as well. I paid the person their $1 and Daphne and I split the digs 50/50. We did this for probably 300-400 gold. I did it a lot more on my own later, in which I probably made.. at least 3000 gold. I sold most of it, used some to tank in battles, and other things. All in all, after I sold my gold, I had made much more real life money than I had spent. And above all else, damn, it was amazingly fun.

Finally, there was one major revelation during this time: I created our IRC on Rizon. I was an IRC noob, but I figured it out. I remember I had to get Daphne to leave so I could leave the room and enter it, thus being the first person and getting op. I never gave that op up and #us on rizon became the most popular eRepublik chat of it's time. Franco rage became epic. I would kb anyone who was ignorant just because, frankly, I didn't want to hear them speak. It was a major siphon of power for me, as controlling the IRC meant controlling the world for eUSA. Our forums still sucked (I had not yet created new ones) so IRC was our main method of communication. At this time, we didn't have a troll infested main chat, either.. it was mainly Americans. I shed a small tear for flashchat.

RfC Presidency and Archibald for President

This was in July 2008. Wow, that was a year ago. Time flies, eh? Times were a-changin' in the RfC. Dishmcds was retiring and would soon defect to the UK (at the time, he was still cool. I remember asking him on MSN, basically, for his endorsement. As I look back on this, Dish is still a cool dude, but got what I call 「Old guy syndrome」. Everyone, myself included, becomes bitter towards the USA at some point. What is it for? Probably the constant political strife. I don't know. All I know is that, sooner or later, you're going to hate America for little to no reason and you'll love to see it fall. You'll make hasty actions to try to do this but it won't work because America is just too damn big) and thus had to retire the party presidency. Daphne Lilac was still one of my closest friends and she was going to help me win the elections. I was running against, as far as I can remember, Desertfalcon and Rhane. Yes, Rhane. I eventually got Dish's endorsement and wrote a 4 part article series on the RfC. Wow, that was dumb. 1 article would have been plenty, but, eh, when you want to win an election and you're a career politician, you're able to talk for ages. I PM'ed every member of the party (115 at the time) and eventually won the elections. I don't think I was ever happier than when I won these elections. Really. It was my real beginning in eRepublik politics and, for all intents and purposes, real life politics.

With that election victory came renewed focus on the party. We worked hard to recruit. We ran a good Mayor campaign and we won in a good amount of states. The RfC, it seemed, was on the upswing. By the way, around this time, the USWP was storming on to the scene. The USWP has always been a cool party and I don't think ever deserved the flack it got. I always follow good leaders and, as you'll read later on, I followed Peregrine to the USWP because he is hands down the best leader I've ever seen on this game. Back to the point at hand, before we knew it, the presidential elections were around the corner. Dishmcds, still very influential in the still very small United States, was planning to endorse Archibald, his somewhat quiet economic guru (cabinets were 8 people large then) over Justinious McWalburgson III, the rising GameFAQ's star. Justin served something like 8 terms as GameFAQ/UCP/UIP party president and eventually PTO'ed me in South Korea, so in the end, I hate his guts. However, at this point, we were friends. He approached me and asked me to be his Vice President. This was a great honor and I told him I'd sleep on it and think about it. At the same time, I approached Archibald and asked him about the openness of his ticket. He stated he would be thrilled to have me as his Vice President and, with that, Archibald for America was formed and we had a formal ticket. The RfC would informally endorse Archibald, the Democratic Party candidate (Dems were still formidable at this point. Uncle Sam had, not yet, PTO'ed the AAP and made it powerful. At this point, Sam and Benn were out being somewhat decent mercenaries in Turkey, if I remember), and that would be that. However, this is where the drama that followed me for the rest of my Franco political career started. Justin, being his emo self, took offense to me not letting him know that I was Archibald's running mate. I could have sworn I gave him a heads up, but even if I didn't, get over it, Christ. Justin eventually ran with some no-name and lost. However, this was a turning point. Roby Petric was the Party President of the USWP and, at the time, they were growing and were now a top 5 party. Their endorsement was up in the air, but after a 15 minute talk with me, they agreed to endorse Archibald. I literally won the election for Archibald with that conversation and I think if you ask him that today he'd agree with you. 3 top 5 parties was too much to beat and in the end, Archibald and I won in a landslide, if I recall, over Justin and his running mate. So, we moved to the White House.

Archibald's presidency was pretty uneventful. There isn't much to say about it, to be honest. Archibald was a behind the scenes guy, so as Vice President, I did a lot of the leg work. At this time, we still didn't really have any functional forums, so almost everything was handled via in-game PM, email and IRC. Archi got a lot of un-needed criticism for not being 「out there」 enough. That was pretty dumb, in my opinion. During his term, we accomplished a spectacular feat of making the United States Constitution, passing it, and having a formal referendum passing it on the forums with 51% of the voting US population agreeing with it. There were few no votes. This was never approved by the admins, even after repeated requests. It was, however, a defining moment of the Archibald administration. It was also a defining point for my future political career, as I met two new and fairly out of the ordinary players – Peregrine and Trisk. We would become the Triumvirs of an internationally known organization like no other not long after.

