Issues/Nation Management Tech Development

[Sedgistan]

I'm going to raise "Regional Issues" as an idea here. It's something that gets occasionally mentioned, and that I've had thoughts on for years, but it's not an idea that's ever been developed much. Is it desirable? How would it work?

I had a couple of visions for it, both based around opting-in in some way - i.e. I do not think a system that obligated all regions to decide on issues would be a good idea. The first was a simple situation whereby a region could opt in to receive regional issues; the results then applied to all member nations. The second was to have a regional body - e.g. an "EU" type organisation, nations in that region can choose to join this - if they do then they are affected by the regional issues; kind of a localised WA. In either case, there's the potential for a few ways of making decisions, whether imposed by the regional leadership or through some sort of voting (member nations? WA member nations?).

Regional issues would provide some scope for addressing topics that don't work so well at the national level.

[The Unified Missourtama States]

Regional issues would provide some scope for addressing topics that don't work so well at the national level.

We have a World Assembly to do that. To me, such an addition would be very stressful (if with regional stat changes).

[SherpDaWerp]

Firstly, generally more "customisation" of the homepage would be nice, which (to start off with) could be as minimal as just adding new notables, admirables, and sensibilities to display. Changing up the WA Classification text would also be nice, as there are some problems with the current system - like how a nation with 68/68/68 freedoms is a lawless wasteland regardless of how much crime they actually have. For the record, those three fields appear on your nation pages as follows, and I've also italicised the "description of WA classification" text. (Also, there are more stat-dependent adjectives elsewhere on the homepage, but they're neither separately accessible as a field through the API, nor are they general descriptors of the entire nation)

The Player By The Name of SherpDaWerp is a gargantuan, <admirable> nation, ruled by Riven of a Thousand Voices with a fair hand, and remarkable for its <notable>, <notable>, and <notable>. The <sensibility>, <sensibility>, <sensibility>, <sensibility> population of 10.893 billion SherpDaWerpians hold their civil and political rights very dear, although the wealthy and those in business tend to be viewed with suspicion.

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I'd also like to revisit Economic Freedom on the Homepage, which (as a thread) died out a little while ago, but is still a very sensible change. The most discussion it got was just "what color should it be", to be fair, and I'm of the opinion that there should be zero troubles with just making it red/green. Maybe use the "absolute" stat that goes into WA classifications, though, rather than the displayed version with the Socialism penalty factored in.

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I'm going to raise "Regional Issues" as an idea here.

This overlaps with your other area, GP, (probably not by coincidence) but maybe something like a Regional Assembly (local WA-equivalent) would work. Regions with at least... 10 unique "players" (check WA, whatever) get to pass their own laws and declarations, probably with a much smaller stat effect (to stop 10 issues players from making a region and min-maxing). I reckon free-reign would work; no rules on what a region can pass, but a maximum number of... 3 resolutions per category, so you can't just pass "please boost my environment stat" on repeat every week.

Regional Issues on their own wouldn't work without a lot of tie-ins, as I'd say a lot more of the EU's problems come from the members, rather than from an external force. "<thing> happened" is fine for a nation, but it's not often things happen to the EU that aren't directly catalysed by member states (and thus would cause autonomy problems... "Testlandia protested the EU's fishing decision!" "Wait, when did I do that?"). I guess I should probably make a thread...

[Galiantus III]

I'm going to raise "Regional Issues" as an idea here. It's something that gets occasionally mentioned, and that I've had thoughts on for years, but it's not an idea that's ever been developed much. Is it desirable? How would it work?

I've thought of this before, as a sort of collective action problem. For example, the region could be presented with a dilemma around a climate treaty, and nations would determine whether to join or not at an individual level. If everyone chooses not to join, everyone's stats stay mostly the same, with a few very minor losses in, say, environmental friendliness and environmental beauty. If they all choose to join, they all have slightly higher taxes, but significantly better environments. Where things get interesting is in the grey area, where nations try to get a free ride by trying to get everyone else to sign on to the treaty but not sign themselves. I believe Unibot posted a thread on this some time ago - I'll have to go look.

[Trotterdam]

Firstly, generally more "customisation" of the homepage would be nice, which (to start off with) could be as minimal as just adding new notables, admirables, and sensibilities to display.

When it comes to those, my biggest desire remains q=notables and q=admirables shards, which display all tags a nation currently qualifies for that could be returned by q=notable and q=admirable, rather than a randomized selection (much like q=banners does for q=banner).

