Welcome to NS Sport : Guide : Rules : Questions

[Ko-oren]

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WIKI ▲ DISCORD ▲ SCORINATORS ▲ HISTORY ▲ FAQ

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WORLD CUP PRESIDENTIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS ▲ RULES REGARDING PUPPETS ON NS SPORT ▲ OLYMPICS PRESIDENTIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

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CHAPTERS                         Pld   W  D   L   F   A  Pts          
 1 INTRODUCTION                  22  20  2   0 109   3   62 CL
 2 SCORINATORS                   22  18  2   2  18   2   56 CL
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 3 TYPES OF THREAD               22  16  2   4  16   4   50 ChC
 4 TYPES OF COMPETITION          22  14  2   6  14   6   44 ChC
 5 HOSTING                       22  12  2   8  12   8   44 ChC
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 6 SO BEFORE YOU HOST SOMETHING  22   0 22   0   0   0   22 AC
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 7 FAIR PLAY                     22   6  2  14   6  14   20
 8 THE NS SPORT CANON            22   6  2  14   6  14   20
 9 LINKS                         22   5  2  15   5  15   17
10 GLOSSARY                      22   5  2  15   5  17   17
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11 MODERATOR-ENFORCED RULES      22   2  2  18   2  22    8 P
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12 THE FAQ                       22   0  2  20   3 109    2 R

INTRODUCTION

Say you win an American Football game 21-14. Maybe you scored three touch-downs. Maybe you hit seven field goals but conceded seven safeties. Maybe you were 15-14 up, defended a goal-line stand like your life depended on it, and pulled off a pick-six for the win with the clock all at zeroes. Maybe you were 21-0 up in the fourth quarter, threw on a rookie quarter-back, and he almost cost you the game. Or maybe you don’t write about the game at all, and instead focus on your seven thousand year old salamander-king solving a rubik's cube with his feet while negotiating domestic cheese-manufacturing policies over Zoom. It’s all good. Welcome to NS Sports.

This isn't a place for real-life teams and athletes like Lionel Messi or the New York Yankees. To discuss real-world sports, try the General forum. NS Sport is the forum where we scorinate and roleplay sports. This guide tries to mention everything you need to know to get involved and enjoy your time here.

You don’t have to like sports to be part of this community. You don’t need to know anything about a sport to sign up and compete. Heaven knows most of the participants in the average baseball, soccer or racing thread couldn’t tell a closer from a header from a diffuser. What sets this forum apart from the other RP forums can be summed up in one sentence. All outcomes are scorinated. The nations participating in that match then decide how the result happened.

In general, NS Sports can be divided into two things: domestic newswires (which belong to a nation/user or a small group of nations/users) and international competitions (which is where different nations/users pit their teams against one another). Both are scorinated. You’ve seen that word - scorinate - a few times now, so that’s a good place to start.

SCORINATING
Unlike other parts of the NationStates forums, the winner of a contest isn’t decided by the nations competing in it. The winner isn’t decided by anyone. They’re chosen by a Scorinator.

A scorinator is a program that finds a realistic-looking result for a match in a given sport. It takes the Rank of two competing teams, adds their Roleplay Bonus, and uses the final figure to affect some Random numbers. Rank, Roleplay and Random are commonly known as the Three Rs.

ROLEPLAY
Commonly called RP. Most competitions will offer an RP Bonus, which means if you write roleplays in the Roleplay thread, your team/athlete will have a better chance of winning.
RANK
After the end of a competition, most sports will update their Rankings. Your team’s rank is a performance rating that shows how good it is at a given sport. It’s based on how well you’ve performed in previous tournaments in that sport. Having a higher ranking in a sport will increase your team’s chances of winning in that sport in the future. This is sometimes called 'skill (mod)'.
RANDOM
RPing increases your chances of winning. Being highly ranked increases your chances of winning. However, they don’t guarantee victory. You could have the highest ranking in history and produce an oscar-winning short film on every day of the competition, but if the random numbers don’t go your way, you won’t win. Random is cruel, but it’s necessary. Of the three Rs, it’s the only one that is absolutely necessary to scorinate a competition. A competition that’s exclusively random, however, is Forum 7 material.
STYLE MODS
Sometimes these are required by a scorinator, sometimes they're optional, and in some scorinators, they can't be entered at all. Style mods help to incorporate how attacking/defending (in team/ball sports, or how reliable your engine is in racing, and so on) a team is, and the scorinator will then output higher or lower scorelines. Mind you - they don't output higher or lower score margins - if Margaret decides your team narrowly loses, then you'll just score more points in that loss but you'll still lose by the same margin (say, losing 5-3 instead of 2-0, or losing 54-51 instead of 10-7). In that sense, style mods are the only way where IC (In Character) crosses into the actual scorination process. Everything else can be RP'd.
TECH LEVELS, GAMESIDE STATS AND SEX
You’ll note that these don’t begin with R. Competitions here do not take into account the technology level, gameside stats or identity of the participants. They also don’t take into account the age, gender, ethnicity, size or species of the participants. NS Sports has seen such outlandish competitors as sentient blancmanges and killer tomatoes, Aztec gods, fluffy bunnies, doddering grandmas and all manner of elves, ponies, gnomes, dwarves, bears and even a single, solitary egg. They all compete equally in NS Sports. However good, bad, rich, poor, big or small you say your team is, the scorinator doesn't care.

