Hello all- Bronzend today with another political article for you, this time on a topic hitting particularly close to home for me.

I would like to preface this article entirely by saying that I believe that everything the USA Government has done in my brief time in the game is, at the end of the day, aimed at bettering the USA / situation of ourselves or our allies. The main party / it's leaders have been incredibly helpful at helping me and other new players learn the ropes, whilst simultaneously being incredibly generous with their time, resources, and knowledge, always being willing to assist when assistance is requested. Despite this, recent actions aimed at optimization are starting to tow the line of tyranny, in my eyes at least. I will outline a few of these below:

  1. "Equipment Groups." This is an idea that I am actually on board with, but one that I believe was done in an overly restrictive way. Basically, USA announced via their discord that they would be making an equipment upgrade program, where players group up and trade specialized equipment pieces to each other to further optimize / hasten their militaristic gameplay. While a great idea for combat output, joining REQUIRES you to NOT SELL ANY GEAR YOU GET, cutting off one of the main / largest gold makers for players of any age that I've seen so far. This is a rather emblematic example of my titular issue; a situation where good will took the reigns too hard and over-restricted the gameplan to a point where I simply cannot partake / hamstring my economic gameplay.

  2. "Gold Donations." I was very surprised to log-in to Eclesiar for a blatant gold request. Using the Government announcement, the USA is requesting donations from its citizens to fund its plurality of efforts on the global stage. While they haven't overly harped on it or anything, I think the idea that citizens need to be taxed extra to afford the decisions made by leadership is a problem in one of two ways:

    1. Either our leaders did not know the cost of the plans they put into work and acted without proper resources / preparation...

    2. OR our leaders knew the cost of the plans they put into and planned ahead of time to front the bill on the general population.

    Either way, when you have 15% tax rates / various sources of income (on-top of hamstringing your players already limited gold creation with the Equipment Groups), I think it rather wild to ask more of the citizens to front a war agenda.

  3. "Workplace Requirement." This one is the most hurtful in my eyes, as even after the leadership of the USA agreed they were hamstringing players economic gameplay via the Equipment Groups as a tradeoff for Military Growth and further requesting economic input from them via Donations, they continue to close the fist tighter and tighter. Today, it was announced that all USA players are expected to have a job in one of the Q5 companies owned by ONLY TWO PEOPLE in the USA. As such, I'm sure to lose some of my hardworking employees, some that I've made good friendships / promises of raises and bonuses when I am able to provide them later on. Now, thanks to mandated government work assignments, the USA government has forced me into relying purely on limited NPC labor, which presents economic challenges of its own (especially in the wake of the Workplace Requirement).

So what do you think, my reader? Is this good gameplay from government, or incremental tyrannical expansion? You decide / tell me below. I personally believe this is from a good place like I said, but that we are acting quickly / overlooking the downsides of acts before putting them out to our player base. Sure, that's technically a problem of it's own- but that's a separate issue if so. Obviously, it's rather difficult to cater to all forms of gameplay. Despite that, I definitely fear the economic implications of the new NPC reliance for aspiring businesspeople. With a limited amount of NPCs, wage competition will inevitably push NPCs out of the pay range of new players, whilst simultaneously disincentivizing new business creation due to Government Imposed workplace restrictions (ISSUE 3) and a general lower amount of spending gold (ISSUE 1/2). If this happens, this will also slow the spawning of NPCs, further driving up the wages / costs of the limited NPCs that already exist. These decisions, in my eyes, ensure the American tycoons as the only economic powers whilst making it harder and harder for new American businesspeople to engage in this style of gameplay.

I wonder what the readers think, though. Tell me below!