A user recently said that this year's N-Day should be moved because it would be inappropriate to run a game where NS nations war against each other on the second anniversary of the day when a sovereign nation commenced a war on another sovereign nation. Sedge responded as follows:
Sedgistan wrote:It's too late for us to move it. I also think we would not have moved it, even if this was raised further in advance. We have an Events calendar with particular times they happen (e.g. last weekends of Sept and Feb for N-Day) to ensure they are spread out over the year, and not too close to those with set dates (e.g. April Fool's, Z-Day over Halloween).
This issue was raised last February, the first to be held at the start of the year, and I expect that the date of the start-of-year N-Day will remain a cause celebre among some supporters of Ukraine on NationStates until and unless Russia is defeated. (This outcome is by no means guaranteed, as demonstrated by recent events in Avdiivka.)
May I suggest that future start-of-year N-Days be held over the first full weekend of March instead? The difference in timing would be a week, essentially negligible in the grand scheme of things: for 2025, this would mean starting on the evening of March 1st instead of February 22nd; for 2026, this would mean a March 8th start, instead of February 21st or 28th.
In fact, moving N-Day forward a week would:
- bring it closer to the midpoint between the February 14th and April 1st minigames, which is roughly March 8th/9th, and
- ensure that the gaps between the two N-Days converge towards 26 weeks each. Under the status quo, the N-Day in September 2023 was 31 weeks from the N-Day in Feb 2023, and 21 weeks from the N-Day in Feb 2024. If my plan were taken forward for (say) 2030, the N-Day in September 2030 would be 30 weeks from the N-Day in Mar 2030, and 22 weeks from the N-Day in Mar 2031.