That really summarizes the Archibald Presidency. He got a lot of heat and decided to not run again, which I respected. I quietly e-retired to my home in Indiana and let bygones be bygones. During this time I did, however, resign the RfC Presidency before my first term was over. Unfortunately, due to real life events I won't get in to, I had to resign. It was with a heavy heart I did so, because I knew I'd likely never win again, but I couldn't let the party suffer in my absence. Ron Paul went on to become the next President, as far as I recall.

Immunogenic Presidency

As far as I know, Immunogenic is one of two foreign presidents, the other being the only one to resign, Roby Petric. Immunogenic was a very influential Libertarian and ran under their ticket. As far as I can remember, this was a very split election, with almost every top 5 party running their own candidate. By a result of a split vote, the Libs (largest party at the time) won. Immunogenic became President and my old friend Justinious became Vice President. Why? I have no clue. Anyway, Immunogenic and I both agreed that my experience and knowledge of prior governments would be a vital tool in his administration. We created the role of Chief Adviser and gave it to me. What did I do? Basically, I was Immunogenic's right hand man on anything he needed. I represented a big knowledge base of prior government policy and helped him shape some of his initiatives. Immunogenic was another fairly quiet President, not bothering to come on IRC and wrote only a few articles in his Presidency. He did nothing to hurt the country and did some to help it, to by my book, he was a good President. He didn't get as much flack as Archibald but still got a lot and only ran for his one term as President. However, after he retired, shitstorm commenced…

The Election That Changed America

The USWP was now the party in America. Hands down, it was the best. Best organized, most unified, et al. I hated on Roby Petric and the USWP but if you give them a moment damn.. they were awesome. Zombies? Maybe. But damn effective ones. The October 2008 Erepublik Presidential Election was probably one of the most important yet it had the least campaigning. There were two main players: Daphne Lilac/ThisGenMedia, running on a Lib/others ticket, and Roby Petric/no VP, running on a USWP ticket. Daphne had a little lapdog named Isaac or something.. and I remember us clashing heads. He wanted to create a position called 「Presidential Speaker」, which basically was the President whenever the President wasn't around. Even if the President was AWOL for a long period of time, Isaac wanted the Presidential Speaker (him, oddly enough) to be the boss. This didn't go over well and eventually I convinced Daphne to change it and Isaac to back the fuck off. I became Daphne's Vice-Presidential nominee.. round two of the Vice Presidency for me. Little did I know it'd come on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Roby and I had a good relationship.. I'd tried to stay out of anti USWP politicking and he respected that. Roby was very intelligent. He'd come on to IRC drunk and have fun and he'd speak in slurred English, but he was extremely intelligent. Anyway, long story short is this: Daphne didn't campaign very much, neither did Roby, but Roby won. So I came up to him to offer him some congratulations and ask him who his Vice President was. He, oddly enough, said he hadn't even chosen one. I just thought that he didn't want to release his nominee before the elections for whatever reason. Heck, he's a Croatian, I don't know how their elections are. But, I was a bit shocked when he said he didn't have a Vice President.. at all. Being the inquiring person that I am, I asked him if he'd accept me as his Vice President. If I couldn't get in with Daphne, I figured I'd be able to voice my policy concerns as Vice President in a new administration. At least my voice gets heard and I get a nice shiny title, right? Exactly. After some planning, Roby agreed to announce me as his Vice President.. and that was the single most important thing to ever happen in Erepublik USA history. Bar none.

Roby resigned a half term later, giving me the reigns to the government. Justinious, who came in second place in the election (beating Daphne, tear) led the charge for an impeachment of Roby.. he wanted the Presidency, so did I. An impeachment passed.. however Roby was not removed from the Presidency. He is, in fact, the first President to be impeached yet stay in office. How awesome. Roby quit for many reasons, but the biggest was the buggy version of Erepublik V1 (he quit the day after it was released). More than that, he quit as a protest for the lack of Croatia in the new version. Needless to say, Croatia was soon added. Roby sent me a long email explaining himself and handing me the reigns to the Federal Reserve. He told me how much gold was in it, et al. He gave me the password to his account.. which I used to perform various Presidential duties.

I was now the Acting President of the United States.