SCORINATORS

A scorinator is a program, spreadsheet or formula that calculates the result of a match based on the Three Rs. To scorinate your own competition, you’ll need a scorinator. Most likely, you’ll need a copy of Xkoranate.

PROGRAMS
Over the years, a couple of bespoke scorination programs have been developed by NS Sporters.

XKORANATE VERSION 0.33
Developed by Commerce Heights and released in 2011, Xkoranate is the go-to for the majority of hosts. It can generate scores for most popular sports. For a guide to how to use it, see this thread.
XKORANATE COMMUNITY EDITION
The 2011 version of Xkoranate has naturally begun to show its age. It still works fine on Windows and Linux, but newer Macs now refuse to run the original program. As such, various members of the community have begun working on a new version. It’s not yet ready to be released, but we’ll post links to it when it’s available.
NATIONSTATES FOOTBALL SIMULATOR
Developed by Bedistan/Vephrall and officially known simply as NSFS, version of this formula has been in use since mid 2003. It became a downloadable programme in 2010

SPREADSHEETS
Some sports more often use a dedicated spreadsheet to scorinate results. These have their advantages and disadvantages over programmes. They can be easier to adjust, but are also easier to accidentally break.

THE RACING SCORINATOR (Motor Racing)
The Racing Scorinator is a veritable Ship of Theseus. Initially put together by Casari in 2006 to scorinate season one of NSF1, the precursor to the current World Grand Prix Championship that serves as our version of F1, it was converted into a cycling scorinator, and then converted back to an F1 simulator by Liventia. Audioslavia gave the sheet a number of overhauls in the early tens, and the scorinator is now looked after by Former Citizens of the Nimbus System. It's twenty years old these days, and a little delicate in places, but if you follow the instructions you should be able to get a tune out of it.
IFCF SCORINATOR (Association Football)
If you'd like to scorinate football matches and don't have access to Xkoranate, The IFCF Scorinator is your best bet.
OTHERS
See the Links section at the bottom of this guide for scorinators for other sports.

THINGS THAT ARE NOT SCORINATORS

DICE
You’ll see the word ‘dice’ thrown about the NS Sport forum because it’s often the best metaphor to use for the generation of a random number. NS World Cups 1 and 2 were scorinated using actual dice back in the very early days of NS, but even as early as World Cup 3, held in spring 2003, a formula was used and applied via an excel spreadsheet. If you try to use dice to scorinate a tournament, and you’re not doing so as part of a ‘bit’, your thread will be laughed out of the building.
VIDEO GAMES
Your first idea for how to scorinate a football match might have been to set the teams up on Football Manager, eFootball or EA Sports FC and run the simulator. This is really time consuming, and you’ll get bored very quickly. Also, these games use a formula that isn’t publicly available, so you don’t know exactly which teams are stronger and which are weaker. It won’t work out. Don’t use a video game.
THAT WEBSITE YOU FOUND
I know. Xkoranate is old and is initially difficult to figure out, but we can promise you it’s fairer and more reliable than the website you’ve just found. The results generators on websites such as leaguesimulator.eu are either not as robust as the simulators we use on NS, or have a formula that is not public. As such, nobody knows how fair or balanced the scorinator is. Remember that guy on YouTube who remade Football Manager from a single spreadsheet? We looked at his match scorination formula. It sucks. It’s much worse than Xkoranate. Use Xkoranate.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
You likely don’t know what formula a random website uses. You definitely don’t know what parameters an AI is using. Will it be affected by me spending ten minutes a day talking to ChatGPT about how good my football team is? Will it be affected by how much information there is on the internet about your football team? I don’t know. You don’t know. The guy who created the AI doesn’t know. The NS Sport forums is just one more place in the world where an attitude of ‘I don’t know how to do this, so I’ll get an AI to do it’ will hold you back and cause you problems.

CAN I MAKE MY OWN SCORINATOR?
If you're technically minded, this article and this article, both written by Osarius, are well worth reading to get an understanding of how a scorinator works, and how you might go about creating your own scorinator. If you're not technically minded, then please don't create your own scorinator.

[Ko-oren]

TYPES OF THREAD

If you’re new to NSS, you can use these phrases to quickly identify what type of thread you’re reading. The tags are not mandatory, but strongly recommended to help yourself and others.

DOMESTIC
Domestic competitions typically do not involve more than one nation, and therefore do not involve other users on the site. A domestic thread is yours and yours alone. Scorinate whatever you like, however you like.

[NEWSWIRES]
Most domestic threads are newswires: results, or results with some flavour text, or results and entire RPs.
[RP COMPENDIUMS]
Sometimes users continue a story line across many different tournaments, and they choose to create a repository with links to each chapter, so they (and others) can quickly find a specific entry

INTERNATIONAL
International competitions are held between different nations, or athletes representing different nations.

