eRepublik

[Gets]

www.erepublik.com

wtf is it?

It's a browser-based life-simulator currently in beta (not all locations in-game yet, sorry to the minorities). You create a character, find a job, get involved in politics and the military. Should you have the money to do it, you can create a company or start a political party. The game is set in the real world, divided into present-day countries. There is an individual economy for countries and set exchange rates, civil wars and struggles of power. If you have already played Travian you might enjoy this as well.

why should I play?

My guild is getting into it and we're only a few atm. Even if you don't decide to play you're helping us create our own company by signing up. The game itself is just a few mouse-clicks a day (click to work, click to train, check not to die of starvation, ez-pz), but kind of like EVE it's following what's going on that's interesting and what takes up most of the time. Currently Spain has the biggest population, Norway holds most of the space but being overall 8th and SA is trolling seven types of crap out of Turkey (map). As mentioned not all countries are available yet. So the current situation is as follows:

My guild has chosen to raise power in Finland, currently occupied by Norway. There will be an independence vote on Monday followed by presidential elections, so an underdog-type struggle will break out probably. We have a good chance though, since Helsinki is the biggest city in eNorway and breaking apart will hurt the torsks for sure. My guild is creating its own company thanks to all the invitations we've spread out. It's done by creating a separate SO (holding) account where managers can be assigned to. If you don't want to work for a bunch of strangers for tablecrumbs with no benefits, then choose Norway as your starting country. You can also help get independence for Finland by joining the Sovereign Finland party and vote on Monday (disclaimer: I'm not Finnish, so I'm not pushing any personal nationalistic agendas here. It's the path my guild chose).

If at any point you want to move nations, invite someone and get 5 gold. Exchange that to local currency and buy a moving ticket from the market and fly to whatever rundown loser country you want.

fine, whatever, how do I get in?

Easiest way to get in is send me a private message with your e-mail and I'll send you an invite. Otherwise you'll have to wait until the game itself allows more registrations. Once you're in you can send your own invites, every successful one nets you 5 gold (not to be confused with local currency).

  IMPORTANT! READ BEFORE SIGNING UP   

When you create your character, you are allowed to choose a country and region. This is the first page of the sign up process where you choose a password! They are not asking for your real-life country and region, they are asking where you want your character to live. If you've joined Norway choose a Finland area (e.g. Southern Finland). Otherwise it doesn't matter much.

i'm in, now what?

Your character begins with a wellness level of 50. If that reaches 0, he/she will die. If you fail to eat during a calendar day, you will lose 5 wellness, so eat some, foo. If you do eat during a calendar day your wellness will be replenished depending on quality of the food. Other actions that effect your wellness: working decreases it by one, getting defeated in combat takes it to 10%, etc.

Then you should find a job. You do this by going to the Economy tab, filling in your Curriculum Vitae and salary (your employer will choose your salary, but it helps if you start low). Writing a CV is not hard like in real life, most of them are similar to "HI THAR, HIRE ME PLZ! lol" I copy&pasted George Carlin's "Modern Man" speech for example. Other resources might be just as effective.

To make yourself easy to find for me, put your salary request as 1 and field as "housing" thank you very much 

You can also join the military and train, but this is optional.

If you've joined Norway under a Finnish area, you can get a job via yours truly (GetsIX is my eRep name) or from a list of Finnish companies supporting independence. Also help out by buying only Finnish products and joining the Sovereign Finland political party.

There's probably a large number who will instead want to go "AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!" and maybe even create beneficial accommodations for other F13-ners there. I'll leave that to someone else and discuss in this thread.

Links:

eRepublik Wiki
eRepublik blog/
SO introduction

In-game newspaper articles (join first):

Sovereign Finland planning to break out of ATLANTIS treaty

tl;dr
Send PM with e-mail for invite and instant access.

EDIT: As I was writing this my guild already put up our first housing company under the name Nove Avatara Housing. We're in business!

[cironian]

Was that first link supposed to go to erepublik.com instead of erepublic.com? Confused me for a bit.

[Gets]

Sorry, my bad. The weird spelling is one part of it I haven't gotten my head around yet.

[Falconeer]

I am a Finn at heart, so I cannot stand the occupation no more. Invite me now and let's kick those norsemen back home.

[Gets]

I just can't spell republic with a "k", I just can't!

In the meanwhile, e-mails 

[Viin]

In as 'Viin'.

Edit with a q: You can be in the military and have a civilian job too?