My role was relatively minor, actually. I didn't feel right to initiate a major policy shift. I wasn't elected, as Roby chose me post election, and in some terms Justin should have been President. However, I did take this as an advantage to make the USA many times richer. For whatever reason, as far as I can remember, there was no 「donate」 function for Senators. So, the only way to get money out of the treasury was to do it via a roundabout method.. buying hospitals. I'd buy a hospital for 99,999 USD and the company owner would, contract enforced, donate 95k or whatever to Fort Knox. However, there is something the admins missed.. and I reported this to them multiple times: When you bought a new piece of infrastructure, the money was given to the company owner but never taken from the Treasury. We were, in essence, spinning free money. I hopped on this opportunity. I made at least 4 purchases, and over a week Fort Knox became 400k richer. I didn't take a penny of it.. Benn Dover recently admitted he did as President.. I don't see how, but that's a story for another time. At this point in my e-life, I was just bored, not cynical of America. The rest of my Presidency was relatively simple. I endorsed Benn Dover to succeed me and he did. And with that, I moved and created the most epic player-designed organization in Erepublik…

The Party

Let me preface this by saying something: Peregrine (later Father) was probably the coolest, most educated, and best player I've ever met in Erepublik. Bar none. I made him my Acting Vice President immediately after becoming President and he proved his worth. He found the Hospital fix. Without it, French Toast would have never even come close to being as successful as it was (before the collapse). Anyway, Peregrine and I were bored. He was filthy rich and I was moderately rich (1000 gold from aforementioned multi accounting). Together, we probably topped 3,000 gold. Now, I was a shit businessman and will always admit it.. so that was a lot of money for me. I never really invested my money, I just kind of let it sit and tank every once in a while. Meh, it was fun.

Peregrine and I had a thought to create the 「TGI/TGM fund」 (TGI being Travelers Group Intl., Peregrine's organization). We'd ask for money and invest it legitimately, yadda yadda, make ourselves a lot of money. But then we realized something. We're rich. Why are we doing this? We can create a private army to control the world. What are we doing sitting here being businessmen? And with that, the INGSOC, also known as The Party, was created.

The Party was ruled by a triumvirate. The triumvirs were myself (Teacher), Peregrine (Father) and Trisk.. an intelligent fellow from Spain who was well versed in economics. His nick was Watcher. We formed this group and set up shop in South Africa, hoping to succeed. We had thousands of gold at our disposal and at the beginning we grew quickly. Our member list included, but did not limit itself, at the man we love to hate himself, Gladdos. Yes, Gladdos was a member of The Party. If you've ever been on IRC, you've noticed Gladdos and I always talk very kindly of each other.. that's because we've known each other for almost a year now.

In South Africa we weren't well received by the locals. It was a bit of a risk to try South Africa. It had natural resources and a large population.. if we could politically conquer it, we were golden. However, it proved to be too much. We simply couldn't do it. We decided to move to South Korea, our backup nation, and begin there. It was much easier and we began to control the government within 10 days. We controlled almost 70% of Congress and achieved the Presidency shortly thereafter. The INGSOC tax plan rolled in. Taxes were high and we instilled a communist/dictatorship regime. Father was the President, I was the foreign affairs liaison, and Watcher was the economic guru. We were the triumvirate and we controlled South Korea.

Our reign was either very prosperous or terrible, depending on who you talk to. Our 「Ajay Bruno」 was a man named Parrot. He accused us of various things including, but not limited to, bribing the Admins. He later admitted to being a multi accounter himself and is now banned. Anyway, Parrot was a constant thorn in our side, but we moved on.. we had constant propaganda in the top 5 and we were beginning to win loyalists to our side. Parrot was named a persona non grata, and so was anyone who hung around him. Our workers worked for minimum wage, had their food (Q3) donated to them, and got a high Q house after X days of working. You could say it was taking away their rights, but they got a fair wage in the form of good food, houses, and if we ever went to war, more weapons than they could believe. That brings me to another point. The Party was working on getting a mercenary group up, but it never got running. The idea was we went to both sides (I was the first ATLANTIS Secretary General. I've omitted that from here because, frankly, I don't care and it's not important. Just keep it in the back of your mind) and say 「Listen, we can tank for you or we can tank for the enemy. We do this amount of damage for X gold. We get the weapons and all materials on our own. If you don't want us to fight for the enemy but don't want to pay us to tank, you can pay us 100 gold and we'll fight for no one.」 It was a genius idea. It worked. We got almost 500 gold. We would have gotten more, but our reign only lasted a month. Our entire military plan was to keep wars and battles going indefinitely.. always fighting for the losing side. War was a boon to us and, if used right, one side or the other would eventually hire us or pay us to not fight.

Justinious, my old friend back in the USA, was now President. He was still bitter and butthurt, but what can I say.. he had a fighters spirit. Almost overnight, he voted to Embargo South Korea from the United States. That was fine, fuck the United States. Their economy was shit at the time. However, what he did next was worse: He planned and carried out a plot to PTO South Korea.

Now, Justin, I have some things to say. Firstly, I'm glad you only got one term because, frankly, you didn't deserve any more. Secondly, I was happy to be the man to get you enough bad PR to get you out of office. Thirdly, go fuck yourself.

