As of January 18, 2024, I've taken up the mantle of "Director of Content" and Issues Development Manager. The post about that is located here, and the original news blurb about Development Managers can be found here.
What's probably more interesting to everyone than some title changes is what exactly that means for the community. In short, it means I'll be doing my darndest to help translate ideas for cool improvements to Issues and Nation Management (things like stats, data visualization, etc) from idea stage, to a working proposal, and finally to a request for the tech and admin staff to code. Some of this stuff (ok, a great deal of it) may be fairly invisible on the front end unless and until it reaches release, but thankfully there is a dedicated team of awesome Issues Editors who volunteer a bunch of time and effort to bring these ideas closer to reality. All that, and they're editing every new issue as well!
First and foremost, the rules about Bad Faith posting apply to this thread. This is a place for us to collaborate towards a shared goal of making NationStates a better, more fun, more immersive place. With that in mind, this is a place to share your ideas for types of improvements, and where I will occasionally try to put announcements or updates should we have reached the point of bringing something to the public.
The basics:
Keep posts here relatively brief. We're not here to go back and forth on all the details of a given idea, other than perhaps asking some relevant questions. If you have a concept you want to have a full discussion with on, give it its own thread, and post a link here directing attention to it. If you've got a straightforward idea you just want to put in my ear or ask about, go ahead and post it.
Some ideas simply can't be realistically executed, or wouldn't work, no matter how cool they are, and we may not always be at liberty to explain the details of why. Please understand that if we decline an idea, it isn't a judgement about you or your playstyle – it's probably just the reality of what we can pull off.
Finally, if your ideas are about adding specific Issues to the game, those belong over in the Got Issues forum. This is for technical stuff.
Major things currently on my radar:
- As Sedge had mentioned in the previous version of the post, we are looking at ways to present more information to players about their nations – especially information about the people in their nations. This continues to be true, and we've made significant backstage progress towards this goal since the original post! I can't say more than that right now, but know that several ideas posted in this thread, as well as others developed by the team, are now "under construction."
- I've seen some comments in Technical suggesting new stats recently, and various editors have been working on betas for exactly that! I saw some suggestions in this thread that also look good, and will go on my radar for potential future beta development.
- Modifications to how existing information is presented, for example, there's a fair amount of discussion in this thread and its linked topics about how economic information is presented on the nation page. To be honest, this is probably a lower priority at present, as it would be entirely dependent on the availability of admins to fundamentally alter how existing content is presented, rather than presenting new content for players, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid possibility. I hear what's being said, and will keep it in mind.