NationStates

Over the next few days, regions will gain the ability to appoint nations as Regional Officers, with authority over specific areas. For example, a Diplomacy Officer can be given the authority to establish embassies with other regions, and a Communications Officer to recruit and manage welcome telegrams. The name and authority of each office is up to you.

To identify the power a nation holds in its region, you'll begin seeing new icons on nation pages beneath the region, signifying their authority: Executive, World Assembly, Appearance, Border Control, Embassies, Communications, and Polls.

This feature has come from much community discussion over a long time: thank you very much to everyone who contributed! It's a big change (affecting over 5,000 lines of code) and could make a big difference to regional dynamics.

Summary

• Regions may appoint up to 12 Regional Officers.
• Executive authority is required to appoint, dismiss, or modify Regional Officers. Only Founders and Delegates can have Executive authority.
• Apart from Executive authority, Regional Officers can be granted the ability to do anything a Founder or Delegate does.
• No Influence is required to appoint, dismiss, or modify a Regional Officer.
• Influence costs are doubled for Regional Officers. That is, most functions can be used freely, but some Border Controls, such as ejecting nations, are harder to use.
• Regional Officers retain power until dismissed.
• The Delegacy can be given a specific set of powers, rather than (as is the case today) being either powerless or fully executive. For example, a region could set their Delegacy to grant authority over Border Control but not Appearance.

Regional Officers are now available to all regions!

Thank you all who provided feedback during the initial few days of rollout. That led to the fixing of many bugs, as well as one major change:

• The power to suppress and unsuppress posts on the Regional Message Board has shifted from Border Control to Communications

The forums are also hosting intense discussion about what limits we need to restrict the use of Regional Officers as a weapon for raiders, who attempt to seize control of other people's regions. The most popular proposals are:

1. New Delegates should be unable to appoint new Regional Officers for the first 72 hours (but can immediately dismiss any existing Officers).
   
2. New Delegates should be unable to make any changes at all to Regional Officers for the first 26 hours.
   
3. Regional Officers should lose office if they're outside the region's borders at update time. (Alternately: only lose Border Control authority.)
   
4. Regions should be limited to no more than three Officers with Border Control authority.
   
5. Regional Officers with Border Control authority should face a small additional "flat fee" of influence for ejecting nations. (Currently, Delegates and Regional Officers can eject brand new arrivals at no influence cost, which helps when holding a newly captured region against would-be liberators.)
   
6. Regions should be unable to eject more than one nation per second. (This would reduce the effectiveness of a team of Border Control Officers working together to hold a newly-captured region against liberators).

So we have to figure out which of these will work and which, like every other thing we've tried to restrict raiders, will actually be subverted into a weapon for raiders. If you have feedback, please contribute! This is a community-driven process and we want to come out with a feature set that accurately reflects community thinking.

There are also a few other tweaks and additional features to come, such as notifications and the ability to resign an office. And are we keeping Founder/Delegate names at the top of region pages as well as listing them under Officers or what?! I don't know. But stay tuned.

[violet] wrote:

Todd McCloud wrote:Most excellent! I take it this will be available for both game-created and userite regions?

Correct!

Ever-Wandering Souls wrote:Are officers' powers come into effect as soon as an executive adds them?
Do delegates need to be in power for a certain amount of time to add officers?

Powers take effect immediately, and there's no minimum time limit.

Alustrian wrote:I am very interested in hearing the reasoning behind this particular change.

What came out of the Summit (and other discussions) is a set of points everyone agrees upon, such as Regional Officers being a good thing in principle, plus another bag of points people don't agree on, such as whether additional rules are required to prevent particular scenarios. I wrote code for much of this, but in the end we've gone with the simpler, optimistic implementation, rather than the conservative, complex one, with a view to seeing how it actually goes. If we decide additional rules are necessary, like time delays and influence costs, then okay. But we didn't want to start with those because they remove a lot of the power and flexibility of the feature.

Jakker wrote:If regional officers can eject, will that include delegates if the officer has enough influence?

