My impression of N-day 2021

[Alcala-Cordel]

I’m glad it was fun for those 15 people, I guess? The thing that people are talking about is whether it’s good for the meta to be dominated by a tiny handful of power players. Maybe those people solving thousands of captchas would’ve had more fun putting that effort into building coalitions with “lemmings” instead.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I had fun

[The Midwestern Atlantic Colonies]

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I had fun

That’s the thing though. I did join CotA, and it was super boring.

[Fractalnavel]

So, wait - NS is a programming contest? Just checking.

---a lemming

[North Saitama]

It was definitely boring this year. Our faction, the JMSDF, didn't even get to fire a single shot. I understand competition, but it is also supposed to be fun. How is it fun for anyone else if the crab cakes are just wiping everyone out within 15 minutes?

[Laurenburg]

This has been by far the least fun N-Day for me out of the four I have participated in, without a doubt. Sure, gigafactions like the Crabs sapped the event of any competitiveness and led to predictable and uninteresting results, but my biggest issue came in the latter half of the day, when the Crabs, having successfully grown to completely insurmountable size and power, decide to completely ruin the fun for everyone else by pettily shielding almost every nuke launched by anyone at anyone else, presumably so that they could grab those precious hits later on to pad their own stats. We weren't expecting to win, but geez, can you let us little factions have our petty little faction duels and feel like we can make a couple hits too? What spoilsports...

[The American Anarchist Empire]

I was a potato faction member for my first N-Day and I really enjoyed myself even if we lost in the end.

[Feyrisshire]

-snip-

So next year, you can do one of two things. You can be a lemming: follow some big faction or maybe your little 20 nation regional faction, get a couple hits, log off, and call it a day. If you lose, you can even go onto the forums and whine about the megafactions that inevitably dominated the event and call it unfair......

So, it is just a skill issue...

[The Midwestern Atlantic Colonies]

Yeah, that was a lot of words for “git gud scrubs”

[Archinstinct]

What scripts were used by only 15 people that let them control what about to roughly 7500 nations? Also cue memes of the nposphere and a robot army.

[The Chariot]

So, wait - NS is a programming contest? Just checking.

---a lemming

So, it is just a skill issue...

Yeah, that was a lot of words for “git gud scrubs”

Yes.

What scripts were used by only 15 people that let them control what about to roughly 7500 nations? Also cue memes of the nposphere and a robot army.

You're really overestimating how effective the scripts were. While they definitely helped for bursts and the initial join times, I managed to fairly efficiently utilize over 200 puppets in previous years with the base game and a spreadsheet. Containerize (a public extension!) means that anyone who's tech savvy enough, even without knowing how to code, can read a couple guides and be nearly as efficient as we are, and without the hard work of making a tool specifically for N-Day. Not sure what "nposphere" you're talking about, especially considering none of the puppetmasters were tied to the NPO in the slightest and we were the only ones with the scripts.

This has been by far the least fun N-Day for me out of the four I have participated in, without a doubt. Sure, gigafactions like the Crabs sapped the event of any competitiveness and led to predictable and uninteresting results, but my biggest issue came in the latter half of the day, when the Crabs, having successfully grown to completely insurmountable size and power, decide to completely ruin the fun for everyone else by pettily shielding almost every nuke launched by anyone at anyone else, presumably so that they could grab those precious hits later on to pad their own stats. We weren't expecting to win, but geez, can you let us little factions have our petty little faction duels and feel like we can make a couple hits too? What spoilsports...

Yeah, sorry about that. We wouldn't have resorted to the massive nuke blockade if people weren't getting on the leaderboard by getting a bit of score then moving all their nations out to be unnukeable. Subsequent years will definitely not be similar as we'll make sure there's more competition.

[Praeceps]

What scripts were used by only 15 people that let them control what about to roughly 7500 nations? Also cue memes of the nposphere and a robot army.

I used Containers but I'm probably the smallest horseman. I would strongly recommend getting containers for next year. I think my capacity is something like 250 but other unrelated technical issues got me to use a lot less this year.