I had spies within the US Government still, in very high places, so I knew beforehand he was going to attempt to PTO us. I went to Justinious and said 「So, are you going to PTO us? You –really- don't want to do that Justin. I can make your world a very painful one. You and the entire United States.」

Justin didn't heed my warning. He went ahead with the PTO. It was planned by Leroy Combs, at the time a CIA leader. He sent a military message saying anyone who 「wanted」 to could participate in a PTO of South Korea. They got a few volunteers.. not many, but enough. I posted an article in the USA saying 「America, do you support PTO's?」 Apparently, America did, by the comments I received in my article. They supported their halfwit President. Fine by me, I had an ace up my sleeve. I warned Justin one last time and then laid off. What was going to be done would be done. If Justin made the mistake, he'd pay dearly for it.

He made the mistake.

He successfully PTO'ed South Korea. Therefore, I struck back. The following 30 minutes were the most fun of my e-life. I set up in the #us chatroom on Rizon (which I still owned and kb'ed people at my whim) and also in The Party's IRC. Manufred Portulamente or something was a spy in the room directed by Leroy, but we kept feeding him disinformation. We knew he was in our private IRC and we knew he was a spy, so we played some disinformation games. However, I wanted him to be there when I distributed the money.. so I waited for him to get on. Luckily, he logged on within minutes and he was now logging The Party's private IRC for the US Government's viewing. Perfect. I wanted Justin to read as I dispersed his countries' treasury and his hopes of re-election.

A long time back I had gone on to the Federal Reserve org and changed the email from socompanyus @ gmail . com (an email owned by Dishmcds, faggot) to socompanyusa @ gmail . com. I figured it'd be a good bargaining chip. I was proven correct.

I recovered the password via email and immediately got on. I was in the #us IRC, laughing more than I can remember. I posted 1000 gold for sale for some obscenely low amount like 25 USD/gold. It was purchased quickly. There was a person in the IRC saying 「hmm, the money market looks odd」, but nothing major. Meanwhile, I was telling Party members to get in on it while they could. Mind you, I wouldn't be giving them the money.. if they were the quickest to buy it off the market, they got it. Fair shot, just like everyone else. I didn't take one cent from Fort Knox. I had plenty.

The funny thing was, when I sold the gold, I got USD back.. when I sold the USD, I got gold back. So I'd empty the accounts and then 5 minutes later, I'd have a whittled down amount of USD to sell.. then I'd get a whittled down amount of gold.. eventually I had zero USD and 3 gold left. I sent it to Alexis Bonte, for shits and giggles. Alexis is the founder of Erepublik. He promptly sent it back within an hour or so, I think.

Harrison Richardson in an IRC conversation after emptying the Federal Reserve

The funniest part of the entire escapade was some persistent noob in IRC saying 「Holy shit, man, the money market is going insane」 and then people just ignoring him. Literally, this noob tried for 15 minutes to get anyone's attention and no one paid him a minute of their time. They all said 「oh, it's normal.. just a little fluctuation..」 without even looking. When he finally said 「They are selling 1000 gold for 15 USD」, someone paid attention. The IRC broke out into madness. I don't know how to explain it other than funny and sad. Sad because it took nearly an hour for someone to legitimately recognize or sad because once he did, no one knew what the fuck to do.

So, I finished the deed and had some fun with my Party buddies. It was a good day. I stuck it to Justin. He ran for re-election and didn't win. Sorry bro.

Justin called me out for the crime, which I denied. I wanted to make sure he lost the election before I confessed. After that, I contacted Benn Dover and said 「let's do this interview」, in which the interview to top all interviews 「Dover/Franco.. to think that I named him」 commenced. It was Erepublik's version of Frost/Nixon. I recounted all of my prior deeds, which ultimately got me banned, and then ended with 「America, turn it around」 or something like that. I gave the money to the people – I didn't take it for myself. I wanted America to recognize their ignorance (we still haven't, by the way) of how we play the game. We play politico far too often and fail to recognize we're the only ones in the world doing it. Also, certainly, killing Justin's career was a very real motive. Revenge is the word and oh did it feel good.

I gave all of my earthly companies to Benn Dover and some to Bertil Gurkvatten. I tanked some with my gold then went to sleep, knowing I'd wake up banned. But, before I did that, I took down the USA forums and linked them to goatse. After a while of that, I changed it to some Chinese dude singing the National Anthem… in Chinese. The youtube video, relatively unpopular, bursted with thousands of views and newbies commenting 「what the hell, where are the forums?」. It was pretty funny. I also set a ban on IRC for anyone who tried to enter #us. People freaked out.

I eventually attempted to give the forums to Killing Time, but SMF doesn't transfer databases very well apparently so it was lost. Meh, I tried. I gave him the domain and the USA had a new IRC, so that was settled. I gave them back the Federal Reserve org, complete with a couple gold Alexis donated back to it, for their continued use or whatever. I reminded them to change the email.

And with that, I retired. But not really.