Yes, a Regional Officer could eject (and ban) a Delegate, given sufficient Influence. If the Delegate has Border Control authority, though, they could unban themselves again. Or if the Delgate have Executive authority, they could give themselves Border Control authority, then unban themselves.

Astarial wrote:1) How will the WA power work? Does the WA Officer cast their own endorsements in the WA, or the delegate's? Can both the WA Officer and the delegate have WA power at the same time, or can you have multiple WA officers?

Regional Officers cannot be given World Assembly powers. Nor can World Assembly powers be removed the Delegate.

Astarial wrote:2) In founderless regions (including GCRs), can the delegate permanently remove certain powers from their position? Can they be temporarily deactivated?

Technically, yes: They can go in and remove powers from the Delegacy. But in practice, no, because Delegates always automatically have Executive authority in a founderless region, so can always restore those powers.

Ever-Wandering Souls wrote:Question: Do nations have to be in the region to use said powers, or, like founders and delegates, can they use powers when not in the region?

Like Delegates & Founders, Regional Officers don't need to be present in the region to wield their powers. However, nations do need to be present to be appointed as an Officer in the first place.

Amerika I wrote:do you have to be a WA member to be a regional officer?

No.

Alustrian wrote:can a nation be RO in multiple regions?

Yes. Nation pages, however, only show icons signifying authority in the current region.

[violet] wrote:

Cormac Stark wrote:How many years will we have to wait for the code to fix the problems we all know are going to occur?

Unless we decided to go in a different direction, I don't think we'd have a delay on code. Regional Officers required a rewrite of the fundamental system for determining who's allowed to do what. But to add a minimum period of time after election before a Delegate can appoint a Regional Officer, for example, that's only a few lines of code.

But I don't expect to rush in new rules at the first sign of trouble. This is a big change with big implications; there will be trouble, but that doesn't mean we run in and gut the feature. Even when the implications are pretty clear, like the increased difficulty of executing liberations, it will still take time to see it through and establish what sort of problems we have and what it may be worth giving up to solve.

And I do appreciate that to many people, they see a really obvious, specific problem, which can easily be solved by removing part of the feature. And they may be 100% right about that, and we end up doing it, but we're talking about a feature that's going into 17,600 regions and will probably be used in thousands of different ways. Before we take away a lot of ways that we haven't even thought of yet, and which may turn out to be pretty great, we're going to give that a chance.

[violet] wrote:[*]No Influence is required to appoint, dismiss, or modify a Regional Officer.

Benevolent Thomas wrote:It also stinks that an invader delegate can instantly appoint officers to help them banject would-be liberators the following update.

Cormac Stark wrote:

Benevolent Thomas wrote:It also stinks that an invader delegate can instantly appoint officers to help them banject would-be liberators the following update.

Emphatically this. This is actually really unacceptable; game administration has tilted R/D massively in favor of invaders with this, and part of the purpose of the R/D summit was to restore more competitive balance to R/D. You've just obliterated it, to be honest; defenders will no longer be able to liberate any raided region, and you've still taken no action to make defending against raids any less difficult.

Epic fail here. I'm honestly in shock at how little thought must have gone into this before rolling it out.

Karputsk wrote:I imagine if they intended for Officers to have a setup/removal period then they would have outlined that already.

Karputsk wrote:I imagine if they intended for Officers to have a setup/removal period then they would have outlined that already.

[violet] wrote:FAQ

To come!

Mousebumples wrote:

Karputsk wrote:I imagine if they intended for Officers to have a setup/removal period then they would have outlined that already.

Like perhaps in this section that is yet to come?

[violet] wrote:FAQ

To come!

Alustrian wrote:First - great for all the non-border control additions. fun stuff, etc.

Second - I have always tried to understand where ADMIN/MOD were coming from. But here...the thread you cite is from the "Gameplay 'R/D' Summit," yet you have totally lost it when it comes to R/D. As BT pointed out - this solution will not help with the tag problem. As EWS pointed out - (and I am far more concerned about this) no lib will ever be successful if there are 13 raiders waiting on the banject button (and even if they do not max out, raiders can easier have 3-5 "leads" online on any given update). I am very interested in hearing the reasoning behind this particular change.