Erepublik Goes Stable
After what seems like years of the site being in beta, Erepublik Version One has been announced for the 14th. According to the slightly date confused blog post the new main features will be:
- New modules, and the removal of less popular ones
- Improved game experience for users who are less interested in the political and economical side of the game
- “improved the Citizen’s interactions” which is quite vague and could mean virtually anything
The blog post also makes it pretty clear that they will be focussing on fixing bugs, bugs and more bugs above anything. There is also mention of an API, random events, private forums, a mobile version, citizen’s adds(?) and 1vs1 fights.
Reader Comments
5 responses so far
1George Lemnaru 
2Beta tester 
3Alan 
4George Lemnaru 
5Alan
Leave a comment“improved the Citizen’s interactions” - we added a few new modules that will make it easier for the citizens to communicate. I’m thinking first of all on the public shoutbox system and the law debates areas.
Private forums will be also included in the next period of time.
Thanks,
George
Erepublik in the beta phase was a good concept for a game. However do to pressure from their investors they are pushing out an entirely new code base that is extremely buggy, almost to the point of being unusable. All user actions are now require knowledge of arcane trivia such as “How may seats are there in the Bulgarian Parliament?” The developers had to take down the site early because there were massive hacking of player accounts. This doesn’t even touch that real money is required to ‘unlock’ user accounts to a barely usable level. Erepublik looks to have been designed by marketers and accountant who looked on games like Second Life and figured they could profit off of players while offering an even crapper game.
I’m sorry to hear that. I really hope this isn’t the case from the final release - but I guess this isn’t the first venture to turn out like that if they ruin the site that drastically. It would be a massive shame to see it happen to something like Erepublik.
Even if money from the site is tight, restricting features surely isn’t the way forward - advertising is one of the ways they could go. I really don’t think the site has a big enough user base if they do decide to screw it up that badly, and I doubt many of the users would consider the service worth paying for.
I’m now hoping that you’ve massively exaggerated upon the situation - either that or I can confidently say I won’t be the last user to stop using Erepublik because of the changes they’ve made to the site.
Restricting features = features can be accessed by obtaining enough experience points (by working, fighting, voting, etc) to access each new level. That was created in order to avoid multiple accounts as some people created new accounts to get very fast some easy votes.
You can get over those levels by paying for the Unlock features pack but this is just a way to access those features easier.
Thank you for your good toughts.
That certainly sounds justified - it will make your character have an in game goal to reach.
I think this will be a massive improvement to Erepublik, and an unobstructive way to make money from the site.