NationStates

Hi all,

When looking through the stats of other countries, I see that the economy stat seems to cap at 100 (unlike income tax rate frustratingly). If this is the case, how are countries who have a 100 economy stat ranked for WA badges?

They're tiebroken according to your internal database ID, an essentially random value that you can't really do anything about. This is obviously not an ideal way of handling the situation.

There is a beta aiming to change this, but something has been holding up implementation of any of the betas for more than a year. I don't know why.

Trotterdam wrote:They're tiebroken according to your internal database ID, an essentialy random value that you can't really do anything about. This is obviously not an ideal way of handling the situation.

There is a beta aiming to change this, but something has been holding up implementation of any of the betas for more than a year. I don't know why.

I see. So to be in the top 1% would be more by luck than anything else?

Edit: Also, running my nation through all of those betas shows insane changes of stats. Especially my black market, 433 bil to 151 bil

While we're on the subject, my nation has had its economy at 100 for years, and all the options that would negatively affect the economy don't really do much. Economic output decreases slightly, but I've never budged from 100. So it seems literally the only way of getting it under 100 would be to pick the drastic options that will completely wreck it.

If the #1 nation in the world for Civil Rights or Political Freedom picked options that would decrease that value by a tiny amount, would they still remain at 100? Is there like an invisible set of numbers? Like even though they're officially 100 on screen, in the background it's really like 174.35 or something and picking that option decreased it to 173.24, so in theory they could pick a few drastic options and still recover easily. Pretty sure you just debunked it by mentioning how it all gets tiebroken, but it'd be funny if the only values that are capped aren't really capped.

Mexican Liberation wrote:While we're on the subject, my nation has had its economy at 100 for years, and all the options that would negatively affect the economy don't really do much. Economic output decreases slightly, but I've never budged from 100. So it seems literally the only way of getting it under 100 would be to pick the drastic options that will completely wreck it.

If the #1 nation in the world for Civil Rights or Political Freedom picked options that would decrease that value by a tiny amount, would they still remain at 100? Is there like an invisible set of numbers? Like even though they're officially 100 on screen, in the background it's really like 174.35 or something and picking that option decreased it to 173.24, so in theory they could pick a few drastic options and still recover easily. Pretty sure you just debunked it by mentioning how it all gets tiebroken, but it'd be funny if the only values that are capped aren't really capped.

My understanding is behind the scenes they are not capped (which is why the beta can show higher numbers) but that isn’t what is used to break ties.

Mexican Liberation wrote:If the #1 nation in the world for Civil Rights or Political Freedom picked options that would decrease that value by a tiny amount, would they still remain at 100? Is there like an invisible set of numbers? Like even though they're officially 100 on screen, in the background it's really like 174.35 or something and picking that option decreased it to 173.24, so in theory they could pick a few drastic options and still recover easily. Pretty sure you just debunked it by mentioning how it all gets tiebroken, but it'd be funny if the only values that are capped aren't really capped.

As the beta shows, your Economy value is actually 101.72, or at least would be sorted as such when the beta goes live. (I wouldn't put too much stock in the exact number, since I suspect there's a nonlinear scaling to keep numbers from going very far beyond 100 even when you're really doing much better behind-the-scenes.) So yes, it's a matter of your hidden numbers being high enough that you can afford to lose some and still stay above 100.

This is just Economy. The three freedom scores, including Economic Freedom, are genuinely capped, so keeping them at 100 or 0 is quite difficult. There are also a few other scores, like Integrity, that use a scaling algorithm to keep them from exceeding 100 even though the internal numbers can still go arbitrarily high (just the higher they go, the less visible change it causes in the visible census score, since you go from 99 to 99.9 to 99.99 etc.). I also expected Human Development Index to fall in this category, but oddly there are nations where it goes above 100.