Join the new world

If you’re reading this for the first time, or if you’re already hooked on The Daily Noobs after just one issue, welcome. This newspaper is written by a NooB, for NooBs. Hopefully, I can help you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made as I got to learn the game, and help make this country more fun for everyone. I’m going to give you a great NooB tip right now. Did you know that you can subscribe to a newspaper? Really, you can. Go ahead and try it. Just click the “Subscribe” button in the upper right hand corner of this page right here to try it for yourself. Doesn’t cost a thing, and you’ll be able to easily find new issues when they come out by clicking the little green button under your mailbox and notifications buttons. You can also “Vote” for the paper by clicking the little blue box to the left of the title of this article, under the green box with the embarrassingly low number in white. That’s free too. Voting for a paper lets people know that you read it, and recommend that others read it too. But before I try to get you to click that one, I suppose I should start writing something you might want to read.

Today I’m going to write a little bit about “Wellness”. Wellness is a measure of your health in the game, and it affects you in several ways:

-As I mentioned in my last article, your Wellness affects how good of a worker you are; the higher your Wellness, the better you perform at work. Think about real life (RL); how productive are you when you go into work feeling sick? Same thing.

-Wellness is also important if you ever find your way into a war. The higher your Wellness when you fight in a battle, the more damage you do for your side. Fighting in a battle reduces your Wellness, and if your Wellness drops below 40 (out of 100) you will not be allowed to fight. And you should want to fight, but that’ll be another article.

Wellness has other effects too, but we’ll touch on some of that further down.

When you come into this world, your Wellness starts at 50. You post your pic on your profile, you get a job, you train- all the stuff the game tells you to do. And then you notice that your Wellness is lower. At least two points, maybe more! What did you do wrong?!?!

You didn’t do anything wrong; that’s part of the game. Training wears you out. Training takes one point off of your Wellness every time you do it (I KNEW exercise wasn’t good for you!). And work can be a grind. Working at a company that makes low-quality (Q1) goods takes one point off your Wellness each day. But working at a higher quality company is probably less stressful, right? Wrong. You lose one Wellness point per quality level of your employer each time you work there. That could be as many as 5 Wellness points, along with one for training giving you a loss of up to six per day. Now, if you’re a Noob, you’re probably at a Q1 company (possibly Q2, but I hope not), so you’re losing 2 points per day. You just got here, and you’re probably down to 48 Wellness. Looks like it’s gonna be a short game, hunh?

The good news is that there are ways to get your Wellness up, too. The bad news is a lot of them cost money, which you probably don’t have a lot of right now. So you might be thinking of skipping work or training. Don’t. Work and train every day. Get those skills up so you can get a raise or a better job and make more money. Train so you can eventually join the army and fight in a war. If you skip a day of either, you are setting yourself back. Early in the game, you have to trade your Wellness for experience and money. It’s a good trade; take it.

So how do you keep your Wellness from draining down to zero, effectively killing your eSelf? The first thing to do is eat. Food gives you Wellness. After a long day at work, there’s nothing like a good meal. Of course, you can probably only afford Q1 food- the equivalent of eRamen Noodles. The Wellness benefit you get from food is based on the quality level of the food, and your current Wellness level. If your Wellness is high, you get less benefit from food. The math is actually this:

Wellness increase = (1.5 - (current Wellness/100)) * Wellness bonus points

“Wellness bonus points” is the quality level of the food you eat (1-5). So if your Wellness is about 50 and you eat Q1 food, you get one point of Wellness. You can only eat one unit of food per day, and it happens automatically when the eRepublik day changes (3 am east coast, midnight Pacific). To eat food, you need to have one in your inventory when that day change comes.

You’re losing 2 Wellness per day for work and training, so you’ve got to eat Q2 food just to stay even, right? Yes, but there’s a problem with that for most of us NooBs:

Best price for food at the Marketplace, 2/10/09, 8:21 pm central:

Q1 - $1.51
Q2- $2.38
Q3 - $5.29
Q4 - $8.38
Q5 - $15.10

Ouch. As NooBs, we don’t make a lot of money. Q2 food looks pricey those first few days if your salary is low. Heck, Q1 food might be tight. So should you skip a meal and save the money? Definitely not. If you don’t eat, you lose more Wellness. It’s a sliding scale based on your current
Wellness:

Current Wellness Loss for not eating
>80-100 -4
>50-80 -3
>10-50 -2
>0-10 -1

As a NooB, you’d be losing another 2 Wellness points (on top of the 2 for work and training) if you don’t eat. You should definitely try to eat something. So you need to go to the Marketplace, go to the food market and buy at least one unit of food. It will be put in your inventory, and you’ll automatically eat one unit of the highest quality food in your inventory each night (Best in, first out – BIFO for any accountants out there!).

