Replacing Inactive Founders

[Bears Armed]

Then there's the active _players_ that may have a primary nation, but then also have umpteen puppets.

It seems that having so many puppets is NOT to play the game so much as to exploit a loophole. In particular, "parking" a puppet in a region, strictly to build up Influence for the eventual invasion. How is that _playing_ the game? The puppet is incredibly 2-D; it exists only for ONE purpose. A whole nation of people?

Wrong! Some of us create puppets to try out different ideas, or because we have friends in several regions and want to maintain a presence in each of those, rather than for the invader/defender "game".

Has anyone ever suggested putting a cap on the number of puppets you can have at one time? Did anyone other than I/D players object to the suggestion?

Yes, and yes.

[Pirates and Smugglers]

A couple points.
1) Real Life. A country is founded. Do the people Founding that nation automatically own it _forever_? Ooo! Just came to me: Cicely, AK in "Northern Exposure". Do the residents have the right to establish their own town government and make laws, despite the fact that Maurice pretty much owns all of the real estate? I know what Maurice has to say, but what do _you_ believe?

2) Given: Founders have the power. IF IT WAS JUST THEM, then when they leave, the power goes with them. But it's _not_ just them. It's a joint enterprise between ALL of the residents, Founder included. As long as the Founder remains, the joint enterprise is protected. Just because the Founder moves on with his Real Life (or whatever), why MUST that protection disintegrate into a mushy mess? If it's something substantial that the Founder wields, why can't he simply hand it off to someone else? Or sell it off to the highest bidder? Or bequeath it to his subjects to let them sort out how that power will be handled?

If a secondary Founder becomes a recurring elected position, it may as well be the Delegate. But that would take a dictatorial position and turn it into a political tug-o'-war. What The People really need is to have Cincinnatus to step up to protect the empire in its hour of need, and when the crisis is over, go back to his farm.

By stripping the region of the powers of the Founder (which are clear cut and precise) minimizes the regional participation of the Faithful that answered the Founder's call. Without those other people, the Founder would be sitting alone in his room entertaining himself with shadow puppets. What _makes_ a region is its people. Depriving them of Founder protection just because ONE guy leaves is probably the single most unjust thing that happens in this game.

Let the Founder pass the torch. And if he doesn't do that on his own when he's heading for Lazarus, or if he's totally negligent, having departed his own region, then let The People choose one of their own to serve as Dictator For Life. That would certainly be simpler and more focused than the muddle in place now.

I have a similar idea. I believe we should look at some system where a designated successor is automatically promoted if the founder nation ceases to exist due to inactivity. This would be very similar to an ancient (real world) King appointing a successor.

This option might be part of the regional controls accessed by the founder. The founder would be able to log in and update the successor setting etc.

This would have a significant on regional security. This would not effect existing regions without founders but it would provide increased protection for established regions with founders.

[Spartzerina]

I would support this suggestion only if the founder can appoint the successor. I don't see how voting for a founder would do any good; invaders would probably attempt to use it to gain permanent control of a region.

[Beet Farms]

No one knows. But we do know one thing. It makes up a substantial portion of the players in the game.

How do we 'know' this? If we 'know' this, surely you must have some numbers or some sort of proof...

Maybe not 50%, maybe not 30%, but even a 5% loss in players would be bad.

Why?

The loss of these players would be a crucial blow to the NS community

Why? Would there be any effect on the enjoyment of others with NS? You are greatly exaggerating the impact.

and no group should be valued above another.

Sorry, the inclusion of such a statement, in some attempt to make this a moral imperative, was just funny.

[Marcuslandia]

Except your solution for the game steps on a lot of toes. I hardly see eliminating the invasion game (which I myself choose to not partake in) as the best solution for the game. Attempting to eliminate it in this manner goes even farther and steps on even more toes (such as those controlling multiple regions).

There are _already_ a LOT of toes being stepped on. Every time someone that did NOT want to play the I/D game has their region invaded, there's a bunch of toes going "Ouch!" (If only you were concerned about them as you are of these others!)

You keep on coming back to this "Attempting to eliminate" the I/D game. How does allowing people that do NOT want to play that game "eliminate" the I/D game? You keep contending that there are soooo many I/D players active in the game, a "highly substantial percentage". That would indicate thousands of players with thousands of nations in hundreds -- if not thousands of regions. With the ability to create tens of thousands more nations in thousands of regions. And if they were left to just themselves, warring against only those others that want to wage war in that fashion, that would inevitably _eliminate_ the I/D game utterly????