The Birth of Harrison Richardson

Before I went to Korea, when I was still on the US forums often, I promoted Scrabman to administrator. This was because Emerick asked to be demoted. It’s funny, because the Adminship was what catapulted Scrab into the limelight and, in his own words, helped him gain the necessary clout to run for President later on. So, by asking to resign, Emerick indirectly made Scrabman President. I bet, if Emerick knew this, he would regret it daily.

So, I knew I still wanted to play Erepublik. And I had a burning desire. When I was President, it was only via political happenstance.. I was not a duly elected Vice President nor was I, in all honestly, an elected President. I was a temp President, in many respects. That bugged me to no end. I’m very competitive and, frankly, I wanted that damn medal. So, I created an account. I created Harrison Richardson.

Scrabman and his consigliore, hokiehigh, soon thereafter talked with me. I had told a few people of my identity. I told Gladdos.. who showed great restraint by never saying anything. While I was President, he could have held it against me.. tried to blackmail me. I knew he wouldn’t and he proved my choice right by never even mentioning it. I told Bertil Gurkvatten and ExoM7. I told Scrabman and Hokiehigh soon thereafter. They came to become my greatest friends on Erepublik. At a time, I can say without a doubt, the Scrab-Hokie-HR “triumvirate” was the most powerful in the USA and, arguably, the world. We dominated USA politics. The USWP got extremely high marks in congress (with much of that due to Ananias, our excellent PP and the rest of the USWP Executive Board) and we controlled the Presidency for an astounding four and a half months.

I started the account mid February and idled for a bit. I distinctly remember arguing with Justin on the forums over his ignorance, but I couldn’t act too smart, lest I be discovered. So I hid and, quietly, rose through the USWP ranks. I did not use the USWP. The USWP is the best party in the world, hands down. I was a former USWP hater and I have been converted. So, quit the bullshit, people. Jesus Christ.

Scrabman was President and he was pretty busy, so I talked with Hokiehigh a lot. They are real life friends and both are pretty cool. I had a great time with them. With Scrab’s assistance and under the watchful eye of Proggypop, then PP of the USWP, I rose to the Executive Board. This was the hub of America, in a sense. The USWP Executive Board controlled the USWP, and the USWP controlled America. It was, indirectly, the most powerful Board of Directors on Erepublik. I started as Communications Director, taking over for Inwegen as he went Emeritus status. I followed Inwegen’s footsteps for much of my political career and I have him to thank for many things as well. To set the record straight, no one in the USWP, or the United States, sans Scrabman or Hokie knew of my identity. Don’t go killing everyone.

My rise to power coincided with Claire’s in the Lib party. She was outspoken and was a mud slinger, but Scrabman played the “keep your allies close, but your enemies closer” card. So, Claire became Press Secretary. Fuck. What an awful decision. To put someone that incompetent in a position that high, where she addresses the media in top 5 articles almost daily, was a bit of a lapse in judgment. Mine as well, as I didn’t complain about the appointment too much.

I spent my early days around in the #uswpchat room in IRC, later venturing into #congress. I waited and waited, knowing sooner or later my chance would come. That change did come, and it came with the evolution of war games…

War Games

While Scrabman trusted me in those days, I can tell he had lingering doubts over my true allegiance. In fairness, that’s a good decision on his part. I mean, I was two or three months removed from the biggest betrayal of America, or any country you could say, in the history of the game. To trust me quickly would be foolhardy on Scrabman’s part.

However, he did give me a chance to prove myself. After he became President, one of the things he did was promise regular war games. However, we could only rent Baja for a certain amount of time. Therefore, sooner or later, the games were going to end. That is where I came in. I was a natural at foreign affairs.. always have been. While One Eye is an economic genius, I am a foreign affairs guru. So, I talked to nations. I talked and talked and talked. The goal was to get payments from every nation weekly, but after a while we realized the time:benefit ratio on that wasn’t too great. We hosted the war games, on our tab, as a gift to our allies. Many of those allies have repaid us in kind. Some of them, like the UK, chose to be cunts. Oh well, c’est la vie.

So I worked it over with Ireland and we, eventually, got war games. Awesome. That is probably the thing I am most proud of in my Erepublik career. Not only that, but it made me a politically credible figure in the United States. “Harrison Richardson.. the war games guy?” It worked. Scrabman had a new trust in me after I secured the deals, and then it was all up hill from that.