[INTEREST]
Before setting up a new competition, you might first post an [INTEREST] thread to see if anyone would be keen to participate. If it seems nobody cares, then consider abandoning the idea. If a few people say they’d love to take part, move onto the next step:
[SIGN-UPS]
Almost all competitions begin with a sign-up thread. If you’re posting a sign-up thread, that means:

• You’re hosting the competition yourself.
  
• You have a scorinator.
• You know how the scorinator works.
• You know what information you need from people signing up.
If one or more of the above isn’t true, then either you’re posting the sign-up thread for the next edition of a very long running tournament, or you’re about to have your thread locked.
The information you need from entrants is probably just the name of their team, which is usually just their nation name. If you need more information, say so in the OP. If you need the names of their athletes, or team, or a picture of their car, or the colour of their helmets, and you can’t run the tournament without this information, then make sure you say so.
A sign-up thread also contains rules about puppet nations and AI usage.
[EVERYTHING]
Most competitions will have an [EVERYTHING] thread. In that thread, there will be three types of post: Roleplays, results posts, and rosters. You don’t need to break these up into separate threads unless your tournament usually has 100 or so users participating.
[ROLEPLAY]
A roleplay thread is where you write about your team/athlete.
[SCORES/RESULTS]
A scores thread is where the results of the competition are posted. The only users that are allowed to post in these threads are the hosts of the competition. If you post in a dedicated scores/results thread and you’re not a host, bad things will happen. Only huge tournaments will have these (at time of writing: World Cup, Olympics).
[ROSTERS]
This is where everyone gives details of the names of their players. You commonly also post information about your team’s history, colours, culture and home stadium. Roleplay Permissions are also typically posted in roster threads.

TYPES OF COMPETITION

INTERNATIONAL
International competitions take place between teams or athletes representing nations, and are open to entrants from any nation. Check the first post for information on the maximum number of nations you may enter into the competition. It’s probably 1 or 2.

WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS
World Championships are the highest level of international sport. The winner will be crowned world champion of the sport.
INVITATIONAL TOURNAMENTS
Some tournaments are usually run by invite only, and thus do not have a sign-up thread.
SUB-AGE TOURNAMENTS
Sub-age tournaments are for teams with players younger than a certain age. Under 21 tournaments will typically involve players aged between 17 and 21 (with some exceptions). They can be used for worldbuilding and developing new characters
EXHIBITION TOURNAMENTS
Exhibition tournaments are smaller competitions. Some are invitational, some require a sign-up thread. They are usually created to help hosts gain experience of hosting a tournament, and to give RPers something to do between world championships.

REGIONAL
Regional competitions take place between members of a game-side region. To participate, you must be a member of that region.

MULTIVERSAL
Regions such as Rushmore, Esportiva, Mandalanusa, Anaia and Arrosia have long-running regional tournaments that take place in the same universe as NS’s world championships, often called the Multiverse. The teams participating in, say, the Copa Rushmori will also participate in the World Cup.
Other regions, such as The South Pacific, hold occasional tournaments on NS Sport. The teams that compete in these might also sign up to other competitions, like the World Baseball Classic (Baseball) or the World Bowl (American Football).
CLOSED UNIVERSE
Some NS regions, such as The Western Isles, Kylaris and many more, run their own in-universe competitions on the NS Sports forum. These competitions are separate from the general Multiverse. Teams from The Western Isles would not ordinarily compete in the NS World Cup. They instead have their own World Cup for their own universe. The NS Sports community do not consider these closed-universe tournaments to be part of the wider NS Sport canon and, vice-versa, regions like The Western Isles do not consider the NS World Cup to be canon.
Please do not attempt to participate in these closed-universe regional tournaments if you are not a member of that region.

DOMESTIC
Domestic competitions typically do not involve more than one nation, and therefore do not involve other users on the site. A domestic thread is yours and yours alone. They’re typically used for worldbuilding. Instead of posting all your nation’s club results in the International Newswires thread, you might prefer to run your own domestic newswires thread, where you post results from all sports popular in your nation, and post links to it in the International Newswires thread.

CLUB
Club competitions take place between teams representing clubs or franchises within nations. An example of a club or franchise in the real world might be Real Madrid C.F. or the New York Yankees. You won’t see these two teams on NS Sport, however. We have our own clubs in our own nations.
Club competitions typically take place within Newswire threads.
INTERNATIONAL NEWSWIRES
For competitions such as the IFCF Champions League (the NS equivalent of the UEFA Champions League) to take place, it’s necessary to know which teams have qualified for the competition via their own domestic league. As such, users post the results of their regular season in International Newswire threads. To ensure your team is eligible for a club competition, you’ll need to follow the rules of the OP.

OTHER

THE NS OLYMPICS
Held every summer and every winter, the NS Olympics pits teams and athletes against each other in a variety of sports. It mimics the RL Olympic Games as closely as possible. Pay attention to the sign-up process, which contains very precise information about exactly how you need to sign up. If you don’t follow the information exactly, you won’t be allowed to participate.
MOTOR RACING
NSSCRA and WGPC are our equivalents of NASCAR and Formula 1, respectively. They are typically held once or twice a year. Pay attention to the sign-up process, which contains very precise information about how exactly you need to sign up. You might be able to sign up a driver and/or a team, circuit, engine supplier or tyre manufacturer.

