A Different View of the Hospital Debate

Day 792, 14:23 • Published in USA USA • by PigInZen


Hospitals - Again?

Let's start from the beginning. I'm sure that there are many readers out there who tire of rehashing the US invasion over the summer but it's important to make note of that time and draw some conclusions from that period. Before we were invaded we had a hodge podge of hospitals of various quality levels scattered throughout the country. These hospitals made no difference in the ease with which PEACE GC was able to roll through our regions and also apparently made little difference in citizen retention.

Fair enough. Many will point to this simplified summary of our collective history as proof that lower quality hospitals do nothing to improve the eUS with its 51 native regions. I'm here to argue a different angle and I'm going to use some up-to-date statistics to do so. Hopefully along the way I'll change the scope of the debate and spark some serious thought about what might be the best infrastructure strategy for the eUS. I will attempt to incoporate strategic conclusions that appear to be at odds with the others. I will come back to this time period further on, so try to keep this in mind as you read this article.




Embracing Chaos as a National Strategy

A good friend of mine, both in Real Life and in eRepublik, LiveFreeOrDie, made a strong case for incorporating Chaos Theory into national strategy. He wrote an article on this topic, titled Harnessing Unpredictability. Essentially, LFoD argues that our national penchant for top-down organization leaves the game in a BORING state for the vast majority of its citizens. Let's face it, the game at its most rote is a boring one; work, train, buy some food and you're done. If there's a battle or two to fight in, great. That adds a little flavor. The upside to decision makers in harnassing our vast populace is obvious: we gain firepower, hopefully predictable firepower, to counter the tanking abilities of our opponents. But the effect is obvious: people are reduced to glorified bots, being told when and where to fight.

By extending this thought outward we're building a society in which groupthink and authority rule the day. This doesn't help with retention as many citizens will begin to wonder "what's the point?" of day after day of glorified five-to-ten clicking. I cannot blame them.

Allow me to shift gears and look at some statistics I've recently gleaned from our national database.




A Statistical Approach

A couple of searches on the US citizen database turned up some interesting numbers. The first search involved new citizens. Over the past 30 days the number of new citizens that joined and stayed in US regions was 10,766. Of these new citizens, 5,166 never bothered to gain any experience and can be considered dead. I believe that this statistic holds up over time and that it is safe to conclude that on average, only 52% of our new citizens find the game interesting enough to even try it after registering. These are the citizens with whom we need to be focusing.

The second search was for all US residents having greater than 30 wellness who were employed and who had greater than 8 experience. We don't currently have historical data searching enabled so I'll have to use employment as a rough gauge of activity. Granted, there are many people who are employed who are no longer logging in but for now this is the best I can do. For the purposes of this article it will suffice. The employment and experience thresholds weed out those citizens who, essentially, will not be returning.

This search returned 12,941 people currently residing in the US that had wellness > 30 and who were employed. Of these 3,920 were in California, 6,071 were in Florida, and 1,311 were in Karnataka. Together that means that 77.47% of our total "active" (by our loose definition) already reside in one of our three fortress states. Of the leftover citizens residing in the remaining regions, some interesting trends were notice😛 3,358 of 12,941 total citizens had less than 50 wellness. 3,404 of 12,941 were new citizens as defined by the first search. Finally, 2,046 of these 12,941 were BOTH new citizens (last 30 days) AND had less than 50 wellness.

I should point out that 1,004 of those "new citizens with low wellness" resided in California, Florida and Karnataka... I think it is somewhat of a refutation of the Fortress Strategy as it pertains to retention.




Fortresses! Good for Defense, Bad for Citizen Retention?

I know that I've probably already lost many of you by this point. For those of you that have slogged through this article, thank you. You're about to be rewarded. For those of you that have reached the "tl;dr" phase, well, I'll apologize and simply say that I hope you dig deep and finish it. If you don't, well, try not to let your personal opinions on this matter be swayed by the arguments you hear from the more widely-read amongst us. It's important.

As we were almost entirely taken over a concerted effort was made by the US government to encourage people to move. We actually had a large percentage of citizens who were active that resided outside of Florida and New Jersey. By moving these citizens we were able to centralize our citizenry like never before, building the wall in Florida as a huge deterrent to attack. The "Fortress Strategy" was proven out as the deterrent in the form of an astronomical attack cost in Florida held PEACE GC at bay.