Also, what's a "low" salary in NOK money?

[schild]

You just wrote a lot of stuff but didn't explain where the fun was.

[Gets]

I'm not entirely sure yet. I got drawn in as my guild's IRC channel went hot a while ago and they're still going on about ePakistan being a possible factor for us, having conquered eChina and eIndia. Earlier I didn't have a clue how to get a job and now I'm a manager. An eEstonian, working in eFinland doing construction of all things. It's comical to watch the stereotypes reappear like that, especially knowing the tension in the real world currently. Frankly, I would have had more fun making up a world and avoiding all the inevitable bigotry, but hey, the trolls would have one less place to go, I guess. Also the fact that you can, unsurprisingly, buy gold for real money. Blatant RMT isn't one of my favorite things in the world, but I maybe it's good I found this out later and not immediately.

But it's a browser-game. To this crowd that in itself should be self-explanatory. These types of games go up on popularity when summer's ending and people are going back to school and work en masse. Most of the eFinland citizens are just a bunch of Travian refugees looking for something more engaging, I suppose. Accusations of multi-accounting already started flying high (some Norwegian political leader, go figure) and those are always amusing if not a tad outdated in such games. For every new e-citizen that joins eNorway loses 30NOK to inflation, so they're not that happy we're deciding to go independent.

I just read the history of eIran, which was rather amusing. And eSweden has conquered eGermany, eDenmark and ePoland. Judging by that pattern we're surely next on the list!

An ok starting salary is 1-2NOK. We'll get that higher once we actually finish producing our own house. Accepting invitations and getting gold also helps as all of that will go to the company. It seems we're taking on a general "Corp is Mother, Corp is Father" policy.  It takes 20gold for a Quality 2 company but we're not going there until people raise enough skill for that. Should be less than a week. We're using 40gold to create a new company for now, it seems, to make room for more employees.

Pages are beginning to lag. Probably the US logging in.

[Lantyssa]

What do I need to do to sign up for the other side?

[Gets]

Nothing. You're free to choose whatever ruling nation from the account creation screen no matter which nation the person belongs to who sent you the invitation.

I'm sure many other online communities have chosen their respectful nations already, so I figured being part of the creation process of Finland (Winland \o/) would have been the ideal solution for newcomers.

[tmp]

You just wrote a lot of stuff but didn't explain where the fun was.

The banner on game webpage has France clearly counter-attacking and winning some small war of sorts vs Germany. How much funnier than that does it really have to get..?

[schild]

But it's a browser-game. To this crowd that in itself should be self-explanatory. These types of games go up on popularity when summer's ending and people are going back to school and work en masse.

This is the worst explanation of fun I have ever seen, Gets. Maybe there's a language barrier (doubtful!) but I was really quite serious - all I know is it's some game where you get to be my boss and Finland pays in NoK. This is the sum result I've gotten out of 9 of your paragraphs. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just really really asking what the hell the interest is here. What's the "game" part. Or even the Sim part. I know you have to eat but uhhhhh ok. What else? Do I like wake my character up, make him go to work, then wait 8 hours and make him go home. I mean, it can't be that mundane is it?

[JoeTF]

It's all about national pride and thus not for you US guys. You don't have any nation that have conquered and humiliated you in the past, so you have no idea how it feels to be able to destroy another country, slaughtering it's citizens, ruining it's economy and erasing it from the map forever; all of that while you know that there are living, breathing (and crying) Germans/Frenchies/Brits on the other side.

[Bzalthek]

So it's international emo angst?

How long until /b/ conquers the world via Niger?

[tmp]

So it's international emo angst?

How long until /b/ conquers the world via Niger?

According to their wiki they already tried, with Iran though. But it's /v/-controlled Pakistan god-state that controls half of the world atm.

[JoeTF]

and the goons are trying their way with Mexico now.

[Ghambit]

Okay, so is this game any good or not dammit?!   
Schild, did you try it?  Educate me.

[schild]

No. No one explained why it was fun.

[Lantyssa]

It's good because of "Teh Hate".

[Viin]

It's a sim, it's not *suppose* to be fun.

You will make your own fun and you will like it!

[Slyfeind]

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS THREAD ABOUT??? 