The State Department

The State Department is where I waited and worked long enough before I could run for President. I worked hard as Deputy Secretary of State under Inwegen. Inwegen is an awesome dude and one of my best friends, but he suffered from a hellish work schedule during my tenure as Deputy.. so I filled in as Acting Secretary of State on many occasions. One memorable occasion was the UK-Ireland adjunct war fiasco. When we opened the war games, we accidentally opened a war between I think Ireland and the UK. The reason this had to happen in the first place was because of some stupid treaty that the UK signed with Ireland that the UK wanted to honor. The Raleigh treaty. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember that we had to go out of our way to fix it. Long story short, a war was opened on the UK and they had half of the world’s MPP’s activated against them. The other half were probably activated from long standing wars between ATLANTIS and PEACE, so for a few short days, the UK had no import or export economy. And, dear god, you’d have thought the world ended. The UK freaked out and their markets immediately erupted. People began planning for the Holocaust. It made me realize what a shithole their country is. They are even more politico than the United States, which is damn hard to do. Expats like Dishmcds and Gladdos resided there shortly thereafter to help them change to PEACE. During this encounter, I realized just how vulnerable the UK was. They averaged, from what I was told by various government officials, 1100 gold per month income. They had an ass backwards system of hoarding currency rather than gold, from as far as I know. In the United States, we have a simple system. Hoard gold, Print USD for .005 gold/usd, sell the USD for .02 gold/usd, thus profiting 400%. However, the UK did it backwards. They hoarded currency, used the currency to buy gold, and used that bought gold to print more currency. Long story short, their economy was fucked. This short stint without trade proved that. As I said, their monthly income was/is 1100 gold. To put that in proper context, the United States makes that much gold in less than half a week.

Back to the main point of that rambling bit, it’s that the UK is fucked without it’s trade. The USA can be relatively self sufficient. The UK literally lives on trade, unfortunately. I got a few angry PM’s and more than a few angry pings on IRC when this debacle happened. It took long hours of negotiating but we finally got the UK and Ireland to solve the problem. The UK wanted to close the war.. the USA said no. We’d paid hundreds of gold for this war to open. We could find an amicable solution to the problem. The UK had, of course, agreed to the war game plans. They had a new President and all, but they agreed to it, so I felt little sympathy for them. This war, in all respects, the beginning of the end of the USA and the UK. The USA offered a resolution of, as far as I can remember, the USA paying 100 gold (or the UK, I can’t really recall to be honest) and the rest being divvied up between war games members. It was a pretty fair solution. However, the UK wouldn’t budge. They demanded to not pay a penny. That eventually changed. And they paid.

Furthermore, we grew extremely tight with Ireland during this period. They truly became, what I thought, were our second best allies, behind Spain. They were willing to do anything, willing to have their trade shut off with no moaning, and became stronger daily with the games. Their President at the time, Nith, was an extremely down-to-earth guy who I liked getting to know. I do remember a point when Starks Hayter, I think a presidential opponent of Nith, got made because Scrab made a comment in an article saying “Good luck Nith, I support you”. Starks interpreted that as interfering in Irish internal politics and went, literally, ape shit. That was as heated as our tensions got with Ireland and, all in all, we’re still good friends to this day.

Inwegen became increasingly busy with real life and AidenAstrup, Scrabman’s Chief of Staff, was clueless and AWOL at the time. So, Aiden was let to and Inwegen moved up to Chief of Staff. By default, as Deputy, I became Secretary of State for the half month left of Scrab’s term and the next full month after he was re-elected. This was probably the biggest turning point when I decided “After Scrab, I am going to run for President”. I truly acted as a Shadow President. I answered PM’s on Scrab’s account, PM’ed foreign dignitaries on it, messed around on it (reading old PM’s is fun :P), and tooled around with the Presidential area, though never proposing anything. It was a fun time and I had Scrab (and Hokie’s) complete trust.

During my tenure as Secretary of State, I think I revolutionized the office. I hired Proggypop as my Deputy, as I trusted him deeply and thought he’d be good insight on Erepublik history. While I knew 10x the history he did, I couldn’t come off to intelligent with regards to USA history, lest I be busted. Nonetheless, he was a very good Deputy, an intelligent fill-in when I took a vacation, and a trusted aide. He still is to this day, though I believe he has quit. Besides Proggypop, I hired a cast of relative newcomers into the State Department. I hired Lexluthor1 to be UnderSecretary of State and Foreign Affairs Advisory Committee (which I helped to found) liaison. I hired PigInZen to the Office of Developing Nations. Pig, as we know, is a close friend of mine. We’re both from Indiana and I’ve met him once at a Borders. I’m sure he’ll be pretty shocked, as I haven’t told him yet of my true identity. Oops. He’s a good guy and I’m proud to have helped him became our Vice President under Emerick. More on that later. I hired Chris Stanwick into the same office, and he and Pig formed a great team. I hired qkoller to be liaison to PEACE, which worked well. All in all, my staff consisted of one future Vice President and Deputy Chief of Staff, one future Deputy Secretary of State and Presidential candidate, and one future Secretary of State. Emerick continued on my tradition of a large State Dept staff and Lexluthor has as well, something I’m proud to have started. This experience with a mini-cabinet became essential when I ran for President down the road.

Tradition pictures started around here. People lamented me for posting pictures of beautiful women in my articles. Frankly, what the fuck. It’s the internet and these women are beautiful, well paid models who do this for a living. They do it out of their own free will. It’s no different than looking at a nice piece of Picasso art and the fact it became taboo is, more or less, shameful. Nonetheless, I love tradition pictures.