[violet] has previously suggested that she's open to the idea but it's somewhat difficult to do. I don't understand how (shouldn't the full list already be generated at some point in order to be able to draw a random selection of it?), but then the admins like to talk about how kludgy NationStates's coding is.

There doesn't seem to be a huge demand for this, but at least one other nation has also expressed an interest in this... and now that I look at it, so has SherpDaWerp in the API thread (although I thought the whole point of this thread is to get things done that might not get looked at if they're only mentioned in the API thread). As for me, well, I think you know what I'd want to use this feature for. It'd definitely be of interest to a lot of players beyond just the ones using the API directly.

Now implemented.

[SherpDaWerp]

and now that I look at it, so has SherpDaWerp in the API thread (although I thought the whole point of this thread is to get things done that might not get looked at if they're only mentioned in the API thread).

Well, the API thread exists partially to request API-related stuff (like new shards), and I figured a new API shard would be more relevant there than here. Adding new options for the fields is definitely a here thing, whereas "new shard for existing data" is a bit more of an API problem.

My point here was more that they are an underutilised aspect of nation customisation, because there's not that many options for each field , and so it gets very same-same the more nations you look at. Adding more of them to differentiate nation homepages further would be a pretty simple change - possibly even one the Editors can do without tech intervention, depending on how closely linked they are to regular policy/banner flags - and it would be a change for the better.

It would be better if the nation homepage was a lot more generally customisable, but I don't even know how to begin proposing that one (and making it sound like a reasonable effort/feature tradeoff) yet, and these three systems already exist in the game's code for nation homepage customisation.

[Flanderlion]

Replying to a few:

Issues based on census ranks - e.g. if I'm in the top/bottom X% in world I become eligible for certain issues.

Why is this different from checking against whatever value there is for that ranking?

It isn't particularly different, I personally haven't seen many issues telling me that with 'one of the largest economies in the world, some of your advisors are wondering whether it is time to take your foot off the gas' type issues. One is raw value, one is value in comparison to others.

Issue history/stats - what issue options I picked in the past, what % players have picked each option (not immediately visible) and a census for issues addressed.

Cards make this less than useless, annoyingly. The game does record what issues you have had previously, but it's a lot more data to record the options you've picked previously.

I still hope that issues will be decoupled from cards, but that's more Fris's territory even though it negatively affects many different parts of the game, and the benefits could be still realised without cards being generated from issue packs. But I've brought up Codger's idea elsewhere.

Tbf it is something that can be done with userscripts instead, so I'm not putting it as super important, but it's still something one day I'd like to see.

More love towards Newspaper headlines - they're alright, but I feel like they could be explored more.

That's on our internal to-do list to get done at some point. We did add a few a month or two ago, for when your issue decision doesn't actually change anything (what I call "slow news day headlines").

Good to hear. Like, it seems like an amazing opportunity for certain issues to have custom headlines, while most have the default ones. e.g. ''Snape murders Dumbledore' for a headline for an issue about book spoilers.

Edit: Re regional issues, sure, but that seems more for issue editors/author's to weigh into than general players. I'm for whatever tools help them give me good issues.

[Sanctaria]

Edit: Re regional issues, sure, but that seems more for issue editors/author's to weigh into than general players. I'm for whatever tools help them give me good issues.

I won't speak for the other team members, but from my perspective part of the reasons for these public threads is to get more explicit feedback and ideas from the general NS population. The Editing Team has been lucky in that we've always had a good working relationship with the admin team with a more-or-less direct line to them. We can pitch ideas/complain about things anytime!

Also we're Sedge's lackeys so if ya'll did decide you wanted regional issues, then it'd be up to us to make it work/implement it Nah, but seriously I think a dedicated thread where people can determine (a) if they'd be popular, and (b) whether it should be something like a mini-WA, or something else, and the logistics around that would be a good idea, because that would give the Editing Team an idea of how much work lay ahead of them and we could give more in-detail feedback on feasibility there.

tldr in theory it's something the Editing team can populate, but as a community we'd have to create a whole bunch more issues, and it really depends on what exactly the player-base would like it to look like.

[Bears Armed]

I'm going to raise "Regional Issues" as an idea here. It's something that gets occasionally mentioned, and that I've had thoughts on for years, but it's not an idea that's ever been developed much. Is it desirable? How would it work?