What is it about the I/D game that it simply can NOT exist unless there are plenty of unwilling victims to be raped and pillaged?

[Naivetry]

Hmm. You've got me thinking about programming code......

1) How difficult would it be for the program to calculate how many days a nation has been in a region?
2) How difficult is it for the program to compile a list of region residents, said list ordered by duration in region?

Click on the link in "{Region} contains {number} nations."

You keep on coming back to this "Attempting to eliminate" the I/D game. How does allowing people that do NOT want to play that game "eliminate" the I/D game? You keep contending that there are soooo many I/D players active in the game, a "highly substantial percentage". That would indicate thousands of players with thousands of nations in hundreds -- if not thousands of regions. With the ability to create tens of thousands more nations in thousands of regions. And if they were left to just themselves, warring against only those others that want to wage war in that fashion, that would inevitably _eliminate_ the I/D game utterly????

What is it about the I/D game that it simply can NOT exist unless there are plenty of unwilling victims to be raped and pillaged?

You keep asking this (I lost the post in the other thread to which I was going to reply). I hate to keep giving the same answer, but it's not going to change. viewtopic.php?f=12&t=375

2. Defenders - Until the advent of Influence, defenders almost universally saw themselves as the protectors of NationStates in a very black-and-white world. Raiders took away a nation's right to live in peace, and a region's right to self-determination. This was morally unacceptable, and raiders were often ostracized from the larger political world where peace was the primary desire. Still today, defenders fight because raiders fight first. They have no raison d'etre except to prevent raiders from wielding power over others. Defenders do not, and never have, fought competitively with raiders as if conflict were an end in itself. They fight as protectors. They fight for ideals. Therefore, it is impossible to maintain the raiding/defending game in a designated "war is okay here" area - witness the epic failure of the warzones. If war is okay, the defenders have no motivation to stop it (and then the raiders have no reason to raid if they're not going to get a rise out of people, and so on in a vicious cycle).

No one knows. But we do know one thing. It makes up a substantial portion of the players in the game.

How do we 'know' this? If we 'know' this, surely you must have some numbers or some sort of proof...

http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=590035 (also posted here with less discussion: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=747 )

I, for one, picked "organized regional activities" on the first go around - but in my mind, that inevitably includes the military dynamic, without which the interregional politics I enjoy so much would never have come into being.

[Marcuslandia]

You keep on coming back to this "Attempting to eliminate" the I/D game. How does allowing people that do NOT want to play that game "eliminate" the I/D game? You keep contending that there are soooo many I/D players active in the game, a "highly substantial percentage". That would indicate thousands of players with thousands of nations in hundreds -- if not thousands of regions. With the ability to create tens of thousands more nations in thousands of regions. And if they were left to just themselves, warring against only those others that want to wage war in that fashion, that would inevitably _eliminate_ the I/D game utterly????

What is it about the I/D game that it simply can NOT exist unless there are plenty of unwilling victims to be raped and pillaged?

You keep asking this (I lost the post in the other thread to which I was going to reply). I hate to keep giving the same answer, but it's not going to change. viewtopic.php?f=12&t=375

So, as of April 13th, there was a survey that had 643 respondents, from a population that exceeds (by purportedly reasonable estimate) 10,000 players.

How well do you feel the survey results reflects the attitudes of the entire population? (That is, do you consider it to be an adequate sample?)

According to the survey, about 20% of the players are primarily interested in RP. Would you say that most (if not nearly all) of them have managed to insulate themselves from the I/D game via Founders and passwords?

According to the survey, approximately 10% of players focus on the I/D game. NS currently has "49,236 nations in 6,050 regions." Do you, as one deeply involved in the I/D game, feel that there are nearly 5,000 nations being used primarily in the I/D game?

[Erastide]

Part of the problem with that survey is that it could only hit the players that are involved enough to care and participate in such a thing. There are a lot of nations that are created, live 28 days and die. Or slightly longer. Just as there are quite a few nations that sit by themselves in small regions and do issues only. There's really no way the survey could reach that population.

10% of people being invaders/defenders is too high, but the proportions are probably nice.

[Marcuslandia]

Part of the problem with that survey is that it could only hit the players that are involved enough to care and participate in such a thing. There are a lot of nations that are created, live 28 days and die. Or slightly longer. Just as there are quite a few nations that sit by themselves in small regions and do issues only. There's really no way the survey could reach that population.