Around this time we also gave Ireland a 100 gold.. payment to help them with a Q5 hospital. We saw it as an investment in the future of an ally. They had been staunch supporters of us and we estimated their lost trade had amassed well over 100 gold, so giving them that much to help get a Q5 hospital, which would help them get stronger and become better allies, was a very solid investment. It is, to this day, one of my proudest moments as Secretary of State. Little things go a long way, and I know for a fact the Irish were proud to be our allies at that point, and still are.

I would be foolhardy to not mention the Fortis negotiations. Proggypop and I started an Alliance Committee, amply called “People Organized to Review Neutrality” – PORN. I was shocked when someone got the acronym within minutes of my article posting. It was a completely non partisan group dedicated to helping us form a better alliance.. Fortis. It consisted of the likes of Tiacha, Eugene Harlot, mjdiv, Neil, and other various geniuses. Fortis started out strong but got weighed down by one thing ultimately.. weighted voting. I still, to this day, think it was a good idea. Take a look at PEACE. Their major breadwinners are Indonesia and Hungary. Those two do the dirty work of the entire alliance, pay more dues, and yet have no more say. It’s, frankly, dumb in my opinion. It works for PEACE because they all bend to IndoHungary’s will. If they don’t, they are kicked out and promptly taken over. Fortis wasn’t going to be that. An alliance with Ireland, Spain, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It was set for excellency.. until people started getting mad about weighted voting. We changed it in various ways to suit these people. We made higher voting members (Spain, USA) pay much higher dues.. We raised Ireland to 2 votes, so Ireland+UK+Canada equaled the amount of votes of the USA and Spain. Since the Secretary General breaks all ties in voting, and people were worried about the USA and Spain pushing their own SG, we bent the rules yet again to make it so each nation only had 1 vote in SG nominations.. thus allowing Fortis, sans USA-Spain, to elect their own SG if they chose. We even eliminated weighted voting all together to get this alliance formed. The UK, time and again, said they agreed to the terms and would advise approval to their Congress. Except, at the same time, I knew they were talking with Hungary about an alliance and confronted them about it. No one said anything. It was obvious the UK was defecting, and against my best attempts to save them, we couldn’t. Gladdos, Dishmcds, Hassan and others had enough power to brainwash the public into getting enough support for the switch and it eventually happened.

With that, the Presidency of Scrabman came to an end.. and I begin to ponder a run for President…

The Run for President

My run for President started moderately. I didn’t plan to announce my intentions to the USWP until I needed to. I had two campaign managers, Proggypop and Inwegen. Inwegen was slated as my Chief of Staff and Proggypop a Senior Adviser, because he wanted a more behind the scenes role. Cerb announced that he had been asked by Gaius Julius to be his Vice Presidential nominee and they were seeking the endorsement of the USWP. This put me in a dilemma. I could put off my run, knowing it may never come around again, or I could announce my intention to run as well. I did announce my intention to run. I have no regrets. I felt bad for Cerb, but he got over it and I offered him a spot in my administration. He went AWOL for Family Reasons shortly before the elections.. we haven’t talked since, mainly due to his lack of activity for the aforementioned reasons, but he’s a cool dude and I still feel a bit bad for him. Gaius later dropped out of the race and endorsed me and became a co-campaign manager and a vital player in my administration as a Senior Adviser.

I initially courted Publius to be my Vice President. Publius turned me down, stating real life work load as his reason not to run on my ticket. Publius is a great guy and would have made a splendid Vice President, but upon further consideration, I’m glad I chose who I did. One Eye was the perfect Vice President to suit my style. He was much more deliberate and analytical and obviously economically gifted, whereas I was quick, intelligent, and policy gifted. We made a very good trio. During our beginning of the end, I don’t think anyone besides One Eye could have controlled the money market the way he did. It didn’t take long for me to convince One Eye to join my team. It helped me gain the endorsement of the USWP, as well. The USWP held a vote to endorse Gaius/Cerb or HR/One Eye. In the end, the choosing of One Eye, a USWP’er as President rather than Vice President, and a very good platform led to my being endorsed by the USWP. And that started a trickle down effect. The Republican Party endorsed me, as did the Nationalist Party. America’s Advancement Party, the USWP’s loyal sidekick, endorsed me. For the life of me, I can never understand why the AAP never runs their own candidates. Maybe they didn’t want to, for fear of alienating the USWP. I don’t know. Together, the AAP and the USWP formed a majority in almost every election and the AAP is probably my second favorite party in the world, next to the USWP.