I believe, however, that now our national obsession with the Fortress Strategy is proving counter-productive in our struggle to increase citizen retention.

Why is this? Look at our statistics from the previous section. There are so FEW highly-active citizens remaining in our "wasteland" regions that we've hit the realm of diminishing returns from the Fortress Strategy. In fact, we're now in a paradox of sorts: the Fortress Strategy is a viable strategy for deterring future attacks on particular regions. I believe it also serves as a disincentive to citizen retention. The vast majority of citizens in "wasteland" regions are low-level, relatively new citizens. Many of them have no idea how to use a hospital or understand what benefit it brings. Sure, we're trying to get them to move but the incentive to relocate no longer holds the same urgency as that of fleeing an invading force. The argument of "national priority" doesn't hold as much strength to someone with a connection to their real-life state of residency.

Some have argued that placing Q2 hospitals in regions that attract most of the new citizens would be a good strategy to pursue. It is argued that by providing people with a "training hospital" would allow them more time to become acclimated to the game before losing hope. I would like to suggest that Q2 Hospitals might help with retention (everyone pretty much agrees that Q1 hospitals are a waste). At the very least they WON'T HURT and if they're not going to cost us anything we should go ahead and try. (And here is where I duck...)




Q2 Hospitals? What Are You, Some Kind of Wiseguy?

As a matter of fact, yeah, I said it. Here's my logic. Right now we have several DISINCENTIVES to citizen retention:
1. Rote, mechanical approach to game play that takes what little fun there might be in deciding for oneself where to live, work and fight.
2. Having to disown everything that you bring into the game with you from Real Life; psychologically, this is a huge hurdle that takes time to do.
3. Current strategies provide relatively little room for personal individuality in game play.

Q1 Hospitals will only bring a citizen who has fought BACK to the wellness level they were at before fighting. It's disheartening to see one's wellness drop day after day and not understand why. I remember when I first fought and saw my wellness drop below 30. I almost left the game forever. The Q1 Hospital in Indiana didn't help my mood. If there were a Q2 Hospital in high-recruitment regions some new citizens might gain enough time to actually stick around and LEARN ABOUT THE GAME.

Right now we're expecting too much of our new citizenry. We're feeding them information and demands with a firehose. eRepublik is a different kind of game and requires different kinds of approaches. Let's not all jump to the same conclusion that "Fortress good, all other Hospitals bad". Rather, I believe that the following regions would be served well by a strategy that INCORPORATES the presence of a Q2 hospital with an outreach strategy that targets new players.




Citizen Retention as a National Strategy OR LET'S HAVE MORE FUN

Here are the new citizen numbers over the past three days, ranked by recruitment (NOTE - THESE DO NOT INCLUDE CITIZENS WITH 0 WELLNESS):

1. 80 California
2. 47 New York
3. 25 Texas
4. 16 Florida
5. 15 Michigan
6. 14 Washington
7. 12 Virginia
8. 11 North Carolina
9. 11 Pennsylvania
10. 8 Massachusetts

We should place Q2 Hospitals in much of this list - especially New York, Texas, Michigan and Washington. Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania might also be good places. We should also direct the Welcoming Committee, Meals on Wheels, Flying Unicorns and Salvation Army to begin directed outreach to NEW CITIZENS in all regions. Every new citizen that gains experience in their first day and returns again should be contacted multiple times. The others that gain no experience or that do not return are useless to pursue and are a waste of resources. I would also like to open up the new citizen reports to any and all political parties for contact, recruitment and new citizen support purposes.

In addition, we should shore up our Fortress states by making residency in California, Florida or Karnataka a requirement for obtaining Q1 weapons via the "Guns for Huns" program. Finally, the eUS should consider the benefits of giving every new citizen a week's worth of food for free with the promise of 5 Q1 weapons once they reach level 5 to encourage people to stick around.

The longer people give eRepublik a look and the more times they return to play the greater the chances of our retention. We don't need to descend into bickering and take sides in this debate. I believe the numbers speak for themselves. Let's make eRep FUN AGAIN.


E Pluribus Unum. From Many, One.



I'LL SAY IT AGAIN: Together we have strength beyond measure. Do your part. Follow DoD orders. Fight with weapons. Maintain your wellness. SUPPORT THE CAUSE.