NationStates

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:29 pm**

Reploid Productions wrote:Nationstates 2 was the aborted sequel to Nationstates, developed by Jolt/OMAC. While it had some things in common with classic Nationstates, the developer went against Max's wishes and did an extremely poor job of making the new game workable. It maintained the classic NS style of randomly selected issues to change the stats on your nation, however this system meshed horribly with trying to do things like keep people from starving. The trade and war systems were defective, as largely the only way you could keep said systems from completely mucking up your economy was to have everything set to neutral.

It was buggy, badly designed, and the dev team seemed almost completely unresponsive to user feedback from the early alpha that the NS1 moderators got to participate in onward. In addition to that, the subscription perks were unattractive ($5 to have a custom flag... oh wait, I get a custom flag for FREE here...) and it quickly became clear that the company was not putting much work into the game, instead bombarding users with "Hey, try this OTHER game we run and give us more money!" nonsense.

It was short-lived, with the company taking it down July 1, 2009, claiming they were putting the game on hiatus to work on it some more. Given that the nationstates2.net domain name instead began redirecting users to one of Jolt's other games, the claim that NS2 will ever return is dubious at best. Max still owns the domain name, and took it back after this happened, and the page load a brief description of the situation and provides a link back to classic Nationstates.

There was other drama behind the scenes between Jolt/OMAC and the Nationstates team, which contributed heavily to classic Nationstates leaving Jolt and going independent again around the same time. Mostly it involved Jolt mods overstepping their bounds, and OMAC failing blatantly to follow through on their contractual obligations regarding the use of the Nationstates name and the money they owe Max Barry for that usage.

And that's the really abridged, cleaned-up version. There's a lot of hate among the mods for Jolt/OMAC, and I'm pretty sure I've been quoted somewhere for my comment about Jolt applying suction to syphilis-afflicted genitalia.

Apparently, there's A LOT of hate.

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:31 pm**

Nationstatelandsville wrote:Apparently, there's A LOT of hate.

Karma's a bitch.

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:36 pm**

Daistallia 2104 wrote:
Terrmish wrote:what was nation states 2?

Short answer: A SNAFU wrapped in a FUBAR inside a TARFU.

Long answer: In the beginning Max created Nationstates, and it was pretty good. But the players cried out for more. There was much discussion, and the one thing that most agreed was missing was war, with trade a distant second.

Max's server had trouble with the number of players, so Jolt, a British gaming company offered to host the game and forums.

After several years, OMAC, an Irish company, bought Jolt. They promised to develop the long talked about NS2. In doing so, they broke many promises to Max and others.

Then they announced they would test the beta. (As I understand it, against Max's wishes at that point, as he thought it wasn't ready.) The players looked upon the Beta and said hmmm.... There were some who complained about the implementation but there were also some who were happy with it and yet others who said "it is but a beta, give it time..."

The beta opened without war even having been programed yet. The trading system was such that a new "feature known as "worlds" was needed. Rather than allow large player created regions with 1000s of nations that could all interact with each other, players were required to choose a world limited to around 300 nations. Instead of player created regions, nations were randomly assigned to continents. Once so assigned, there was no moving, so one could not play with one's friends but was instead thrown inm with random strangers. And bexcause of the requirments for the trade engine, there could be no interaction between worlds. This made players from large regions/alliances unhappy.

As already noted, certain features that are free on NS (custom flags being a big one) were pay on NS2. I know of at least a couple of complaints regarding billing and at least one regarding the contract terms being unilaterally reworded by OMAC.

Still, most players were waiting to se how the much promised war feature would be implemented. When it was, there was much howling and to do. Most of the players were unhappy about it. It was strictly one-on-one, making the alliances that had been built up meaningless. It was more damaging to be the attacker than the defender. And the results were highly unsatisfactory.

Around this time. OMAC started publicizing "their" game. The review was glowing. The comments from players and NS staff on the review website were damning. OMAC was displeased. I was IP banned from the forum by the CEO for complaining.

Max, having retained ownership of the site and the original game, rehosted the game and forum.

http://antiquity.nationstates.net/page= ... index.html
http://antiquity.nationstates.net/page= ... index.html

Shortly thereafter, OMAC decided to take the game down for retooling, leaving a link to one of their commercial developments. It never reopened.

http://antiquity.nationstates.net/page= ... index.html

Osthia wrote:Nation States 2 also gave nations the ability to actually declare war on each other. While I wish we had that power here, the internet deities did not wish for it to be...

But it was implemented soooo badly that, for me, and as I understand it a number of others, that it was worse than no war.

You could have saved yourself a bunch of time in typing by just shortening it to this...

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:38 pm**

Oh yeah, I had completely forgotten all about that. I never played it or even considered it.

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:38 pm**

Dyakovo wrote:You could have saved yourself a bunch of time in typing by just shortening it to this...

Then it wouldn't be the long (and useful?) answer it was.)

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:39 pm**

Daistallia 2104 wrote:
Dyakovo wrote:You could have saved yourself a bunch of time in typing by just shortening it to this...

Then it wouldn't be the long (and useful?) answer it was.)

Meh... Why bother with useful answers?

Posted: **Wed Jun 01, 2011 6:40 pm**

Interesting timing! After Jolt/OMAC released NS2, they began to pressure us to close down NS, so our players would move to their game (which had features you had to pay for). We said no and split with them. A few months later, Jolt closed NS2 and emailed all its players telling them to play their new Legends of Zork game instead. Today, Jolt closed that one and told its players to go play Utopia Kingdoms. Except it's not the original Utopia Kingdoms, because they canned that; it's a new Facebook game leeching off the name that spams your friends.