HOSTING

Competitions on NS Sport are hosted. This means that a user, or a team of users, organise every aspect of the competition. Hosts are responsible for the competition in its entirety, and are generally considered the 'owners' of the thread(s) they create for it. They are generally seen as the main cause for the success or failure of a competition.

HOST SELECTION
The prospective host(s) of a competition should already have a plan with regards to how they'll run the competition. This includes a schedule, format, scorination methods and RP grading. They'll also be expected to provide information on how many 'puppet' nations users can enter, if any, tournament tiebreakers and your own hosting experience. More recently, users have begun to specify AI rules.
If you want, or say what amount of sign-ups you’re aiming for given your intended format (and what other amounts you’re willing to work with), or anything else you’d like to include that’s relevant for how the tournament will be run.

BIDDING PROCESSES
Tournaments that have been around for a while have reasonably reliable schedules for when they begin the sign-up process for the next edition of the competition. A president, or organizing committee, will take care of that. Users wanting to host the competition will generally post their bids directly into the competition's Sign-up thread, although with the NS World Cup it's more common for bids to have their own thread.
ONE-OFF TOURNAMENTS
If you want to hold a one-off tournament, you have to host it yourself. Creating a tournament and then asking someone else to scorinate it for you is seen as spam.

ORGANIZATION

SCHEDULE
When do the Sign-ups close? When will the Everything/RP thread be opened? How much time will there be before the first matchday, and how much time will there be between matchdays? At what time will you grade RPs and post results (‘cutoff’)?
FORMAT
A tournament format is the way in which the competition goes from dozens of teams to just one. The NFL does this by whittling 32 teams down to 1 via a 17-game conference-format league system followed by a twelve-team staggered-entry playoff. The World Cup uses a round-robin system followed by a single-elimination knockout. The Champions League used to use a similar system, with a staggered-entry knockout as a pre-qualifying system, but now uses a system that's similar to, but not exactly, the Swiss System.
You can inform your players of the format by simply using a real-world example. ‘8 groups of 4 teams each, double round robin, top two in each group advance into seeded (no reseeding after each round) single legged knockouts, no 3rd place playoff’. Simple is fine. Simple is good. If that example doesn’t seem that simple: don’t worry, you’ll get it after participating in a few tournaments.
FORBIDDEN FORMATS
Do you think you’re ready? Do you have what it takes? If so, look at the section below at your own peril. Many have gone mad. You will never be able to unlearn what’s in there.

‘Round of 24’
Knockouts rely on you having a number that’s two to the power of something. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. There are ways to make a different number work, such as a Round of 24, where teams placed 9th-24th play each other, and the winners join the teams placed 1st-8th. It’s a neat way to include some more teams if the size of your tournament asks for it. Of course, this can be any number you want. Round of 21, where the teams 12th-21st play each other, and five drop out? Sure.

Double Elimination
Knockouts typically eliminate the losing team. In Double Elimination, losers go into something called a ‘Losers’ Bracket’ where they continue to play on. Only when a team loses a second time, they’re truly eliminated. This creates some unwieldy brackets and schedules, but has a time and place.

Triple Elimination
Once you realise a Double Elimination is possible, why not a Triple Elimination? Winners’ Bracket, Losers’ Bracket, Double Losers’ Bracket, and only after three losses you’re out.

Casaran/Swiss
Now this is where things get good. In a Swiss tournament (on NS Sports often called a ‘Casaran’ tournament), the further into the competition you go, the more chance you have of playing a team that’s as strong as yours. It’s a very efficient way of ranking a lot of teams in a way that doesn’t require a full round-robin, but it’s complicated. Too complicated to explain fully here. If you’re running this on NS Sports, you are probably going to need a dedicated spreadsheet (or more) to keep track of your tournament.
TIEBREAKERS
In round-robin phases, teams often finish 'level'. To decide which of the two teams gets to finish above the other, you need to decide, before the competition starts, how to separate them. After points are taken into account, which of Goal Difference, Head to Head results, Total Wins, Win Percentages, Strength of Schedule and Strength of Victory (and many others) should be considered the next most important tiebreaker?
Xkoranate will, by default, include ‘goals for’ in its list of tiebreakers. Neither ‘goals for’ and ‘goals against’ should be used in competitions which employ Style Modifiers.
If you’re doing knockouts, how are you going to ‘seed’ them? Will you make a list of the top X teams and let the best play the worst, and second-best play the second-worst? And if you go that route, will an upset win let the winning team take the vanquished team’s seed (‘no reseeding’) or will the winning team play another tough opponent next (‘reseeding’)?
Alternatively, you might let the winner of Group A play the runner-up of Group B, so everyone already knows their potential paths to the final at the start of the tournament.
SCORINATION METHODS
Which Xkoranate formula will you use? For soccer, this involves a choice between SQIS and NSFS. Each has its advantages and disadvantatges over the other.
RP GRADING
How much will a roster be worth? Will you award more RP bonus to someone who posts one brilliant RP every other matchday, or to someone who posts consistently every matchday, even if short and mediocre? Will RP bonus carry on through groups and knockouts, or is there a soft reset at some point?
HOSTING EXPERIENCE
Why should a group of strangers trust you to impartially and reliably grade RPs and post results? What have you hosted before?

