Ranking error?

[New South Hell]

Today's lowest ranking nation, the least politically free, Mattaj, rates 11 on the Diebold Election Inking Scale. The second lowest nation rates 0. This certainly looks like an error of some kind.

[Ballotonia]

This actually seems to affect the last 4 nations: Der Schwarze Sonne, Stalins Dreams, Herbert the Pervert, and Mattaj.

The Most Politically Free ranking goes from 0 to 100 and matches the Political Freedom trend graph. There are a lot of ties, and they are determined by update order. [This is a bad tie breaker, IMHO, but it does have its (gameplay) consequences for the early-updating regions.] Note that Mattaj was just refounded 23 hours ago and this was the first Major update that nation participated in for 257 days. Its trend graph has just jumped from 0 to 11, even though it answered no issues (according to its national happenings) and isn't in the WA. Could it be that its WA Census ranking was made on pre-Rejiggeration data?

I'm also including the other three, because there's something fishy going on there as well. They do not obey the standard tie-breaker (update order). It's not until the fifth last nation that the bulk of nations start which are at the end of the update. The top of the ranking are nations in the beginning of the update, so that end of the WA Census is as expected.

Ballotonia

[Luna Amore]

On the topic of ties, why don't tied nations share the ranking they're tied for? Granted that'd mean this census would have around 900 #1's in the world, but it's true and a better system then update order.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

On the topic of ties, why don't tied nations share the ranking they're tied for? Granted that'd mean this census would have around 900 #1's in the world, but it's true and a better system then update order.

That would require significantly more work on the part of the admins, and might conceivably significantly slow down the update, too.

If they're open to doing it though, more power to them

[Luna Amore]

Seems this happened again with today's #1 in the world nation.

[Bears Armed]

Today's lowest ranking nation, the least politically free, Mattaj, rates 11 on the Diebold Election Inking Scale. The second lowest nation rates 0. This certainly looks like an error of some kind.

Clearly the corrupt government of Mattaj tried to supply the survey with falsified statistics...

[Ballotonia]

Seems this happened again with today's #1 in the world nation.

And again it's a recently refounded nation.

12 hours ago: Altrick was refounded.

I'm detecting a pattern...

However, that doesn't apply to the other three I mentioned, so I'm thinking there may be two separate bugs.

Ballotonia

[Ballotonia]

*bump*

This is still happening.

Today's update was again Most Income Equality. It saw a repeat of the prior problem, albeit with different nations.
Altrick dropped from its #1 position to 2,686th, without ever having answered an issue, joining the WA, or even logging in.
The #1 spot went to 1127, another recently refounded nation. It has a 202 on the Marx-Engels Emancipation scale, which for all non-recently deceased nations is maxed at value 200.

Ballotonia

[[violet]]

Aha! It's a quirk of the new server. What happens is the game caches a few nation values in memory, to avoid the need for heavy computations. Previously, these cached values would expire fairly quickly, as the RAM would be needed elsewhere. But the new server has lots of RAM, so it's holding on to those cache values much, much longer. This exposed a bug whereby a newly restored nation would get rejiggered but fail to instruct the cache to drop the old, unrejiggered values. So the nation is fine, it's just wrong in the cache... like a web page that looks wrong until you refresh it.

It shouldn't occur for any more newly restored nations, and answering an issue causes the cache to be flushed, too. For the rest, it's probably easiest for me to flush them manually.