[Falconeer]

Some games are not fun.
Some games, especially multiplayer ones, just fulfill a few silly needs we have.
Like wasting time or just having it pass (some think that's a remedy against boredom), showing off, having someone to look from above, or just having the perception of learning stuff and being then able to pass down the knowledge. These are usually MMOs.
The majority of the un-fun games involve other people because the people generate the fun, through other people we find and sublimate the fun. Or not, but still we'd feel that something is happening on the social level and that is, most of the time, more than enough.

Leveling is a beast. Be it EVE, or EverQuest, eRepublik and Goalline Blitz and ultimately Real Life 1.0, this is an era where most of the time as long as we are leveling we feel safe and satisfied. Fun is optional as long as we are moving up. And that is sad.

[FatuousTwat]

I think I've gotten to the point where the fun part of MMO's is just not enough to make up for the stupid shit. IT'S THE END OF AN ERA! 

[UnSub]

I'm in. Don't think there is an

Started in Thailand since I just watched "Tom Yum Goong" and Tony Jaa is awesome.

I'm going to be the most capitalistic political soldier ever.

[JoeTF]

Small update.
Today they released "V1" version, which was supposed to be the official release.

Uhg. Is it just me, or mmo designers are biggest failures of entire IT industry. As in, picking up the phone is too complicated for you (to work call center), you go become mmo designer?

Instead of releasing current beta with few new things and bugfixes, they wrote an entire new game and unleashed it on players. Without any form testing. That new thing is slow as fuck (for a pure html game that doesn't even use flash, it's a fucking achievement!), dumb as fuck and so ridden with bugs, you cannot even play it (most amusing is the fact private messages don't work, so you cannot even report all those bugs ^_^).

They had less or more brilliant idea and they just slaughtered it. 

[Soln]

so is this like the Game of Life, which was a game, or just an economic simulation?  Because why would I want to play that?

"at lvl30 you get to get your license.  At lvl50 you can spec your mortgage"?   Fail.

[JoeTF]

Realize your mad political ambitions or just kick your neighbors ass.

[Zira]

Small update.
Today they released "V1" version, which was supposed to be the official release.

Uhg. Is it just me, or mmo designers are biggest failures of entire IT industry. As in, picking up the phone is too complicated for you (to work call center), you go become mmo designer?

Instead of releasing current beta with few new things and bugfixes, they wrote an entire new game and unleashed it on players. Without any form testing. That new thing is slow as fuck (for a pure html game that doesn't even use flash, it's a fucking achievement!), dumb as fuck and so ridden with bugs, you cannot even play it (most amusing is the fact private messages don't work, so you cannot even report all those bugs ^_^).

They had less or more brilliant idea and they just slaughtered it. 

I try to register, but the form just goes nowhere... you fill it in, submit it and it returns black...

Damn, wanted to be the first Aussie citizen there too....

[UnSub]

I was playing in the beta for a while now.

Well, maybe 'playing' is too strong a word. I'd log in once a day, go to work, train in the army, buy food and log off. Whee.

The new version includes a 5 question quiz (4 options per question) with 20 seconds to answer each question. I'm finding some of the questions pretty obscure and am weak at geography, so do pretty badly with the quizzes.

I like the idea of the new version - to give casual players more to do - but yeah, things are pretty slow.

[Gets]

We at Nove Industries are very much enjoying the fact that you don't get any money from selling your products 

The economic crisis made us lower everyones wages. Unsurprisingly some people started quitting over it, others just complained, violently even. It was satisfying. Corporate Management should be one of the evil factions of any game.

[UnSub]

The new version (v1) is has a number of fun bugs. One of these bugs meant that people couldn't vote properly in eThailand (and probably other elections) so the election was 'stolen' by the incumbent.

Said existing government is now buying the lowest quality hospital for about 20x what it should cost. Questions are being asked about why this is, if the TNT (the government that is possibly facing its last term as it stands) is just looting the economy for a kickback. However, even if they are, it looks like nothing is going to be done about it.

Oh, and the president of eThailand is now apparently blackmailing the opposition into putting taxes to the levels he wants or else.

... this is as exciting at this game gets, folks.

[UnSub]

If I were a developer, I'd put a feature in my browser based MMO that let me save my character for later, rather than requiring them to be fed constantly or suffer permadeath.

Good thing I'm not a developer.

[nurtsi]

I died in this game, too. Play again? Umm, no.

[sidereal]

This game is very poorly moderated. 

[UnSub]

Yes.

I'm amazed that people are putting rl money into it to buy gold to start up companies / political parties et al when the actual game play is so weak. I can see the attraction of meta-game politics, but even that is pretty limited.