So if you’re only able to buy cheap food, and you’re losing more Wellness points than you can afford to add right now, what are you supposed to do?

First off, don’t worry about it too much right now. Your employer should realize that you can’t do much about your Wellness right of the bat, and since your skill level at work should hit 1 in 2 days and 2 in 6 days, you should be able to get a raise or a better paying job before you starve to death. But there are other ways of gaining Wellness. The first two won’t help you much right now, so I’ll just mention them quickly. If you own a house, you get the same Wellness benefit from a house that you do from food, with the quality level of the house (1-5) taking the place of the quality of the food. You can’t afford a house yet, so don’t spend too much time on it (come to think of it, where are all these homeless NooBs sleeping in eMerica? Lotsa park benches, I guess). The second way is using a hospital, but you can only do that on a day when you’ve fought in a battle, and you can’t do that for quite a while.

Third, you can buy (for 2 gold) a “Wellness Box” in the Market under “Get Gold and Extras.” This contains 10 “Wellness Packs.” Each Pack boosts your Wellness by 1. You can buy 2 boxes per day (20 Wellness Packs, +20 Wellness) unless you’re a really high level when you can buy 4. Experienced players may do this when they’re fighting in a war, but they generally don’t do it otherwise, and it’s probably not the solution for you right now.


The solution for us.

Finally, there’s the Wellness solution for the rest of us: Gifts. Gifts make you feel better. You get one Wellness point per quality level of the Gift (1-5) regardless of your current Wellness (but never above 100 total Wellness), and you can gain up to ten (10!) Wellness per day through gifts. There is one big catch, however. You can’t give yourself a gift; somebody else has to give it to you.

When you buy gifts in the Market, they go in your inventory. When somebody else gives you a gift, you consume it and get the Wellness increase.

Great. You don’t know anybody here, and you’ve got to get somebody to give you a gift. How the heck are you supposed to do that? There are a couple of ways. First, you can try to set up a gift exchange with somebody. Lots of other people in the game are looking for gifting partners too. Find one and start swapping. A couple of bits of advice on gift exchanging:

1. Make sure you agree ahead of time how many Wellness points’ worth of gifts you are going to exchange. If you want to get 3 Wellness in an exchange and have already bought a Q3 gift, make sure the other person knows that. You don’t want to send them a Q3 gift and get a Q1 gift back because of a misunderstanding.

2. Be clear about whether this is a one time exchange, or a recurring deal. You don’t want confusion to cause one person to send a gift when you aren’t going to reciprocate, or vice versa.

3. You can only receive 10 Wellness points through gifts each day. That’s 10 Q1 gifts or 2 Q5 gifts (or any combination where the quality levels add to 10). Don’t commit to sending a gift with somebody, then pull out because you hit your limit.

4. Make sure you reciprocate on the same game day that you receive a gift, and as soon as possible. The other person is concerned about their Wellness too, and might be holding off working until they get your gift. Additionally, people live in lots of different time zones. There are people playing in the eUS but living abroad, so send your gift as soon as you are able, because you don’t know when they have time to access the game.

5. If you have set up a recurring gift exchange and want to stop it, let the person know as soon as possible, so they can arrange a new gifting partner.
How do you find gifting partners? Your co-workers are a good place to start. You can also check the “Shouts” in the upper right hand corner of your home page- some people will shout “Looking to exchange Q1 gifts!” Send them a private message (PM) first to see if they still need a partner. You could post a shout looking for a gifting partner. You could go to eusforum.com and post a message on the Gifting Exchange thread in the Welcoming Committee category.

Another place to find a gifting partner if you have limited time online is to click on “Info” on the main tool bar and select “Social Stats.” This takes you to a page that gives you a snapshot of the eUS population among other things, but also how many people from your country are currently online. You can click “Who” next to that number, and see a list of the people who are signed in right now. The most experienced players are listed first; they might not need gifting partners. Flip through a couple of pages, check out somebody’s bio, and if it looks like they are a high enough level that they can afford a gift, but have a Wellness level below 90 or so, send them a PM and ask if they want to exchange gifts.