The in-death mode nations are continually replaced. That is, when you combine "over two million served!" with the 49,236 currently living nations, you see an active death march that has never let up. For further emphasis, we could note that of 643 people that bothered to respond, 146 are planning on quitting the game, for a "die off" percentage of 22.7%. That's of players planning to quit that actually care to comment. Maybe we're actually looking at closer to 40% of the population involved in continuous turnover.

[Weird thought. Anybody know how many of the former natives of France and Belgium simply quit the game after their regions were taken away from them?]

Hmm. Has anybody got a graph or chart that shows number of active players in NS since it started? That would give a clearer idea of what regular turnover is like.

Anyway, I'm thinking it safe to say that about 10% of players are into I/D, and 20% are into RP, and 30% involved in "organized regional activity" (read: "we do our own thing"). That's primary interest. Secondary adds about another 10% to I/D, 15% to RP, and 15% to regional interests. So, 20/35/45. Of people that knew of and cared to respond to the survey.

Does this sound like a reasonable general breakdown to everyone?

[Erastide]

Your argument was 10% of respondents translated into 5000 nations. The problem is that doesn't work when people have huge numbers of nations for various reasons while others only have 1. I could maybe go with 10% of actual people being part of that, but not 10% of nations. # of people in the game is a bit harder to nail down though.

[Marcuslandia]

Your argument was 10% of respondents translated into 5000 nations. The problem is that doesn't work when people have huge numbers of nations for various reasons while others only have 1. I could maybe go with 10% of actual people being part of that, but not 10% of nations. # of people in the game is a bit harder to nail down though.

I think it was a couple of the mods that tossed out the 10,000+ figure.

I was actually having fun with numbers there. If anybody is _likely_ to run a large string of puppets, I figure it would be an invader. So if you have about 10,000 players with about 50,000 nations, you would think that would translate into 1,000 I/D players with about 5,000 nations AT LEAST. Yet, wherever invaders and defenders are active, they tend to be quite noticeable. So, does it look like there's 5,000 nations rampaging around? If not, it would actually suggest that perhaps there is considerably less than 1,000 I/D players in the game. (And when you factor in the _secondary_ interest group....._10,000_ I/D nations???)

[Naivetry]

Hmm. Has anybody got a graph or chart that shows number of active players in NS since it started? That would give a clearer idea of what regular turnover is like.

I believe Ulthar has access to such a graph. All I have is this, from December 10, 2008:

I have been monitoring the current decline in NationStates. The NS site has less than 50% of the traffic it had a year ago during the last holiday decline. And it continues to decline at a steady rate.

In the past seven days, NS has lost 3300 nations, or about 5%. For WA nations, the decline is over 6%. It could be considered that WA nations are a better barometer of actual players. The feeders will soon drop below 3,000 nations each.

At this rate, NS will shed about 20% of it's nations during December, bringing the total down to about 45 - 50,000. It was 72,000 at the end of last year, 120,000 the year before. Early this year, there were some that considered 50k to be a critical mass, below which NS could not recover. That seems an exaggeration to me, but I would agree that consolidation is needed for game survival under those conditions....or should I say, under current conditions.

The current decline cannot be blamed simply on NS2, though I'm sure it has some impact. The statistics show that the current decline has been progressing steadily since July. NS2 traffic jumped into tracking in early November, and is still only half the traffic of NS1. There was no sudden drop in NS1 traffic due to the start of the NS2 open beta.

So....anyone want to make their NS 2009 Predictions ? I'm expecting about 50,000 nations by the first of the year. And I don't expect their to be any significant increase through January at the least. Actually, I think any increase will be difficult to acheive unless certain conditions change.

[Marcuslandia]

With the collapse of NS2, it will be interesting to see if there's a NS bounce-back.

[I was in NS2 on World 32 where I established the single largest Alliance. The way the game mechanics worked, belonging to a LARGE alliance actually worked _against_ you. Add that the Economic model functioned like a bus driver on LSD, it pretty much guaranteed that people would get the flock out of there once they realized there was no rhyme or reason to trying to accomplish anything.]

[Naivetry]

If there will be an NS bounce-back, we're seeing it now.

As Westwind noted, there was no significant decrease in NS1 traffic with the opening of the NS2 beta. I don't see why there should be an increase in NS1 traffic now if it never significantly decreased in response to NS2.

