I'm now running the development for Issues. In short that means I'm making the decisions on what gets passed to admin to code.
Issues are a bit different from some of the other areas that have got Development Managers, in that the issues game regularly gets new content added, thanks to the team of Issues Editors. So the focus here isn't really on the issues themselves, which IEs continue to add, but on the issues-derived information you see on your nation page, such as the description, world census rankings, industries and so on.
The other difference is that a lot of the development is on behind the scenes tools for Issues Editors, or is work that has to happen behind the scenes, because it involves the confidential game stats. But there's still plenty to discuss publicly here.
Before we go any further, I want to make clear that the Bad Faith standard is being imposed in this thread. You are expected to post in good faith. If your post is in bad faith, it will be removed and I will call you out.
The purpose of this thread is to gather views on what changes we can consider making to improve the experience of those managing their nations via issues. Links to previous ideas that already have threads are helpful.
Keep your posts brief. I am not going to read walls of text. Also, it's not expected that we are going to get into long back and forths in this thread over the merits of certain ideas. They'll get their own, separate threads for that. I'm not banning replies, but don't get drawn into those discussions.
From my point of view, what I'd like for us to be able to do is present more information to players about their nation, and go into more detail in some areas.
We've seen some betas go live recently, but there are plenty more ideas for world census rankings in the works. There are aspects of the text that goes into nation pages that could do with some sprucing up, particularly to make use of some new stats we've introduced since changes were last made to this. Additional detail on the "People" tab of the nation page would be good. Yes, we know how everyone dies, but how do they live?
More banners to unlock are on the agenda already - we're in the process of adding more images we can use for these & issues newspaper headlines.
Finally, the dreaded industry reform topic - it's been discussed for years, but needs to be addressed at some point. NS's range of issues are unrealistic and limiting. We'd like to see a more comprehensive range of industries in-game, but ones that continue to recognise NS's quirks, with niche industries such as Beekeeping added alongside the more predictable big ones like Pharmaceuticals.
The concept of adding industries has problems, though, which is part of what's held us back. One is how to present this information on nation pages - if we hadd 30 industries, for example, the industry badges overwhelm regular ones - so do we need those displayed separately? And the other is how we translate existing industry "scores" into new ones. We do not want to undo years of hard work from players, but also want to ensure that all the new rankings are not just dominated by the same nations. I imagine that we'd look to consult on these details, as well as ideas for the new industries themselves, as part of the process.
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