RANKINGS
Rankings list teams in order of how good they are. How each sport decides which teams are good and which teams aren’t is up to them. They generally use one of two types of system.

SEQUENTIAL
In a sequential system, the important number is your position in the rankings. If you’re the 30th best team out of 100, your magic number is ‘30’. A smaller number would be better. You’re exactly as far from 60th as you are from 1st.
POINTS-BASED
In a points-based system, the important number is whatever is spat out by a formula. Your magic number might be something like ‘8.5’. A bigger number would be better. The world number 1 probably has about 30 points. The number 100 probably has 0.1. If you’re the 30th best team out of 100, you might be exactly as far from 10th as you are from 100th.

[Ko-oren]

SO BEFORE YOU HOST SOMETHING...

Hi there, and welcome to NS Sport!

If you’re reading this, you're probably a newcomer to NS Sport. First of all, well done for finding the coolest part of Nationstates! It's great that you want to get involved, and we hope you stick around! You might have just posted a new thread for a new competition. In some cases, that thread has since been closed.

Here's the deal: Running an event on NS Sport is a bit like stepping in as replacement referee in a sport you're not familiar with yet: you don't know the rules, you'll whiff the subjective calls, and after a few minutes, even if you try your best, everyone's just yelling at you. And we really don't want your first impression of the community to be like that.

We don't really want you to start a new thread.

With that out of the way: We're also aware you might not care what a few hundred people think, and insist on trying your idea out regardless. If so, here are the basic ground rules:

IF YOU CREATE IT, YOU HAVE TO HOST IT
If you create a new competition, you have to host it. You can’t create a new thing and insist someone else runs it for you, that’s spam.

IF YOU HOST IT, YOU HAVE TO SCORINATE IT
If you host a competition, you have to use a scorinator to generate results. You can’t just go on votes, vibes or spin-the-bottle. For that kind of thing, try Forum 7.

IF YOU SCORINATE IT, YOU HAVE TO TELL US HOW AND WHEN
What format does the tournament have? Are you posting results every day? What are the rules on puppets? And who will be generating scores for your team? You have to tell the community what scorinator you’re using and what parameters you’ll be using. You need to say what rankings you’re using, if any. If you’re planning on awarding RP bonus, you need to say so. If your OP doesn’t contain this information, it might get locked.

SO YOU DID ALL OF THE ABOVE AND YOUR POST STILL GOT LOCKED
The fact is, while you can’t use vibes to create a new competition, the community can use vibes to decide if you know what you’re doing or not. You probably really, earnestly, honestly believe you can run a new competition on your first day on NS Sport. But you - like anyone else in 20 years of this thing - can't.

HOW WE KNOW YOU CAN’T DO THIS WHEN WE HAVEN’T EVEN LET YOU TRY
If you saw a four year old child in brand new Superman pyjamas standing on a fifth-storey window ledge, you wouldn’t explain gravity, aerodynamics and impact forces to them, you’d just pick them up and put them back in the living room. This post is the living room.

WE ALREADY HAVE THAT COMPETITION ANYWAY
Nihil novi sub sole. If you’ve created a new world championship for a popular sport, it’s already been done and there is a system in place for when and where the next edition will happen…

SO YOU FOLLOWED EVERY RULE BUT NOBODY’S SIGNING UP
There’s only so many nations and there’s only so much time any of them can devote to NS. Chances are, they’re only signing up to established tournaments with established hosts.

BUT HOW CAN YOU GET EXPERIENCE IF WE WON’T LET YOU HOST?
You can’t get experience of flying a Boeing 747 by jumping into one at Heathrow and demanding that random passengers tell you how all of the controls work. Find a Cessna first. There’s fewer buttons, fewer pre-flight checks, and if you crash then, hey, you’re only going thirty miles an hour with three mates, not torpedoing 200 people into the side of a mountain. Basically: start small. Do some domestic sports to learn how Xkoranate works. Start participating in other tournaments to learn the signup-roster-result-rp cycle. Find a few users whose RPs you like reading and follow what they do.

As with flying, you won’t immediately be made Captain of your own 747. Big tournaments, like big planes, have two pilots at the front. Find someone who’s a Captain and ask if you can be their First Officer. Co-hosts of major tournaments typically have one senior partner, and one junior. The way to become the former is to first be the latter.

DO YOU TRULY WANT TO HOST SOMETHING?
“I’m going to fly this aeroplane around the world” sounds fun until you realise it’s 90% planning and paperwork and 10% sitting and not touching the controls. Somewhere between your fourth and fifth refuelling stop, you’ll get bored and wander off. Your passengers will be furious and you won’t ever be given a plane again.

Look. We like you. We want you to enjoy NS Sport. Sign up for a competition that looks fun. Don’t make us chase you around shouting at you for opening new threads. Neither of us wants that.