They are all about profit-driven gaming. Nearly every game they've ever released has been a rip-off of another more popular game, and was closed with little or no warning (Legends of Zork players got 3 days) as soon as the revenue started to level off. No commitment to community, no ongoing development, just a splash of hype, then milking the playerbase for cash with empty promises of future features that never arrive.

Should mention that they were a good host to us for quite a few years, but their whole philosophy changed when they were bought out in 2008.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 4:37 pm**

[violet] wrote:Except it's not the original Utopia Kingdoms, because they canned that; it's a new Facebook game leeching off the name that spams your friends.

And one that, upon following the link, landed me with this message:

Sorry! We can't display this content while you're viewing Facebook over a secure connection (https).
Would you like to temporarily switch to a regular connection (http) to use this app?
You will have a secure connection upon your next login.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 4:57 pm**

I have the last surviving NationStates2 flag: I copied it to my regular NS flag, so it is still at the shrunken-head size OMAC gave you if you didn't pay.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 4:58 pm**

Terrmish wrote:what was nation states 2?

A débâcle.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:04 pm**

Terrmish wrote:what was nation states 2?

If you watch the Simpsons monorail episode, but shout out "Nationstates 2!" every time someone says "monorail", you'll get the picture.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:09 pm**

Terrmish wrote:what was nation states 2?

For over a thousand generations NationStates was the guardian of fun and cyber-governments.

Before the dark times.

Before NationStates 2.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:12 pm**

Terrmish wrote:what was nation states 2?

Awful.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:17 pm**

It lured us with promises of reserving our nation names if we signed on soon enough. Only those with enough sense or a lack of a disposable income were able to resist it's webly wiles.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:17 pm**

NS2 was a mix of good ideas done badly, bad ideas done worse, greedy ideas, backstabbing, and just plain crap.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:18 pm**

Veblenia wrote:
Terrmish wrote:what was nation states 2?

If you watch the Simpsons monorail episode, but shout out "Nationstates 2!" every time someone says "monorail", you'll get the picture.

this is an excellent analogy.

"I call the big one Bitey"

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:34 pm**

Back when I was here, everyone used NS2 as a way to troll newbies, 'cause NS2 didn't exist (or had as an April Fool's joke). Guess things changed while I was gone.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:57 pm**

NS2 was hilarious.
If Jolt had come out and went "April fools!" I would've taken that 100% seriously.

I think I logged in twice.
First time because I was excited.
Second time because it couldn't possibly be as terrible as it seemed the first time.
Turned out that it was and never went back.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:57 pm**

I have had an infinitely more pleasurable experience from playing Nation States rather than NS2, although I did have an NS2 account while the site was active before it failed. It seemed to be rather corrupted. You had to pay for decent features, RP opportunities were restricted, and you could lose 90% of your population after a day or two of war.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:04 pm**

Did Max ever sue Jolt/OMAC in the end?

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:06 pm**

I have a feeling the sheer satisfaction of watching it crash and burn was enough for him.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:14 pm**

The developers really didn't seem to know where they were going. There was at least one player-generated idea that might have developed the way invader/defender did here, but they didn't seem to understand how it was done or even why it was done, let alone have the gumption to make a decision about whether it should continue.

The trophies thing was bad. Players could give other players trophies, and the awardee couldn't say no. I think some had to be paid for, but I don't remember the details. I do know that one paying player awarded another non-paying player a trophy saying something like, "For being a gay wanker and total douche" and it took me several days bombarding the admins to get it removed (at that stage, mods couldn't do that sort of thing by themselves). Couldn't get anything done about the offender for a while after that, either, and when they did it was something incredibly mild.

At the time it was one incident among many and I didn't jump to the obvious conclusion, because it took several days bombarding the admins to get anything done. It could have been simply incompetence, anyway, not preferential treatment, but it looked bad.

They did have one admin who understood that not all players exist solely to make admins' lives miserable. But she was squished between outraged NS mods -- by this stage, we were in 'Take no prisoners!' mode -- insisting You Can't Treat Our Players Like That! Fix It Up RIGHT NOW! and developers who seemed to need everything translated into some other language that didn't actually have any term for ~~those unclean and unnecessary bits of grime that kept on clogging up their beautiful machine~~ "players".

The thing was, players were willing to help. People were used to contributing to the way NS1 worked and wanted to do it in NS2 too. But players having ideas seemed to be regarded as attempts to break some rules none of us knew about, and mods forwarding ideas from players seemed to be somehow regarded as -- I dunno, behaving unprofessionally. Or maybe just not knowing our place.

NSers collectively are an uppity lot. I'm glad we all ran away from the orphanage.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:16 pm**

Was there any cake?

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:22 pm**

Free Cakes wrote:Was there any cake?

About as much cake as GlaDOS promised.

Posted: **Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:26 pm**

Going in to NS2 Max had a pretty badass design document with lots of awesome ideas in it. OMAC developed, at best, half of each idea, creating a mutant organ-deficient fetus which was from its mother's festering hellwomb untimely ripped, and consequently flopped about helplessly for a while before being kicked onto the trash heap to die in the harsh light of day.

Meanwhile our original baby is still loved and cherished by developers and players alike, and continues to chug along.

NationStates

What was Nation States 2?