[Great Algerstonia]

Literally every person defending scripts uses the same argument: “just use scripts/puppets if you don’t like them.” Which is stale and an overused argument which provides no substance other than make the mini game more broken and unfair than it already is.

Unfortunately for you, it's the stance the moderation's taken. Every metagame, be it cards, R/D, or otherwise (save for the WA), has had scripts and puppets and people complaining about scripts and puppets since forever and ever. Guess what's happened? Everyone who refused to change and adapt gets smaller and smaller numbers and impact until eventually, they don't mean anything anymore.

Fundamentally, I don't even think this year's problem was scripts and puppets, which have existed since N-Day 1. While they're certainly more powerful this year than ever before, it's not the main problem. The main problem this year was that we toiled for hours and hours on end; we worked with the smartest people on NationStates who wrote hundreds of lines of code; we solved thousands of captchas; we had years of experience; we were simply better. The problem this year was that large, affluent regions with motivated, competent people tend to build relationships with other notable regions. The result? All the talent is concentrated in small areas. All the people who put in the most effort group together and put in so much effort that it dwarfs everyone else. Gameplayers play the game, while the lemmings participate in it. This is a fundamental problem within Nationstates that definitely isn't getting fixed anytime soon (think WA voting blocs). While this year's... one-sidedness was certainly a fluke, the dominance of megafactions will always be a thing.
The solution? Well, I don't think any easy one-size-fits-all fix, but you can be the solution yourself. I'll let you in on a little secret. A good half of crabs consisted of a little over 15 people. People who manually, yes, manually, created hundreds of puppets, perhaps even refounded those puppets, just in preparation for these past 24 hours. Regardless of what scripts you use (scripts for nation-creating don't even expedite the process; the website puts a downright sluggish cap on nation creation speed once you make enough), we put in a lot of work. The rest of crabs? Not chump change either. We've had multiple people pull all-nighters, pouring hours and hours of work in pursuit of this nationsim game. Timopolis of the Potato Alliance even called off a day of work (admittedly not very successfully) to administrate his faction. We've had people who just logged on for a couple minutes every other hour, did a couple nukes, then got off. They mattered too.
So next year, you can do one of two things. You can be a lemming: follow some big faction or maybe your little 20 nation regional faction, get a couple hits, log off, and call it a day. If you lose, you can even go onto the forums and whine about the megafactions that inevitably dominated the event and call it unfair. That's fine. You had your bit of fun, and not everyone can dedicate as much time as we do. On the other hand, you could actually put in effort. You could toil as a GCR officer through layers of bureaucracy or gather all the people who are frustrated about megafactions dominating. Muster up the courage to contact all your embassies and form N-Day alliances. Next year, become the megafaction. Fight fire with fire. Then, when you've put in the work, you might even win. At that point, you'll be like us. Standing from the top, maybe entertained by the lemmings who take to the forums to bemoan their lack of succes during N-day, maybe a little bit frustrated at them, or maybe a bit of both. However, you'll have put in the work to get there. You'll deserve to be there.
Crabs of the Apocalypse is not some legion of mindless bots with MacGuffin tech that let us effortlessly wipe out the competition. Last year, we didn't even win. When you look at CotA, you're not looking at some cheaters who pressed 2 buttons then went to sleep and woke up with the entire leaderboard. Hell, we didn't even pull off a flawless victory this year — we have four thousand six hundred ninety-seven radiation on our faction that proves otherwise. When you peer at the leaderboard, filled from 1 to 11 with our name, you're not looking at some representation of injustice and unfairness. No, it's quite the opposite. You're looking at the crystallization of thousands of man-hours. You're looking at the the back talks, the game planning, the captcha solving, the key-pressing, the all-nighters; the stress, the triumph, the joy in the dusk-filled voice chats in which we cradled your factions to sleep. You're looking at proof that hard work does pay off.

Ok

[North Saitama]

We didn't even get a chance to get on the leaderboard. We just got wiped-out in 15 minutes for simply existing.

Last year, we at least had a chance, and at least did stuff. We had standoffs, diplomacy, allies, enemies, and the like. Even if we didn't win, and eventually got wiped-out by a bigger faction, ourselves, it was still way more fun for the couple hours we survived.

