Suggestion: Reduce population growth.

[Tule]

One thing that has always bugged me about NS, (as much as I like it) is how incredibly fast the population growth is and how quickly nations reach over a billion people.
It's not a terribly big issue, but it does have certain disadvantages. I think it might be discouraging to new players who would like to RP with nations that may even be only a few months older and may make the larger nations harder to manage.
Many players simply RP with a different population than their profile suggests to avoid this, but that can have problems of its own.

So my suggestion is that everyone starts with 10 million people or so and grow by 1 million per day. Whether or not this change should be retroactive or not (For example by cutting a zero off the populations of current users) I don't know, it certainly would not be popular with everyone if put into effect.

IDK, just something that crossed my mind.

[Mallorea and Riva]

Admin has said that they aren't going to touch population growth.

[Nua Corda]

It's silly, but they're not going to change it. Just RP with a fixed population and ignore gameside statistics. If people don't like that, don't RP with them.

[Breadknife]

With it being a more or less steady increase over time (as opposed to proportional to the current population, thus exponential growth) and already not affected by issues (ones where you go down the route of birth control measures... or the opposite) it's only really a rough measure how long (apart from any absence through account time-outs) a nation has existed.

Being arbitrary, of course there's nothing against "devaulation". But there's no advantage either. For RP purposes you can currently convert gameside populations to RP populations (e.g. estimate age and convery into a "compound interest" figure, and/or take into account a Malthusian upper-limit), but messing with the 'game' measure would make such a conversion more difficult.

(Not being a deep RPer myself, I have no idea if anyone goes the whole hog and properly factors in births, deaths, immigration and emmigration (using general fecundity, attitudes to ex-marital sex, health levels, attractiveness/overcrowdedness of the country and border controls, as would intermittently be adjusted through issues) to "more accurately" produce a roleplayed population... But messing about with the current measure wouldn't easily help there, either.)

[The Fascist American Empire]

As much as I'd like this, they would probably have to take dow the whole website and reboot it to do this.

[The Most Glorious Hack]

Plenty of people have role played smaller-than-listed populations. Either by reducing the number, reducing the modifier (changing "billion" to "million"), removing the modifier entirely (300 million becomes 300), or just using a flat cap.

Since it only matters in role playing, there seems to be no need to modify it.