Did the promise of limitless secure regions destroy the community and regional politics of NationStates?
In my opinion, yes. I will explain my reasoning in a moment, but first let me look at the game as a whole.
NS, as a game, can be broken into five sub-games that live both gameside and on the forums. In (rough) order of player participation, they are:
- Answering Issues
- The World Assembly
- Role Playing
- Cards
- Gameplay
Domains
Each of these games has their own domain. As I explained, Gameplay lives in the regions. Issues exist at the national level, with national stats being a world competition. The WA exists on its own page. RP exists on regional RMBs and forums, and the NS forums. Cards, the newest of the sub-games, has their own game-side page.
Now, there is some cross over between use of domains. In the case of regions, although they are the primary domain of Gameplay, other sub-games use them. RPers use regions to host their activity on the RMB and any forums or Discord servers they have, and regional mechanics give rise to the system of WA delegates that help the WA to function properly.
Participation Levels
Within each sub-game, there is also a concept of how involved individual players are in the game. For example, some issues players might only log in once a week, while others might contribute to the issues pool by writing their own issues. Gameplay has the same sort of division, but the line is less obvious, because it has to do with whether players are conscious of and acting based on regional mechanics or not.
It should be fairly obvious who is in the very top tier of gameplay as a sub-game. That would be raiders, defenders, GCR politicians, and the like. But the lower tier is who, exactly? In my opinion, the lower tier of gameplay is anyone who considers themselves a member of a regional community. Or in other words, you participate in gameplay the moment you invest yourself in a region.
Regional Communities
For the most part, the sub-games of NS exist within their own sphere and community. There are of course players who get involved with multiple aspects of the game, and the communities that exist surrounding them; but some communities plant their home either partially or entirely in a specific region. By my definition above, this makes them gameplayers.
I should be clear, however, that players creating vanity regions, or groups of friends, or members of class regions, or players who move to a region and never participate in things with other regional members, don't qualify as gameplayers. They either don't participate in the community at all, or the core of the community is something other than the region itself. If there is either no community to invest in, or the community would exist on its own independent of the region, then members of that community are not gameplayers.
User Created Regions
So this brings us to the existence of UCRs. Anyone can make a new region, for whatever reason. This isn't inherently a problem, but it creates issues for communities that would otherwise thrive, and it degrades the quality of gameplay overall. I understand the connection isn't totally clear, so let me present a hypothetical: What would have happened if UCRs never existed?
Suppose for a moment that the only regions which exist were GCRs, and somehow new regions came into existence to maintain the same population density we see now in the GCRs. This means all active players would be concentrated in about 30 large regions, rather than disbursed throughout thousands of disparate regions. But what's the big deal? Well:
This means players not interested in gameplay would form communities based on something other than a region.
Conclusion
Essentially, the introduction of UCRs resulted in a fusing of regions with communities. This granted a free win in the realm of regional politics by the creation of new real estate you could guard without threat. Instead of having to compete in the realm of regional politics to pursue competing objectives, a player can found a region with the same promises as 50 other founders and never realize them. This kills activity. This only maddens communities who did not want to do gameplay. And this maddens gameplayers seeking quality politicking.
Ultimately, limitless UCRs existing in the same space as limited GCRs has forced many communities across NS to participate in gameplay and compete unnecessarily for activity and growth. Many communities that could have improved NS have been destroyed by raids or stagnation. That is why I say UCRs ruined NationStates.
So now that I'm done ranting, what do y'all think, Gameplay?
Edit: This absolutely is NOT a proposal to remove UCRs or something of that nature. I am more interested in discussing the unintended side-effects of having UCRs exist under the current model for so long. There are imperfections in any system. As evidenced by my involvement in UCRs, I whole-heartedly support the existence of UCRs.