Thought it was better from Fris's feedback and the last reply date to make a new one for this. Feel free to merge it back in if necessary.
The Problem:
To generate card packs, you have a small chance of generating a card pack for each issue you answer. Your nation only gains 4 issues a day, so to gain more packs, players have created puppet nations that exist to generate issues, that they then answer those issues to generate card packs. Each card pack has a small chance of getting a legendary, so to increase their chances of getting a legendary card, they answer as many issues on as many nations as they can. Players have hundreds or thousands of nations to answer issues on, and they put these in either existing regions, or their card farm regions. These nations and regions have grown in number and size, leading to many of the largest regions in NS (by raw nation count) being card farm regions.
This was made apparent to all NSers when the Best Nation Game was first trialed for April Fools 2021. The sheer number of puppets both made it more difficult for the game to calculate the best nation (as it required multiple comparisons to begin to weed out the worse ones and make the better ones appear more frequently), and made players less interested in playing (as no one wants to be comparing Card Farm XII to Womble 2537). The game, if enough comparisons were made, would have weeded out the card farms in time, but there was not that opportunity as the sheer number of card farms overwhelmed it.
Season 3, if it came out tomorrow, would be filled with mostly card farm nations, as they take up a large proportion of the total nations in the game. Instead of nations, the cards you picked from a pack would likely be 'Card Farm XI' and 'Womble 2781'.
To answer issues as fast as possible (so they can gain more packs in the same amount of time), they generally pick the first option (or randomly sometimes). The sheer number of issues answered for card packs has resulted in the statistics of who picked what option in each issue being warped dramatically. These statistics pre card farms were used by the Issue Editors to balance issues. If one issue option was picked far more/far less than the other options, they would look at the issue, and nerf/buff it so the issue was more of a dilemma rather than having a right/wrong answer. Issue Editors have since said that due this, they are unable to use this, and have to rely on other means to balance issues.
1. Issue statistics have become muddied, decreasing the quality of issues for all players.
2. The game has to process thousands of unnecessary regions and nations, decreasing performance and increasing server costs. If these nations were not required to be competitive in cards, many major card farmers have both onsite (past thread) and offsite said they would let most of them CTE. Also logging in/out of multiple nations rapidly taxes the servers more than normal activity.
3. Season 3 would be made primarily of card farms, which are not interesting to collect. The average nation would be less likely to get interesting cards from their packs.
4. The Best Nation Game did not successfully run due to puppets for AF 2021.
The Solution:
1. With issues no longer
2. Having the ability to answer unlimited comparisons (and therefore packs) on a single nation means the need for other farming nations is radically reduced (tens for deck capacity rather than hundreds/thousands). Most large farmers have indicated that they will let the unneeded nations CTE - leading to less unnecessary nations reducing normal players performance and hopefully making NS cheaper to run (so the resources can be invested elsewhere to improve NS). Players would not need to login and out of large numbers of card farms. This would again help the servers.
3. A few months after this change, S3 would be able to be created, and the intent of this change is that the majority of card farms would have CTEd by then, dramatically reducing the number of puppet cards in S3. This will increase the average quality of cards in S3 with the removal of thousands of cards that otherwise would have existed with default flags and bad names (as the card farms would have CTEd).
4. We would finally be able to see the Best Nation Game in the form it was intended in, and allow the persuasion/drama/bribery for the honour of being the regions best/worst nation (and the worlds). More comparisons would be made, making the game more accurate. More comparisons would also help by reducing the frequency of 'bad' nations appearing, as admin said that nations that are consistently not picked appear less often. In the AF event though, there were too many nations and too few comparisons, but here there will be more comparisons and less nations.
Please note: This would not change the frequency/value of the cards in each pack. Packs would behave exactly like now, just instead of answering an issue to get a pack, you'd answer a comparison.
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Additions after feedback
At the end of each WA vote - all voters that are still in the WA at the time of the vote ending get one pack added to their nation - this is to both incentivise voting, highlight cards to those who don't answer issues, and to make the average nation better off by this change. Having the issue frequency of packs decreased to 0.05 per issue and giving one per WA resolution puts the average player ahead every 4 days (2.4 vs 2.8 packs every 4 days). -- This is removed again due to contradictory feedback/complexity.
Also the unopened pack limit should be removed (to allow pull events etc. to continue as normal, so players don't need to use 500 nations to store their packs for pull events like present).
Nations should be added to the pool of possible nations to compare once they opt in (probably by doing a single comparison) and removed from the comparison pool on CTE. If they refound, their comparison value should have been saved, and either they either opt in again to the pool again, or they are automatically added to the comparison pool again on refounding.
Things needing specific feedback:
-Probability of each comparison generating a pack - as it should be roughly equivalent to an hour card farming to an hour answering comparisons.
-Whether packs held by a nation need to be infinite (and if so with a new season should packs be reset/only usable for the prior season). This has also changed as pull events aren't a thing now.
-Should there be a time limit between answering comparisons. Some have suggested none, others 1s, or 5s, but it can't be longer than that, as at that point it's faster to switch to another nation and answer there (negating part of the reason for the change).
-Should packs be generated in addition by WA resolutions/still by issues/by random pages on NS? If so, the best way to generate cards should be still the best nation game (ensured by rate limit and unlimited packs being held by a nation) otherwise the change is moot if farmers find another way more efficient.
Other minigame options
Trivia - Fris has ruled that out here. Also I would've been against anyway.
Random pages - too gameable by just having a script doing things.
Something tied to stats - easily gameable, as scripts had advanced to the point where you can legally bot to #1 on the leaderboards for a specific stat.
Challenge - is tied to stats, so same issues as above. Also is way more resource intensive as needs to load each nation, and get each stat from both nations.
Edit: Added on 'Things needing specific feedback'
Edit 2: Added on time limit bits.
Edit 3: Added on WA/normal pages/issues
Edit 4: Reworked - instead of changing, adding two different ways of gaining cards but ensuring BN is the superior option for farming, as there were genuine concerns about existing players being disadvantaged/harder for new players to find the game.
Edit 5: Added other minigame bit.
Edit 6: Added nations opting in to the best nation game to avoid useless puppets being added in without intention.
Edit 7: Took WA out again, and edited parts to reflect pull events aren't a thing.