But if you really, really must follow the voice in your head that’s telling you to create a new event, and you’ve decided you really don’t want to figure out why an entire community dedicated the largest part of their guide to begging you not to do exactly the thing you want to do, keep reading:

HOST SOMETHING SMALL
Host a regional competition. Something that members of your gameside region can sign-up for, but isn’t open to the general community. Alternatively, maybe try running a small invitational competition, perhaps with just four to eight teams. Send invites to your friends via telegrams.

With either idea, follow these guidelines:

• Keep it to one thread.
• In the OP, tell the competitors the sport they’re playing, how and when you’ll scorinate the games, how many ‘puppet’ nations are allowed (if any), plus any in-character information they might need.
• Don’t bump the thread for no reason.
• Don’t flood the competition with puppets.

If you need some last-minute help, you can always ask questions in this thread or on the NS Sport Discord.

[Ko-oren]

FAIR PLAY

Here, godmodding is impossible. We take every step to ensure the fairest playing field. Telling us your team is composed of a dozen fifty-foot tall Lebon Jameses on steroids is the same as telling us your entire international baseball team is just one small hard-boiled egg. Here are the rules of the sub-forum.

USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

GENERATIVE TEXT
As mentioned above, Roleplay is one of the Three Rs. Writing extensive high-effort posts typically makes your team perform more well. As such, using ChatGPT, or similar, to generate your roleplay is cheating. Hosts also have the right to determine the consequence of absuing Generative AI, as well as the limits of their usage. Being caught may result in your expulsion from the tournament.
GENERATIVE IMAGES
Using images generated by an AI is usually fine, but check with the host. You will usually find that AI images must be declared. If you use an AI image and you don’t say you’ve used an AI image, you might be punished.
TRANSLATION TOOLS / GRAMMAR HELPERS
We have users from all round the world, with varying levels of English. It isn’t against the rules to translate your RP from your native language to English, nor is it against the rules to use an app like Grammarly to correct mistakes.
If you’ve written your RP in your own language and translated it using a machine, post the translation, but post the original as well, ideally in spoiler tags.

PUPPET RULES
A ‘puppet’ is a secondary nation of yours. Before you enter a puppet nation into a competition, read the instructions in the first post. If the first post does not say how many puppets you can enter, then you can enter as many puppets as you like. If the first post does say that there is a limit on puppet nations, entering more than your allowance is against the rules.

To prevent cheating, the NS Sports moderation team can enforce a competition’s puppet rules. For the complete ruleset, see here

REMOVING A TEAM FROM YOUR COMPETITION
If you’re hosting a tournament and you do not want a team to take part, you can refuse their sign-up. This could be for any reason. You don’t have to say what the reason is.
If you want to remove a team from your competition while the competition is in progress, you can.
For long-running tournaments with a governing organization in place, where changing the host is an option, it’s expected that the governing organization should have a say in the expulsion of a team.

WITHDRAWING YOUR TEAM FROM A COMPETITION
No team should be forced to participate in a competition if it does not want to. You can find instructions on how to withdraw from a competition, or how to deal with a user withdrawing their team from your competition, here

SCORINATING MATCHES INVOLVING YOUR OWN TEAM
This is not against the rules, as in some cases it’s unavoidable, but if it’s possible (and 99.9% of the time, it is possible) for you to ask a third party to scorinate a game between your team and that of another user, you should. Ask around on the NS Sport Discord or make an arrangement with a trusted user before the competition begins.

WHEN TO ASK FOR A THIRD-PARTY SCORINATOR
A third-party is another user who will step in to scorinate individual matches in your competition. When there is a clear conflict of interest, you should ask someone to do this for you. If possible, someone not participating in the tournament.
You should definitely not scorinate a match if the match involves your own team. If you scorinate a series of wins for your team, people will assume you cheated. Maybe Xkoranate did award your team five wins in a row. It won’t matter. People will assume you’re a cheat. If people assume you’ve cheated, it’s your fault, regardless of whether you cheated or not.
It’s impossible to prove that someone did or did not cheat.
The only way to make it certain that you have not cheated is to not scorinate your own result. That is the standard the NS Sport community expects of hosts. This is true whether you’re a newcomer or a veteran.
If you’ve stated publicly that you hope one team wins a match you’re about to scorinate, you shouldn’t scorinate that game.
Before the World Cup 66 final between Polar Islandstates and Eura, Audioslavia said, on the old #IRC channel,
“I hope Polar Islandstates wins”
The problem was, of course, that Audioslavia was due to scorinate that game the next day. He then immediately apologised and recused himself from scorinating the final.
You should consider asking for a third-party scorinator if
you have beef with one of the teams involved.
If you scorinate a loss for a user who you recently had a blazing argument with, people will accuse you of cheating. The only way to ensure you haven’t cheated is by recusing yourself from scorinating that game.
You should consider asking for a third-party scorinator if your team stands to benefit from a certain outcome. If your team can only progress in a competition if an improbable outcome happens in another game, and you scorinate that outcome from that game, people will assume you’ve cheated. Don’t give these people any grounds to assume you cheated. Ask for a third-party scorinator.
EXCEPTIONS