I would almost call the Crabcakes griefers at this point.

[Fractalnavel]

I was under the impression that NS ran this mini-game. My bad.

[The Midwestern Atlantic Colonies]

Expecting everyone to run scripts on 200+ puppet nations sounds like the most boring possible way to run the event short of just running bots to do everything automatically.

[Haganham]

None of the puppets were bots. All of the puppets were controlled manually by real live humans.

Do you mean to tell me after this that you're not even real crabs?

[Matthew the Man]

Unfortunately for you, it's the stance the moderation's taken. Every metagame, be it cards, R/D, or otherwise (save for the WA), has had scripts and puppets and people complaining about scripts and puppets since forever and ever. Guess what's happened? Everyone who refused to change and adapt gets smaller and smaller numbers and impact until eventually, they don't mean anything anymore.

Fundamentally, I don't even think this year's problem was scripts and puppets, which have existed since N-Day 1. While they're certainly more powerful this year than ever before, it's not the main problem. The main problem this year was that we toiled for hours and hours on end; we worked with the smartest people on NationStates who wrote hundreds of lines of code; we solved thousands of captchas; we had years of experience; we were simply better. The problem this year was that large, affluent regions with motivated, competent people tend to build relationships with other notable regions. The result? All the talent is concentrated in small areas. All the people who put in the most effort group together and put in so much effort that it dwarfs everyone else. Gameplayers play the game, while the lemmings participate in it. This is a fundamental problem within Nationstates that definitely isn't getting fixed anytime soon (think WA voting blocs). While this year's... one-sidedness was certainly a fluke, the dominance of megafactions will always be a thing.
The solution? Well, I don't think any easy one-size-fits-all fix, but you can be the solution yourself. I'll let you in on a little secret. A good half of crabs consisted of a little over 15 people. People who manually, yes, manually, created hundreds of puppets, perhaps even refounded those puppets, just in preparation for these past 24 hours. Regardless of what scripts you use (scripts for nation-creating don't even expedite the process; the website puts a downright sluggish cap on nation creation speed once you make enough), we put in a lot of work. The rest of crabs? Not chump change either. We've had multiple people pull all-nighters, pouring hours and hours of work in pursuit of this nationsim game. Timopolis of the Potato Alliance even called off a day of work (admittedly not very successfully) to administrate his faction. We've had people who just logged on for a couple minutes every other hour, did a couple nukes, then got off. They mattered too.
So next year, you can do one of two things. You can be a lemming: follow some big faction or maybe your little 20 nation regional faction, get a couple hits, log off, and call it a day. If you lose, you can even go onto the forums and whine about the megafactions that inevitably dominated the event and call it unfair. That's fine. You had your bit of fun, and not everyone can dedicate as much time as we do. On the other hand, you could actually put in effort. You could toil as a GCR officer through layers of bureaucracy or gather all the people who are frustrated about megafactions dominating. Muster up the courage to contact all your embassies and form N-Day alliances. Next year, become the megafaction. Fight fire with fire. Then, when you've put in the work, you might even win. At that point, you'll be like us. Standing from the top, maybe entertained by the lemmings who take to the forums to bemoan their lack of succes during N-day, maybe a little bit frustrated at them, or maybe a bit of both. However, you'll have put in the work to get there. You'll deserve to be there.
Crabs of the Apocalypse is not some legion of mindless bots with MacGuffin tech that let us effortlessly wipe out the competition. Last year, we didn't even win. When you look at CotA, you're not looking at some cheaters who pressed 2 buttons then went to sleep and woke up with the entire leaderboard. Hell, we didn't even pull off a flawless victory this year — we have four thousand six hundred ninety-seven radiation on our faction that proves otherwise. When you peer at the leaderboard, filled from 1 to 11 with our name, you're not looking at some representation of injustice and unfairness. No, it's quite the opposite. You're looking at the crystallization of thousands of man-hours. You're looking at the the back talks, the game planning, the captcha solving, the key-pressing, the all-nighters; the stress, the triumph, the joy in the dusk-filled voice chats in which we cradled your factions to sleep. You're looking at proof that hard work does pay off.