I've thought of this before, as a sort of collective action problem. For example, the region could be presented with a dilemma around a climate treaty, and nations would determine whether to join or not at an individual level. If everyone chooses not to join, everyone's stats stay mostly the same, with a few very minor losses in, say, environmental friendliness and environmental beauty.

I object to the idea that nations should be directly penalised for not participating in one particular aspect of the game. We're [currently] allowed to 'dismiss' national Issues or even switch them off altogether without any penalty, after all...

[Galiantus III]

No reason there can't be an "opt out" available to regions. Founders and delegates could dismiss issues or turn them off altogether, and nations don't have to join regions that engage in regional issues.

[Valentine Z]

If I may make another suggestion, would it be feasible to have issues that are based on region sizes? Small regions that are not too well-off (maybe by economy, other countries), or large GCR and UCRs with issues that would normally plague large regions. I know a few issues that would namedrop (e.g. "we are a laughingstock in @@REGION@@!"@), but I was wondering if this would become a bit of an incentive for both large and small UCRs/GCRs to benefit from this? Issues tailored for small regions, or for large regions.

Of course, the problem I can see is nations hopping around regions for the sole purpose of getting those issues, but that could be somewhat closed by tying it with Residency (you must be here at least for a month, for instance).

Maybe another one about triggering, for instance, giving foreign aid to those who needs it, or if you have a bunch of high foreign aid nations, you could have an issue about receiving a lot of goodies from other nations.

Just my two cents again!

[Trotterdam]

On one hand, regional issues could help encourage interation with other players, but on the other hand, many players wouldn't like having their stats modified through actions that are not their own, which is aready why many players don't want to join the WA, at least on their main. Player interaction is very much contrary to the current design spirit of NationStates, which is that you run your own nation (including, famously, the lack of a war mechanic that other players could use to forcibly impose their will on you).

Any opt-in/opt-out would have to be on a national level rather than a regional level, since it's no fun to be forced to flee a region you've been in for years because its other members decided they like regional issues. However, this would also drastically limit participation, if only a few weird kooks in the region opt in while most nations ignore the feature.

Another idea would be if there were "regional stats" that could be affected separately from national stats, but that seems like it would both take a lot of work to code and be hard to justify flavorwise.

For what it's worth, there is already one way in which creative regional officers can present a form of "issues" for their member nations to collectively answer without worrying about consequences: polls. Only problem is that requires imagination on the poll officer's part, because there aren't any built-in polls in the game, and even if there were, answering the same polls over and over would get boring.

[Valentine Z]

To clarify, my suggestion is about issues that are tailored based on regional stats and the size of it in terms of number of nations. It's unlike WA regulations whereby they *will* affect WA nations. For these, you might get a chance to accept foreign aid from the generous nations of the region at some point (the offer to accept, so you are not automatically accepting it), I apologise for the lack of clarity.

For these region-centric issues, you can ignore them and they will not affect your stats like how you dismiss other issues; only difference is the one or two issue you might get just because you are in a large/small region.

[Bears Armed]

For what it's worth, there is already one way in which creative regional officers can present a form of "issues" for their member nations to collectively answer without worrying about consequences: polls. Only problem is that requires imagination on the poll officer's part, because there aren't any built-in polls in the game, and even if there were, answering the same polls over and over would get boring.

The IDU had one about whether our regional map's fauna included any surviving lineages of Trilobites. (Majority choice = Yes.)

[Paffnia]

Bringing up a feature request about Easter eggs: could there be a page where a nation can view which specific ones they've gotten. More: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=489934

[Odinburgh]

Would that mean the policies we get through issues answered be also a regional thing?

[Dabarastan]

I note that a few here are already talking about the nation page WA category descriptions.
I became a Tyranny by Majority today after being a Conservative Democracy since 2019. This WA category's description says:

[ the population] enjoy great social freedoms and frequent elections, where the majority of the populace regularly votes to increase its benefits at the expense of various hapless minorities.

I sort of get it if if I really think about it, but intuitively, this doesn't feel right to me. Tyranny by Majority requires low civil rights, so why does it default to "enjoy great social freedoms"? My civil rights are around 5.5. You could argue that the "great social freedoms" are only experienced by the ruling-tyranny-majority, but surely that's not what a 5.5 civil rights stat communicates?