To actually exchange the gifts, you’ll first have to have one in your inventory. Go to the Market, select gifts, and buy the level of gift that you want to swap. Then go to your exchange partner’s profile page and click on “Offer a gift.” The highest quality gift in your inventory will be given to them, so if you have a Q3 gift in your inventory, that’s what they are going to get, even if you only wanted to give them a Q1 gift. Plan appropriately. Like I said earlier, 5 Q1 gifts are the same as 1 Q5 gift, so just make sure you send the agreed on equivalent in points.

As a last resort, if you can’t find anyone to exchange gifts with (and really, you need to be more outgoing if that’s the case) then talk to your boss. Ask him if you can “Donate” a gift to him or his company and have them Gift it back to you. Since your boss benefits from your increased Wellness at it’s not costing them anything, he or she is likely to be willing to help you out. To do this one-sided round trip, make sure you click on “Donate” on the profile page of the company or your boss. Then, you’ll have to click and drag the gift down to the donation area and click “Donate.” While you can’t “Offer” a gift to a company, make sure that you “Donate” it if that’s what you’ve arranged with your boss, so he doesn’t have to go buy you a gift he hadn’t planned on paying for.


I Can't Afford A Gift!

“But wait,” you’re thinking. “You know I’m a NooB. You know I don’t have much money. Why are you telling me to go buy things I can’t afford anyway?” OK, you’re right. You want to know how to get free gifts. Well, there aren’t many things to try there, but there are a couple. First, ask your boss. After all, you’re more productive if your Wellness is higher, right? Not all bosses can afford to send you free gifts, but some can and will, especially if you’re showing up to work every day. But be polite about it. Don’t just send a PM that says “I want a gift” and think you’re going to get one. Also note that some bosses might be under additional strain right now, because the economics of business have changed now that workers can’t boost their productivity through a good performance on trivia.

Some of the political parties have gifting programs as well. Yes, they’re trying to buy your vote. Let ‘em (at least for now, since you can’t vote anyway). Now, the two I know of are really gift exchange programs that help you find gifting partners, but if you’re really hurting, they might help you with nothing in return. Try the USWP Hand to Hand Fund and Group Services United Inc . I’m not a part of either organization (though I’ve found gift exchange partners through both, and both have helped me out on top of that); I can’t speak for them, but they’re basically here to help you. Great people at both groups. Now, don’t just go and tell them you’re desperate for a gift if it’s your first day and your Wellness is 48. Send them an honest message describing your situation; show them some respect for being experienced players trying to help others in this game.

If you still have no luck, try your congressman. If you don’t know who they are, you can find out by going to “My Places” selecting “Country Administration”, clicking on the “Politics” tab, and clicking on “Election Results.” If your state results don’t pop up first, make sure you’ve got “Congress Elections” and your state selected in the drop down menus. Your congressman has lots of constituents (especially if you live in a heavily populated state) so they may be getting a lot of requests, but they’re more experienced players and may be able to help you themselves, or through their political party, or know someone else that can help you.

Well, this article is turning into a double issue, so I’d better wrap it up quick. Just a couple more points:

1. When buying gifts compare prices. Sometimes a Q2 gift costs less than two Q1 gifts. Just make sure that you can exchange it for equal value so you don’t end up wasting your money.

2. The math to decide what is a better buy, high quality food or gifts, gets pretty complicated and depends on market prices and your current Wellness level. I’ll write about that in more detail another time. For now, when you money is limited, look at the cost per Wellness point for Q1 vs Q2 in both Food and Gifts, and realize that you really should buy at least one unit of food, even if it’s just Q1 food. Then, take the incremental cost of Q2 food and compare that to the cost of a gift. With a Wellness below 50, the extra quality point for food is worth the same or more as a Q1 gift. At today’s price posted above, you’d pay $0.87 for an extra Wellness point by getting Q2 food. A Q1 gift is more expensive.

3. If you can’t afford food, send your boss a PM and ask him or her to help you out. The Wellness difference between eating even Q1 food and not eating at all is huge; if you’re currently at 50 Wellness it’s a difference of 3 points (1 point for the food and 2 points for not eating). At 51 Wellness, it’s 4 points.

That’s all I have for today. Hopefully, this is useful to you, and you’ll feel like going up and clicking that Vote button now. Thanks for reading.