It appears that a ton of people have their black market stat spiking for... no reason. Here are some examples but I'm sure there's many more: https://www.nationstates.net/nation=llo ... ensusid=79
Ratateague noted a 2597% rise in their black market stat after answering the issue Face Lift and selecting option 1 (https://nsindex.net/wiki/NationStates_Issue_No._518), which should not have led to any substantial change. Podria tells me they haven't answered an issue in months and still had an increase of almost 20x out of nowhere.
All these examples are from left-leaning nations that apparently had quite low black markets, but I can't see why even an algorithm change would be so drastic as to throw some of us with some of the smallest black markets into the top 10-15%.
Side note: On 20 November 2019, the world average for Black Market apparently spiked for just that day before returning to a marginally higher level than its original (none of these nations were affected at the time in any major way it seems), so not sure if that might be what's going on here.
Anyone else having this happen?
EDIT: If you run through the stat for my region - The Leftist Assembly - you can see who has been affected because the ranking haven't updated to reflect the changes yet (as of time of posting). For example, this page: https://www.nationstates.net/page=list_ ... 6&start=50