On one hand, regional issues could help encourage interation with other players, but on the other hand, many players wouldn't like having their stats modified through actions that are not their own.

I'd also like to back this up. I wouldn't like my stats even more frequently being modified by other plays (it's already my least favourite part of WA membership).

[Merconitonitopia]

On atrophy
I'm not too thrilled about this atrophy idea.
This would punish less active players. A less active player might find that his stats are decaying faster than he's feeding them. Is a player going to be happy about putting time in when he's only breaking even, or even declining? Then his options are to quit the game or put more time in. Or one might decide to brush the dust of an old nation, only to find that it has fallen into disrepair.
NS is a game that you should be able to play at any pace you choose, whether that's playing every day for years, or playing weekly, or going through episodes of activity and inactivity, etc. Less active players are already 'punished' in the sense that they will see slower progress proportional to putting less work in; why penalise them on top of that?

I really don't understand this idea of giving new players a hand up. Ranks are a zero-sum game, so the only way you can pull up newfriends is by pushing down old-timers; by punishing their hard work and devotion. You might think I'm just pleading my self-interest, but I can't see how this would be fair.

tl;dr: it would be discouraging to less active players (both old and new) and unfair to old-timers.

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On crime
Not too much to add here, but I'd like to echo the sentiment that crime is long overdue for revision. Crime is a serious problem IRL and it doesn't make sense that you shouldn't have to work at it. By making crime not a problem for the average nation, you're taking away something to consider when answering issues, which makes the decision-making process less engaging, and it makes having a crime-free utopia less of a prize to be earned. The median nation should have 'moderate' crime IMO.

Thank you for all the comments re industry reform. Sedge didn't originally post this as he wasn't sure if I, as designated PM/point Editor on the team for this, wanted to disclose current status, but I also think it's important people know where we're at.

You'll all be very happy to know that we've (the Editing Team) identified a whole host of new industries, and how industries are built/structured, and we're closing to finalising this and the conceptualisation/basic architectural stage. I am hopeful we'll move on to the start of what will be the implementation stage in the next few weeks. Many of the ideas mentioned here thus far re new industries will be reflected in some way in the new make-up.

That's not to say to expect the industry reform any time soon (#sorrynotsorry) but this update is just to let you all know that we're much further along than we have been before and it's an actual "project" now, and not just an "idea".

*insert Ron Paul "It's Happening" gif here*

P.S. please keep ideas coming (though I think penalising people for not being active in answering issues may be a bit of a non-runner, as that's a little mean )

Very much pleased to hear this. And take as much time as you need.

[SherpDaWerp]

Another thought that's occurred to me is an Issue Submission Preview page might be nice. As in, when submitting an issue, have a "Preview" button that just chucks it all in the exact sort of format you'd see if the issue were published as-is (obviously with the disclaimer that it would get edited and different images attached prior to publication).

The standard view submission page is already kinda close to this, given it has the newspaper formatted title and the right sort of spacing between options, but there's still a bunch of boxes scattered around that get in the way.

I know I'd definitely use it for last-minute proofreading, although I can imagine it being an obscure enough feature to go pretty far down the queue.

[Paffnia]

Two changes on nation creation questions:
- Random history setting: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=304412
- Edits/clarifications to the question language: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=489006

[Jar Wattinree]

On atrophy
I'm not too thrilled about this atrophy idea.
This would punish less active players. A less active player might find that his stats are decaying faster than he's feeding them. Is a player going to be happy about putting time in when he's only breaking even, or even declining? Then his options are to quit the game or put more time in. Or one might decide to brush the dust of an old nation, only to find that it has fallen into disrepair.
NS is a game that you should be able to play at any pace you choose, whether that's playing every day for years, or playing weekly, or going through episodes of activity and inactivity, etc. Less active players are already 'punished' in the sense that they will see slower progress proportional to putting less work in; why penalise them on top of that?

I really don't understand this idea of giving new players a hand up. Ranks are a zero-sum game, so the only way you can pull up newfriends is by pushing down old-timers; by punishing their hard work and devotion. You might think I'm just pleading my self-interest, but I can't see how this would be fair.

tl;dr: it would be discouraging to less active players (both old and new) and unfair to old-timers.

All of my thoughts have been expressed here, atrophy is not a good thing. Sometimes I just don't feel like answering issues and let my nation sit for weeks at a time, answering again when I choose. Having that be penalized is counterproductive.