[[violet]]

Those numbers don't match mine. Traffic took a 30% hit in the months immediately following NS2.

[Naivetry]

Those numbers don't match mine. Traffic took a 30% hit in the months immediately following NS2.

Ooh, good to know.

[Spartzerina]

Those numbers don't match mine. Traffic took a 30% hit in the months immediately following NS2.

Interesting... another thing I can blame OMAC for...

[Bears Armed]

I wonder how much of the decline was players whose nations had been in regions that were demolished by raiders after 'Influence' replaced the previous rules on 'Griefing ' deciding that if the game allowed that sort of behaviour then it simply wasn't their cup of tea?

[[violet]]

There's definitely been a decline since 2006 (when Influence was introduced). But the 30% drop I refer to was on top of that.

[Marcuslandia]

There's definitely been a decline since 2006 (when Influence was introduced). But the 30% drop I refer to was on top of that.

I'm actually surprised that anyone with an existing NS account would drop it to play NS2 exclusively. Two different "nuances" to the flavor, made them distinctly different. But in less than a month, a player would have figured out, "something ain't right." [The something that wasn't right was that the longer you stayed with the game, the more the Economy turned EVERY country into a cardboard shanty nation.]

[AP3 10]

So we know the number of players has declined; and we believe that permanent guaranteed success of a invasion, with no recourse for residents to change this, is a negative factor involved in causing the loss of players, (perhaps especially the active region-absorbed types as opposed to the less absorbed who might be expected to leave at such a rate anyway). We have asserted the commonly held understanding that our volunteer and busy moderators should not be forced to actively intercede, since its very hard, may damage their standing and reputation for lack of bias, and that any change must not increase their workload.

I have argued that in addition to disputed region power being very hard for human moderators to decide, it is near impossible for coding to work out what's going on. In a case of destructive region invasion there are natives, raiders, defenders involved, a player created distinction that the random bloke on the street couldn't guess, never mind code. Founders however code can deal with (i.e in the same way as now). And so .....

so on topic....

[AP3 10]

?

Wheres everyone gone...

[Ballotonia]

IMHO, the case in favor of this feature has been made. It is up to the Admin whether or not this gets implemented.

OR... the decline mentioned is speeding up and the people who spoke in this thread have already left the game

Ballotonia

[Martyrdoom]

IMHO, having just re-read the thread, the case has been far from made. Indeed, a case AGAINST it has been clearly and convincingly expounded. Although, if your motivating factor is to practically abolish the raiding game, I can see why you would say the case has been made.

[Kandarin]

Part of the problem with that survey is that it could only hit the players that are involved enough to care and participate in such a thing. There are a lot of nations that are created, live 28 days and die. Or slightly longer. Just as there are quite a few nations that sit by themselves in small regions and do issues only. There's really no way the survey could reach that population.

10% of people being invaders/defenders is too high, but the proportions are probably nice.

Essentially yes. Without Admin support, we had to limit survey distribution to NS-based forums, be they official or unofficial. That meant that the target audience was...people who are active on a NS-based forum. I can't prove anything, but reason suggests that such players are a definite minority. Most NS players come and go without ever reaching that level of involvement, and most of those who stay are still minimally involved in some small, selective area. It'd be a mistake to extrapolate the survey results proportionally to the entire ~10,000+ player base. Incidentally, one of the things that I felt was a significant problem with the survey was that we were unable to reach the most numerous invader groups.

Anyway, I'm thinking it safe to say that about 10% of players are into I/D, and 20% are into RP, and 30% involved in "organized regional activity" (read: "we do our own thing"). That's primary interest. Secondary adds about another 10% to I/D, 15% to RP, and 15% to regional interests. So, 20/35/45. Of people that knew of and cared to respond to the survey.

I felt that the "primary importance" question was less informative than the "secondary importance" one, since NSers don't all cram into easy categories and they could choose more than one. However, the percentages were displayed wrong in the secondary importance question. Calculating the percentages correctly reveals that the number of respondents with at least an interest in I/D was more like a third. Again, though, those proportions can't reasonably be applied to the game at large. The only way we'd be able to judge the proportions of the game as a whole would be a survey created by admin and sent to all nations.

Additionally, the survey response group overwhelmingly expressed disinterest in NS2, with ~85% saying they didn't play it. The reduction in NS1 site visits due to NS2 must instead have been due to the less involved part of the playerbase switching over.