OLYMPICS / MOTOR RACING
The only real exceptions are for events like motor-racing or the Olympics, where it’s either impossible or wildly impractical to have someone else scorinate a result for your driver/athlete.
TIME ZONES
Some users live in a time-zone where there are few, if any, NS Sporters available to third-party scorinate matches at your cut-off time.
This is not an excuse to scorinate your own game.
If you suspect you won’t be able to find someone to scorinate your own team’s game, then arrange with another user to do it when they become available. You can scorinate the games not involving your team at the regular time, and the third-party can generate a score and send it to you when they’re available.
LEAGUE PHASES
If the game is part of a league phase, where you need to generate a table, you may feel that it’d just be easier to scorinate your own game.
This is not an excuse to scorinate your own game.
Most tournaments award equal ranking points for a win in the group stage as for a win in the final. We have plenty of resources to generate tables based on just results data. Furthermore, generating the standings after each scorination is, and has always been, optional.
GRADING YOUR OWN TEAM’S ROLEPLAYS
Running a competition likely involves generating RP bonus for your own roleplay. In these cases, it’s important to under-estimate your own RP. Of course you like your RP - you wrote it yourself, you’re aware of how much time you put in. This is exactly why it’s important to give yourself a lower grade than you think you deserve.

ROLEPLAYING

ROLEPLAY PERMISSIONS
Some events have a list of permissions. This refers to what another user can or cannot do with your teams, athletes and your characters. Can they choose your goalscorers? Can they kill your players or invade your country? All sorts of things are covered here. A common RP Permissions box for football/soccer looks like this.

My opponent, if they RP first, may do the following:
Choose my goalscorers: Yes/No
Godmod scoring events: Yes/No
RP injuries to my players: Yes/No
Godmod injuries to my players: Yes/No
Hand out yellow cards to my players: Yes/No
Hand out red cards to my players: Yes/No
Godmod other events: Yes/No

You can fill it out for your own team by deleting the answers that aren’t applicable, or by adding more information. For example:

My opponent, if they RP first, may do the following:
Choose my goalscorers: Yes (please don’t let Smith score, he’s on a cold streak)
Godmod scoring events: TG me beforehand.
RP injuries to my players: Yes (but not serious injuries)
Godmod injuries to my players: No
Hand out yellow cards to my players: Yes
Hand out red cards to my players: Yes (if so, preferably Smith, Arotza or Ferrara, or any of the defenders)
Godmod other events: Only if it’s really funny.

If you do not follow the permissions outlined by your opponent in a match - for example, if you RP’d that the captain of the team above broke their ankle - the host of the tournament may ask you to change your RP or penalize you.

Roleplay permissions vary from competition to competition. Some hosts elect to remove the option to disallow others from choosing goalscorers, as it can make games prohibitively hard to roleplay.

CONFLICTING ROLEPLAYS
It’s not uncommon for two users to write about the same game at the same time, and therefore have conflicting accounts of what happened. Have a chat with your opponent and see if there’s something you can do. There are ways of hand-waving the discrepancy (maybe your country’s media is famously unreliable, or the journalist was drunk). A general (but not universal) rule is that whoever posts second should follow the lead of whoever posts first. This does mean that it’s a good idea to check the thread to see if your opponent has RP’d recently.
THE IGNORE CANNON
If you disagree with an opponent’s roleplay but do not wish to engage with them, you can simply ‘fire your ignore cannon’.
THE SCORINATED RESULT IS FINAL
You can ignore-cannon an RP but not a result. Only in rare circumstances can you insist that the final score is not the score that was generated, and even if you do insist this, it doesn’t change the final score. Bears Armed famously complained that their 14-0 World Cup Qualifying win over Peisandros was instead a 7-0 win, that they would never run up the score like that against a friendly rival, and that the referee was drunk, had double-vision, and thus awarded each goal twice. This is fine, but it does not change the final score in the tables or the history books. That match was a 14-0 win.
(EXCEPT WHEN IT’S NOT)
On very rare occasions, the scorinator will produce a score which is technically impossible. One example of this would be in Baseball, where the final team to bat scores 5 runs in the 9th inning to win the match by 5 runs. Sports where these edge cases exist will likely have a remark in their host bid/roleplay thread - and if not (or you believe you have found a new edge case (in which case: Congratulations!)), you can always ask around in that event’s/sport’s Discussion Thread.

THE NS SPORT CANON

The NS Sport community have been doing this kind of thing for over twenty years. Some users have been here the entire time, some for only the last five minutes. They are all equal parts of the community.
THE MULTIVERSE
The general canon of NS Sport is often referred to as The Multiverse.
Although there are any number of ‘World’ championships, our general plane of existence is usually referred to as multiverse. Most teams are from what we’d call ‘the world’, sure, but others hail from alternative dimensions, planets and realms.

