This Insider article was quite good, so I had to publish it in the blog too.
After considering the achievements of 2008 in the last article, we’ve decided to share our challenges for the first half of 2009. The priorities in the near future are:
- Improving the experience of citizens. The existing modules will be improved in order to make them more easily understood by new citizens and also to provide a better overall eRepublik experience.
- New citizen laws. The new set of laws will replace the eRepublik 10 laws we have now and it will bring a more complete coverage of the events that are taking place in the New World.
- Visual improvements. Usability and game experience can be upgraded by improving several visual aspects of the New World. This process will be a constant challenge for our team throughout the year.
- Tools for general managers. Yes, the inclusion of the famous company statistics is one of our top priorities as it has been one of the most highly requested modules by the community.
- API system. A teaser of the eAPI was released last year and can be found here. The deadline for this complex project is approaching fast and our developers are working full-speed on bringing this new product to life.
- Translation in other languages. No web project is cool enough without being translated into other languages. The first steps were done and 2009 will bring new languages to the New World
- Moderator module. This community module will help citizens perform moderation tasks. As the eRepublik community is a fast-growing one, these types of tools are highly needed in order to provide a more complete and timely moderation.
- A cool eRepublik map. While the wars are developing fast, the map of the New World is constantly changing and a cool system is needed in order to display the new borders of the eRepublik countries.
- Citizen ads. The possibility to promote your party or your company in eRepublik is something our team is very keen about, therefore ads regarding the entities in the New World will be one of our challenges in 2009.
- eRepublik shop. T-shirts, eRepublik passports and badges will be fun things to have this new year.
- Add new countries. After Slovenia and Croatia, several other countries will be added constantly in eRepublik. The next one will be announced here.
- War improvements. Improving the current war module is one of our main challenges and with the feedback received from you, we shall make the proper changes regarding this module.
- Customization. Citizen / game customization is something we will start adding in small increments throughout the year.
- Newsletters. One of the tools that will help citizens keep up to date with the latest news around the New World.
- Adviser system. The tool used in beta will be back in V1, but Plato will have a more complete and fun coverage of what’s happening in eRepublik.
- Poll system. The poll system shall be used by parties, organizations and other entities in the New World and our team will use it to have a more complete view of the citizen needs.
- A new way to add improvements. Starting February the changes will be uploaded only once a month and announced at least a few days before hand.
New communication tools for citizens and improving the existing ones are also among our priorities. Along all of these front-end features, many other improvements will be made to the modules that are not visible by the citizens as these back-end modules help our team respond quickly to your needs.
All of these priorities are just a glance of what we expect in the next few months, several other features will be added in time. Remember to keep an eye on the eRepublik updates topic, the place where the new modules, features and improvements will be announced on a regular basis.
A Happy New Year To All Of You!!!
Dear Citizens,
As many of you already know, the 14th of October will be the pre-launch of Erepublik V1 to our existing community of BETA users. This will be followed by the official launch on the 21st when we begin to actively share V1 with the outside world (press launch). As a result, the site will be down today as we make the transfer from BETA to V1..
Here is some fun stuff about the development:
- 4 months of work until the first blueprints were created
- 10.000 hours is the total amount of work for creating the specs, design, developing and testing. Not including the brainstorming fights we had.
- More than 2000 tickets (tasks) for the developers
- More than 200 pages of documentation
- Around 40 km walked by George within the office
- More than 20 team members worked on creating this product
- 4 different major layouts changes
- 2 team members broke up with their girlfriends because they spent most of the time at the office.
All of this because:
- We had a crazy idea that proved to be interesting not just to us (thanks for that)
- You the community quickly showed us the limitations of the beta and how we could make it better
- We were prepared for hundreds of challenges but had to resolve thousands;
- The BETA design did not support a large amount of simultaneous citizens online and we couldn’t grow it technically to its potential; so had to rewrite everything for scalability;
- It became harder and harder to add new features in the old code;
- We have a huge amount of involved citizens that have driven us to work on the weekends and during the nights because we are passionate about making Erepublik a better place for the community.
What we’ve done:
- Changed almost 100% of the code and design;
- Created a slightly different gameplay based on the same ideas of economic, political and geo-political simulations and community interaction. Erepublik is still Risk meets Civilization meets the web on steroids;
- Came up with new modules, improved many and took out a few of the old ones;
- Focused on the “15 minutes user experience” so that citizens that are less excited about their political or economic careers can still have fun during their time in Erepublik.
- Improved the citizen’s interactions
What we have not done
- Gotten it all perfect right from start. We know that some will not like a few of the new features in V1 and others will not like certain things we removed.
- Make all the modules as good as we would like them to be.
- Put all the changes that we wanted to make in this first version of V1
- Found all the bugs, although the ones we know about have been fixed.