Ok

it is enthralling how alger, whose claim to fame is being an unfunny and talentless version of vara but for the east pacific, thinks they can make a suitable "gotcha" post in response to a genuinely well thought out commentary on the current n-day metagame. if this sort of posting is what you consider quality trolling, id recommend going back to the NSGP discord server. there at least you'd get pity laughs and hopefully some bullying to straighten out your sorrid attempts at comedy.

[Avonticus]

Ok

it is enthralling how alger, whose claim to fame is being an unfunny and talentless version of vara but for the east pacific, thinks they can make a suitable "gotcha" post in response to a genuinely well thought out commentary on the current n-day metagame. if this sort of posting is what you consider quality trolling, id recommend going back to the NSGP discord server. there at least you'd get pity laughs and hopefully some bullying to straighten out your sorrid attempts at comedy.

Ok

[The North American Unified States]

I can definitely agree with the above sentiments. I was with the Liberty Democratic Alliance's Strategic Liberty Pact, which eventually joined arms with Celtia. We eventually realized that this might as well be a zombie wave defense game against the Crabs. People gave up and just started building shields only because no one could afford to build nukes or risk not having shields for the hundreds of nukes heading our way.

It was pretty unfun, mostly consisted of us shielding ourselves against the hundreds of puppet nations that launched salvo after salvo. We ended up surviving N-Day with three nations left, which was worse than nothing, but N-day left a sour taste for me. If this is how it's going to go next time, I don't know if I'll even bother participating.

[Great Algerstonia]

[edited out, sorry about this]

[Guess and Check]

CoTA's win was not unfair. As The Chariot said, CoTA worked hard as hell diplomatically, technologically, and in terms of manpower to get everything together. They broke no rules while doing so, and used no cheap tactics (from what I saw). It was a fully legitimate, if very overpowering, victory- and an amazing one at that.

That being said, I do agree that this N-Day wasn't really as fun as previous ones. I was part of POTATO and the best fun I had was this morning when we were fighting (and dying by) the crabby horde, and otherwise it was pretty boring just stockpiling :x. For smaller alliances who were pretty much decimated, not being able to participate in any meaningful battle before getting subsequently demolished isn't fun at all.

Hopefully the technical decisions being talked about in the tech forums alongside the player-led choices next year let the smaller alliances have some real fun next year. For now we have Z-Day to look forward too

[Alcala-Cordel]

Looking back through N-Day history it looks like people angrily take to the forums every single time they lose. I get where some of you are coming from, but getting mad at the people who won because they won and throwing baseless accusations of bot usage around really isn't cool.

For what it's worth, I didn't see any bots. We crabs just had very good coordination and massive numbers. The faction had all these things last year and got obliterated. It was just as fair then as it was now. I know people really hate being told to calm down so I won't exactly do that, but instead of getting angry in the forums it might me a good idea to learn from this year, come up with new strategies, and respond accordingly. Maybe you can even make some puppets.

[Valentine Z]

On the topic of the number of puppets and the number of nations involved, I would go as far to note that the numbers this year around were extremely large, as compared to what we have seen last year even with the big regions.

I couldn't link the image directly, sorry. A little too big, and I'm on my phone. https://i.imgur.com/dz8tBJl.png

Note the number of nations for the top and bottom 10. And perhaps note how varied it is.

-----

With that said, (obligatory not a mod/admin), but I'll also echo that as far as I'm concerned, bots weren't involved in it, in a technical sense. It's just scripts, and a lot of clicking and human input still required. I also used containers last year in order to keep tabs of many nations, but again, human input required. A lot of scripting, a lot of puppets, just maybe way too many puppets.

Edit: Just going out to also say that I didn't participate, maybe short of doing some data work with thanks to another friend. ❤️ So I have no bias towards or against the crabs.

[West Phoenicia]

This year was extremely boring and too one sided. Needs to be either a cap on the number of nations in a regions during that time or regions which have a ridiculously large amounts of
numbers being unable to attack smaller regions.

[Sweitchland]

And now we conclude N-Day
To be honest, it wasn't that great, but I partly had fun I guess. First NS event I've participated in.