I'd rather see things like Population, Influence, Endorsements, and Residency removed from the Challenge game because they give an unfair advantage to nations who are either older, in endorsement happy, and/or non-Influence decaying regions before this "atrophy" thing is implemented. But isn't that the whole point of stats? You are getting an "unfair advantage" over everyone else when you specialize certain stats, which is why there are nations that have ludicrously high stats that poor and puny 5 million pop nations can never hope to achieve within the very first day of their founding...

...and two or three years later those same 5 million pop nations are sitting at the top of the leaderboard in some stats, for example Darths and Droids, which admittedly is only 1st in the world for Welfare because the now 2nd in the world guy decided to slash his stat by 5k, but I'll stress the differences of their age. DND is almost five years old, and Blogotopia is sixteen years old. And just a year ago, DND had unintentionally reached 3rd in the world for Welfare purely because of dedicated Issue answering for almost three years prior to that.

Now people say that's unfair to others, but, c'mon, excuse me? It takes time and effort, and endless patience for screwups ("Is this a government or a shanty town?!? Slash all funding!!!"), to reach these thresholds. And if the current leaders decide to self-sabotage or just not answer issues for a good while, they will just stay at their current level, or even Cease to Exist, meaning there's a lot less competition. Stat-decay... works against it, and is counterproductive. You may not know the feel of dopamine by seeing a stat increase by mere decimal points, but neither will you know the feeling of satisfaction when you look on your stat bar and see all of the progress that's made.

Imagine coming back after a while and seeing, for some inexplicable reason, all of your stat bars just going down. With no kind of activity to indicate otherwise. I can't imagine what it'd be like to see these bars when you've CTE'd and then revived your nation. There's nothing to be gained by punishing players who don't put the time in to keep answering their issues. Might as well set it to where no nations have any sort of stats whatsoever except their Residency, Population, Influence, and Endorsement stats and they only gain or lose them by answering issues. Now isn't that a fair thing? It'd keep all of the R/D puppet nations and inactives (e.g. sleeper nations) from bloating the census rankings, and thus some measure of equality can be reached.

Speaking of stat decay, it'll be bloody hilarious if Population, Influence, Endorsements, and Residency can also suffer from this atrophy thing. There's no bigger sign of "unfairness" than seeing a 39 billion pop nation with 100k influence, 500 endorsements, and 6000+ days of sitting in a particular region, next to the 5 million pop newbie. How dare they.

[Land Without Shrimp]

I don't have any "big ideas" to suggest, just wanted to say that this is the area of development I'm most excited about! Thanks for your work on this, as issues-answering (and associated badges) is one of my favourite parts of NS. Especially in support of:

1) Adding Economic Freedom to home page
2) More rankings/badges!
3) More unlockable banners!

All of these make me most excited.

As for stat-atrophying, I agree that this is a bad idea. NS is a game measured in years - not meant to be at top of rankings in a few months. As has been said, it is possible to catch up to nations at top if they're not answering issues - and part of the fun is finally catching up to them and nabbing that #1 ranking! (Shh, don't tell the #1 in TSP for Book Publishing that I'm finally almost caught up to him...) It takes away the thrill if they're easier to grab. As long as the nation hasn't CTE, why should they be punished?

Again - just posting to say I'm really excited by this development and will support anyway I can.

[Sedgistan]

Things are going a bit slow my end with this, as the changes made in this area tend to be reliant on work done by the Issues Editing team. At the moment we're busy with the Issues Contest judging and integrating two new Editors. In my other GP/SC role I've just had a new SC category implemented, which is taking up quite a lot of my NS time.

However, with those out the way, there is plenty I intend us to work on - we need to get the new newspaper images finished, and use some of them for new Banners, and pretty much the entirety of the nation page needs working through, section by section, to add more variety to it.

[Sedgistan]

An update: the current project is images related; we've just added around 350 images to our pool to select from - these are being added as "Headline" images to some of our issues to give more variety. We've just started work on increasing the number of unlockable banners too; that will likely take a few weeks as we all come up with and refine ideas for them, but once that's complete, implementation is simple.

If anyone has suggestions for achievements that could unlock further banners, feel free to make them in this thread.

[Lord Dominator]

Is it possible to have your ranking on a stat display on more than just your page and the first page?

IE, for instance I sometimes do comparison of my very low stats to the other lowest ones, and it’d be nice if my rank/score would display on those pages.