My election was, to be honest, quite eventful. We had random people in the race, Ajay’s shenanigans, Emerick losing his endorsements, and lots of mass PM’s. Emerick PM’ed the entire nation, from what I can tell.. or at least he did in the next election. On the other hand, I had my campaign staff PM the USWP while I PM’ed the Conservative Party (it won me the election. They were 50-50, because of the turmoil of the primary process in their party.. so I gained significant votes from them), the AAP, the Democrats, and other various smaller parties. The personally sent PM’s added a nice touch. Little did I know that answering 30 PM’s every morning would soon become a daily occurrence.

Election day was, to say the least, eventful. I was out doing normal human stuff with the family on July 5th, and I had stayed up to 4:30 the night before to vote early (I was the second overall vote in the world), and I was losing to Emerick when I went to bed. I didn’t check the results in the morning, which was probably a good thing. So, when around 4:00 rolled around in the afternoon, I finally caved and texted scrabman and asked him how the elections were going. I was shocked when I found out I was in the lead. I really was. I was able to hold a steady percentage lead and win the Presidency by a couple hundred votes.

The Presidency

To say being President is fun is misrepresentation. Being President is the most fun you’ll ever have. First, power. Everyone loves power.. if you say you don’t, you’re a liar. Secondly, you have stuff to do. Erepublik is built backwards in the fact that until you progress, the game is pretty boring. Maybe that’s good, but it gets steadily more addicting as the game goes on. Being President is the equivalent of being on crack.. it’s that addicting, I promise you. I probably worked, overall, 10 hour days while President. Most of that time was on IRC and the rest was while I was out doing normal things, interacting via text and wireless.

I set out to create the best cabinet in the history of eUSA politics, and I think I did. My cabinet was filled with political, economic and military superstars. I had a few uber close advisers. One of them was Inwegen, my Chief of Staff. The second was PigInZen, my Deputy Chief of Staff. Pig and I had a pretty close relationship and still do. It’s nice to have someone local to relate to and Pig was always on, so he was my eyes and ears. He was, in essence, my Josh Lyman. Proggypop, Scrabman, and Hokiehigh were my “USWP Brethren” and thus were in the inner circle.. so was Gaius Julius and One Eye, of course, as Vice President. Beyond that, it included Emerick (although I honestly didn’t trust him at first) and tdwester and various other personas. This doesn’t even include those like Eugene Harlot and Lucius Varenus who sacrificed countless hours for the betterment of the military (Qn20, et al, you too).

My term was probably the most hectic of any President, ever. Maybe save Emerick. I was thrust into the world’s most massive war right at the start, so it was trial by fire. Luckily, I’d been in the government for the past 3 months so I knew what I was doing. Scrabman was excellent at delegation and setting up forms of communication, mainly the forum, for the cabinet to discuss. I followed his trend and Emerick has as well. The President receives a brief each morning and various cabinet members weigh in throughout the day. It is, in essence, a running tab of the day’s activities. Very helpful to look back on. If you ever become President, you can view the Harrison Richardson Presidential Library.

So, back to the war. I knew it was coming but I saw no way out of it. We had to stand our ground and fight. Immediately, my thought was that we’ll likely suffer heavy losses. Granted, I didn’t expect it to get as bad as it has, but a lingering thought in the back of my mind always existed. My plan was, basically, to turn the war into a war of attrition. We pulled literally every stopgap we had out of the book. We retreated to regain initiative, we had allies block, we did this and that. In the end, the lack of attention to the world over the past 6 months on the part of ATLANTIS was to blame for the war. We allowed small nations X, Y, and Z to become engulfed by PEACE. PEACE can give an ultimatum of “join us or die”, and they did. Also, PEACE, for better or worse, rules with an iron fist. If you do not bend to the will of IndoHungary, god rest your soul.

I get tired of talking about the war. It is what burned me out in the end. When I lost my re-election bid I was almost happy. First, I got to publish these badass memoirs.. and I got a break. After a month of the shit you go through, you want to quit Erepublik all together.

Among the other things that happened in my term were me firing Chris Stanwick for being a complete and utter idiot, me telling PEACE “NUTS!” on their proposal for peace (it required us to abandon our allies… something I’d never do), and attempting (yet failing) to initiate domestic policy changes during a war. To any future President, don’t even try. It’s impossible. Being a war time President is literally a 24 hour job.

The Retirement

As you can tell, I wrote much less about the HR years than I did the Franco years. It’s just easier to write about far past rather than recent history. To add to that, it’s much easier for someone else to record this history now than before. I’m part of a dying breed of Beta Giants who will leave no tangible history of the early years of the game. With luck, this will provide at the very least a biased view of Erepublik and the USA to future generations of gamers. If I can give anyone advice, it’s that as soon as you register, leave political ideology at the door. Write using game mechanics, not rhetoric.

I retire after over a year of gameplay, with 1 term as Deputy Secretary of State, 5 as Secretary of State, two as RfC President, two as Vice President, and two as President of the United States. And the two times I was President, mind you, were on different accounts. If anyone anywhere in the eWorld can claim this fact, I dare them to. As far as I know, I am the only player, ever, to accomplish this.