ERepublik

eRepublik is a massively multiple player online, social networking and strategy web browser game developed by eRepublik Labs which launched on October 21, 2008 and is accessible via the Internet for free. The game is set in a mirror world (called the New World) where players, referred to as citizens, join in local and national politics, set economic policy, start businesses and wage wars with other countries. It was developed by Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru. There are currently 23 members of staff for the website besides the founders.

Overview
eRepublik combines both social networking and strategy into a single massively multiplayer online game where players can participate in a variety of activities. Citizens of the New World can be employees, own businesses, form political parties, vote in elections, become party presidents, members of Congress or country presidents, write newspaper articles and even go to war as citizens of virtual versions of real life countries. The game has very few visual elements and is primarily text-based in nature.

Upon joining a citizen picks which virtual country he wishes to join. Each of these countries is named after an actual country in the real world, and is located similarly. The citizen then seeks employment at a company within that country, and is allowed the opportunity to train as a soldier for that country. Training, and working at a company is done on a daily basis by a simple click of two buttons. One of the main drawing points of the website is that it takes a mere "14 minutes a day" to participate.

War Module
Recently the developers of Erepublik have enabled the War Module allowing the virtual countries to wage wars of attrition with each other.

V1
The latest updated version of the game released on October 14. It contains many changes from Beta like a new war module and political structure.

As the game matures, it also begins to generate profit on the 750 thousand Euro investment that was previously made to support the game's development. Since the release of Version One, it has been more difficult to obtain Gold (in-game currency commonly obtained by purchase with real currency but can be gotten by other means) due to tweaks in the invitation system and two Gold cost 0.5 Euros. In Version One a lot of things that were free in beta now cost Gold. Examples include attacking regions in a war and making newspapers. More peaceful options such as changing the description of a "newspaper" also used to cost Gold whereas it was not needed previously. The newspaper fee was repealed after much complaint.

New functionalities include a Twitter-like shoutbox system. Users have a quota of 3 shouts per day, which can be expanded by paying in euro. By paying 10 euro, internal messaging becomes unlimited, you get 10 shouts per day, and 50 inventory slots. Another way of improving in-game modes is purchasing Gold (In-game currency) for Euros you can buy the packages in 20,40 and 80 gold respectivly.

Politics
On the fifth of every month erepublik hold the presidential vote, on the fifteenth the party president and on the twenty-fifth the congress elections. Days before the presidential vote the top five parties will select a person to run for president, and then it is just a major vote across the country. When running for party president it will cost you 2 gold to run, anybody can run, provided you have the level requirements. The congress elections are a tad bit complicated than the rest.

The top 20 in each party is automatically set up to run as a congressman, then they do a major vote all across the country. In V1 they changed it a bit, the party president selects a person from their party to run in each region, running against other parties representative, people that live in that region vote. This style represents a Senate more than House of Representatives, as in Beta Depending on the percentage of people vote for a party determines the number of congress they get, a total of 40 for a country. If someone tied a vote with someone for the last seat erepublik automatically chose by referring to experience points.