I'm looking at introducing a hard cap on the number of active nations we permit per player, possibly around 1,000 to 2,000.
Please use this thread for feedback and discussion. Nothing is set is stone yet, although we have a strong interest in doing something.
What: While most NationStates players control a single nation, and the great majority have five or fewer, a small number of players operate very large numbers of nations. By one estimate, about 0.2% of players control about 50% of nations, with about 25 people each controlling 2,000 or more active nations, and another 25 people each controlling 1,000 - 2,000 nations.
Mostly (but not exclusively), people maintain such large numbers to farm Trading Cards, which can only be earned by manually answering Issues. These are time-limited per nation, so the only way to earn more Trading Cards is with more nations.
Why: More nations consume more site resources. This is particularly true for nations that actively log in to answer issues, but even nations that don't do anything put pressure on two crucial parts of the site: the daily updates and the World Census rankers, which must process every nation in the world. We're able to manage this extra load, but we currently spend a disproportionate share of site resources and developer time on a small number of site users.
How: We would need to enforce the cap strictly, with repeated violations leading to a site ban, so that honest players would not be disadvantaged. We'd also need a grace period so nobody can get banned for nations they forgot about.
Our ability to enforce a cap will improve with the introduction of the Accounts feature (coming soonTM), and this will also help players avoid accidentally violating a cap. But the cap wouldn't be tied to Accounts, i.e. we'd run cheat detection regardless of whether people have an account.
Cap Number: There's nothing magical about 1k or 2k; that's just the point where the numbers start to look a bit silly. It could be lower or higher.
General Timeline: (1) Public discussion (2) Announcement of cap (3) Grace period with warnings / notifications (4) Enforcement.
Questions: I'm interested in feedback over whether this cap would impact you, and if so, how. What should the cap number be, do you think? How important is strict enforcement? What have we not thought of?
Sedgistan edit: Following a very small number of inappropriate posts, we are invoking the Bad Faith standard in this thread - i.e. all posts are expected to be made in good faith:It is expected that players post with the intent of making the site a better, more enjoyable place to be - this is good faith posting. Bad faith posting is when a person is no longer interested in this goal, and instead seeks to score points, contributes nothing useful, or is deceitful.
This standard is enforced in the Moderation forum by default as well as Got Issues, and may be declared as applicable by the Moderation Team in other threads elsewhere when said threads involve policy discussions, mechanics discussions, discussions of potential additions/modifications to the game or forum, or other pertinent announcements. These threads, like Moderation "discussion threads," are meant to gauge the opinions of the community and otherwise help better player experience; posting in bad faith in such is detrimental to this process.
Where this rule is enforced, posts that violate this standard will be removed from the thread to the "Evidence Locker", so the removal can be reviewed by other Moderators if necessary. Players will not be otherwise punished for posting in Bad Faith; however, please note that repeated Bad Faith posting may cross over into spam, flaming or trolling.