What we’ll do:
- Top priority: resolving bugs and security issues that may appear over the next few days and working on the scalability of the new platform;
- Improve the current features and implement new ones: API system, multi-language, mobile version, citizen’s adds, 1vs1 fights, random events, reputation system, create polls, private forums and the list continues
- help the API devs create new interesting apps connected to Erepublik.
Conclusion: We will present to you in a few hours a new Erepublik. A new world in which we have invested a lot of work and energy. A new world that we consider a big step forward but, at the same time, a world that needs much more work and is far from being complete.
The real world might have been created in 6 days but… we are just the admin and the only person with superpowers around here is Cristesco (apparently he says he can find multi accounts when sleeping). Consider this version of V1 as day 1 and enjoy it when we go live!
Thank you all for your support and for being a part of Erepublik.
The Erepublik Team
Over the next few days we have to make some changes in the Erepublik database to improve long term performance. This means that the site may not be accessible or slow at times. We apologize for the inconvenience and will do our best to get this sorted asap.
Read more…
Yesterday we gave to the Citizens that used all their invitations 3 more invitations to send to friends. Also we invited 400 new Citizens from the waiting list to start their lives in Erepublik.
If you are still waiting to get in and don’t have a friend that can send you an invite, pacience we will let you in over the next few days. If you’d like to get in please go to www.erepublik.com and register for an invitation or ask a friend who has available invites.
We also made a few improvements to the erepublik beta:
Easier to hire
And the good news on hiring new citizens is that we have just made it easier to do so, a manager can now “Propose a job” to another Citizen from the same country right from the Citizen’s profile page (the link is under the profile photo).
New Header
We made some small modifications to the header to make it easier for citizens to check their wellness level and the new Alerts received. Some of you might have seen broken designs on your browser, this is due to the cache - the solution is to refresh the page (F5) and everything will be OK.
Adviser
We have also made a small change to our adviser Plato, replacing the several daily tasks tips with a single one that takes you to a separate daily tasks page. There you can see tips on the main things you can and should do today to develop your citizen and country. This new format considerably reduces the queries to our database but we are not sure it’s the ideal solution so we will be tweaking that one and feedback is welcome.
Other way to get GOLD
Some presidents such as Aliatar in Spain or Alexis Bonte in France (disclosure: Alexis is one of the co-founders of Erepublik) have decided to put some of their country GOLD reserves in the local money exchange at lower costs that the actual value of gold vs the local currency. They have done this to help local entrepreneurs mainly (tip this is also good for exporters). An interesting initiative none the less and it will be interesting to see what will be the economic impact of that. In any case the initiative seems to have found interest in Spain where the 100 GOLD where taken up within a few minutes
Also erepublik was in the news again, in:
» France on “journal du net”
» Romania on “Business”
We had to take down the project to make some improvements. No data will be lost and the website will be back on as soon as we resolve them.
Thanks for understaning.
PS: Sorry for doing this the hard way.
Dear Citizens,
Yesterday was a crazy day, the first real first big test for the admin. With the population growth the number of queries to our database and servers jumped trough the roof. At some points of the evening we had more than 200 simultaneous citizens in erepublik plus several more trying to get in. As a result a few of you might have seen a not very nice page stating that we were doing “server maintenanceâ€.
To be more specific what we had to do is streamline a lot of the queries because due to the very large stats system and points system that we have, erepublik.com creates a lot more queries than a normal website. So when we have 200 concurrent citizens in our world the load on the servers and database is the same as if we had 2000.
We had planned the “beta†to be able to hold 500 concurrent citizens but hadn’t counted on the huge number of queries. The result is that although during the day yesterday we managed to streamline several of the scripts and add server power therefore doubling our capacity that still wasn’t enough.
We are going to double again our capacity today and have started working on a much more scalable hosting solution but we will need a few days to move to it. Also we didn’t want to make such a major change just before the elections.
So in order to be able to deliver the required performance to all citizens and avoid major server outages we have decided to take the following temporary measures.
- All new citizens will from now on only receive 2 invitations instead of the 5 usual invitations. This is the only way we have to keep the growth somewhat under control, of course we want our little world to grow as much as you but not at the detriment of every users experience.- We have removed for the moment the country ranking points system and replaced it with each countries present population. This was one of the major query loads on the database and it was not working properly anyway (bug). No points have been lost, we are working on fixing the points system bug and will put it back on as soon as it is fixed and that we have moved to our new hosting solution.- We will be looking at other things like the points system that cause large server server loads and might have to disable them from time to time, we will do our best to limit this to non critical functionality.
We are doing everything we can so that we have a lot less issues today and give you as good an experience as we can.
Thank you all for being a part of the erepublik adventure, we might have had no sleep yesterday but we are thrilled by the positive responses of so many of you.
The erepublik admin team
Dear citizens, we are experiencing much higher than expected server loads and are working to fix the issue (ie switching to better hosting) we are very sorry for the inconvenience and hope we will have erepublik “the new world” back up and stable asap.
