Robo-workers - Idea proposal for eRepublik

Day 4,097, 03:15 Published in Ireland USA by Alias12


Hello all,

With this article, I would like to propose a new idea for this game. I recently wrote a ticket to the admin staff about this topic, who suggested me sharing the idea with the rest of the community to get some feedback first. For this reason, I am writing this article so everyone can see it and comment on their opinion. Let me begin.

Introduction
My name is Alias12. I have been playing this game for 4 months on a row now, after coming back from being eDead. The reason why I returned, is that I find this game very interesting. Many people may prefer the war module and the ability to fight for their countries as the main enjoyment, but I like better the economy module. Being gone for so long, my account is not developed enough to be competitive in the war module, so the economy one is more challenging and helps me grow my account faster, by earning some additional income. However, as I have noticed, but as well as many of you may have said before, the economy module is not developed enough. Some may say that it is not complete yet. For this reason, I would like to propose an idea to eRepublik staff, regarding the improvement of the economy module. The next section will contain a lot of economic terms, so if you want, you can jump directly to the next section.





Economic background
One reason why the New World's economy does not work as intended is that inflation in the game is very high and unpredictable. As an example, I can bring the price of q1 houses, which were worth just 2500 currency each when I rejoined the game. Now, 4 months later, their price has skyrocketed by more than 100%, and they are trading close to 6000 currency. High inflation and high salaries ruin some of the features of the game. For example, even though there are 4 different industries you can work in, 1 of them is not profitable at all (air weapons industry), 2 of them are profitable only when you work as a manager (food and weapons industry, except working in q7 weapons factory) and only the remaining one is profitable to use it as the game is designed to. Also, since the number of players is limited (and not increasing anymore), the amount of labor/work tickets in a given day is fixed. So if the existing players want to create new companies like house and q7 weapon companies, where you can hire workers, they will face a labor shortage. As a consequence, they will have to offer higher salaries, increasing inflation even more. This inflation in the job market is then transmitted to the rest of the economy, especially house and q7 weapon prices.





Solution
My idea is to introduce a new feature. Since 2019 is here and more and more jobs are being replaced by technology in real life, I think it is about time to introduce robo-workers also in the game.

The coolest way in my opinion to do this is to create another market where you can buy the so-called robo-works. Their number should be limited, let's assume only 10'000 robo-workers for the entire New World. Their salary could be fixed, or they can be hired on auction. This is for the game developers to decide. Also, those workers can be specialized for different sectors (this would be a lot more cooler, also in my opinion) or they can be all standardized. With specialized robo-workers, I mean that there are different workers that can be hired for each industry. For example, there will be different types of robo-workers for producing food, weapons, houses and aircraft weapons. By differentiating between these workers, and the price paid for each of them, people may find it attractive to hire these type workers for all the industries of the game. That way, the production of each industry would increase and the prices would be less prone to inflation. The currency spent on hiring these workers will be taken off the game, so the supply of currency will be also controlled and not lead to higher inflation.

Another cheap way to implement this idea (cheap in the sense of low developing costs and time) would be to sell work tickets on the market for gold or currency. Whenever the salaries on the market increased by a lot, players would turn to this market and buy more work tickets to be able to fulfill their consumption needs. Also, this idea would not affect the sales of tycoon packs materially, because I assume the majority of the players buy the pack for the 20% extra productivity bonus rather than the 150 extra work tickets. On the contrary, the increase in work tickets would increase the number of companies players own, because it would be easier for them to find workers and to make a profit. The more companies the players have, the higher the chances would be for them to buy tycoon packs to get an additional 20% productivity bonus and earn even more profits.


1. There is a shortage of workers in the market nowadays. This leads to high inflation in the job market (salaries are increasing constantly), which leads to increasing prices of all the products in the game.

2. I propose to increase the number of workers in the game. This can be done either by:

- Implementing a new feature, robo-workers, which you can hire them
for currency or gold and in return get 1 work ticket for each day you
hire them, or

- Selling work tickets directly to the players. Players can buy work
tickets with gold or currency and use them to work in their companies.

Whatever idea is chosen, the number of extra labor supplied should be fixed. How big that number is, needs to be estimated by the admin staff.

3. The implementation of this idea will keep inflation in check, it will reduce prices, and will increase the total number of products manufactured. As a side effect, this will make the economic module of the game more balanced and I hope that players satisfaction will increase.




Thank you for listening to my proposal. It is essential for everyone to read this article and provide their feedback if they want to. That is why I would like everyone reading this article to share it in their friends feed, MU feed, National feed, post it even in your player description if you want to. But please spread the word.

If you like this idea as much as I do, please say so by writing it in the comment section and by voting this article. Let's show to the admins that this idea is well appreciated so that they can add it into the game. However, if you don't like this proposal, your feedback is also welcomed. If it is possible, try to write the reasons why do you think so. Maybe we can include your feedback as well. That will be very helpful for me, but I believe also for the admin staff. If you have any extra question, feel free to ask below, or you can PM in the game.

I wish you all a good week.

Cheers,
Alias12