TIME
Editions of a sporting competition happen at various frequencies. Olympics tend to happen in real-world northern-hemisphere summer or winter (every year, instead of every four years) popular sports like association football and baseball run their world championships between two and four times a year, while grand prix racing events sometimes see a year or two between seasons.
It follows that in-character time flows at a different speed for the various roleplayed characters of the multiverse. There is no one ‘correct’ cadence for aging athletes. A racing driver might be 25 in an RP you wrote in 2023 and 26 in 2025. Meanwhile, a professional footballer might have experienced their entire career in the same period of time.
Time in the multiverse is fluid, means different things to different people, and runs at different speeds depending on various factors. Every nation has a different concept of how fast time runs in their nation.
For more information about how Time works, check the wiki.
SPACE
Sizes of nations and regions and distances between them may be RP’d differently from user to user. There is no all-encompassing canon for geography.
Throughout the subforum, you’ll find references to various ‘sporting regions’. These are gameside regions which are created by, and for, NS Sports users. There are a handful of these regions, but membership of one is not necessary to get the most out of NS Sport.
THE GENDER DIVIDE (OR LACK THEREOF)
The oldest NS Sport RP thread we still have access to is the World Cup 4 RP thread, posted on June 2nd 2003. The first reference to a female footballer playing alongside male footballers, as equals, was posted on June 3rd 2003. At any given time and in any given sport, about 20% of the athletes are women, regardless of real life differences in the capabilities of competitors of different genders. This has always been part of the RPing culture on NS Sport, as is the concept of non-human athletes competing as equals alongside humans, with no advantage or disadvantage given to either.
As to why, you’d have to ask early NSers. One theory is that many early NSers were based in the USA, where the cultural touchpoints for world class soccer players were women.
The exception to this is the NS Olympic games, where the differences in performance suggest that male athletes are stronger than their female counterparts. This follows real-life but is completely at odds with every other competition on the forums, and is therefore simultaneously completely realistic and completely unrealistic. Welcome to NS Sport.

LINKS

The Previous Guide to Sports Roleplaying (2009-2025)

SCORINATING

Scorinators and Other Related Programs. A collection of links to scorinators can be found here.
Spaam's Rugby League Scorinator (Remixed by Osarius)

Xkoranate 0.3.3 - The most widely used scorinator on NS Sport, developed by Commerce Heights
Xkoranate for Dummies - a short guide to xkoranate for newcomers.
A shorter Xkoranate for Dummies
Xkoranate - Community Edition - Newer macs may not be able to run xkoranate any more, so the NS Sport community are teaming up to produce an update. It's not yet working for Mac, but this version is useable with Linux OS and contains some updated sport files. Ask in the Scorinator Discussion Thread for more details
NSFS vs SQIS explained
Scorinators and their mathematics

The Scorinator Discussion Thread - Contains help for all NS Sport scorinators. See also this beginners guide to xkoranate.

WORLDBUILDING AND LORE

The History of Modern NS Sports thread - Collated results and links to past tournaments since the forums moved to the new server in 2009.

The NS Sport Graphics Thread - Would you like a uniform for your team? If you ask nicely, someone in this thread might answer your call and make one for you. Bear this in mind though: Nobody needs a uniform or a crest. You can take part in NS Sport without it.

The Nationstates World Cup Presidential Announcements thread
The Idiot Project Database - Match results from every WCC tournament, 2003-present
Stats Central - Information on tournament winners in international football, 2003-present
NSWC SRS Rankings

Nephara's Guide to Creating a Domestic Sports League
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Tumbra's added notes about starting a Domestic Sports League

DISCUSSION THREADS

Olympics
Football / Soccer (International)
Football / Soccer (Domestic)

American Football
Aussie Rules
Baseball
Basketball (International)
Basketball (Domestic/College)
Cricket
Handball
Ice Hockey
Lacrosse
Motorsports (NSSCRA)
Rugby
Tennis
Water Polo
Motorsports (World Grand Prix Championships)

Scorinators
NS Sports History / Record Keeping

GLOSSARY

HOST (v) (n)

To be responsible for a tournament in its entirety, from start to finish, generating scores and collating tables and reading roleplays and dealing with complaints. It’s often a long and arduous process and is a responsibility given only to those who the community trust.

OOC (adj) (n)

Out of Character. A comment by you, the writer.

IC (adj) (n)

In Character. Something said or done by a character or by a nation on Nationstates.

TRIGRAM (n)

A three-letter acronym that typically represents your nation. For example, in the real world, Australia’s trigram is ‘AUS’, Austria’s is ‘AUT’, France’s is ‘FRA’ and so on. A list of existing NS Sports trigrams can be found here.

SCORINATE (v)

To calculate the results of a game or sporting event using a combination of RP bonus, ranking and a random factor. Scorination is often done with a scorinator.

SCORINATOR (n)

A program or spreadsheet that calculates the result of a game or competition using a combination of RP bonus values, ranking values and a random factor.

NEWSWIRE (n)

A thread that is used more for reports on domestic competition

OP (n)

Original Post. The first post of a thread. Could also stand for ‘Original Poster’, meaning the user who posted the thread.

MAIN (n)

The nation that you use the most. When other users refer to you on this forum, they refer to you via the name of your main nation.

PUPPET (adj) (n)

Another nation that you post with. In NS Sports a player is often limited to the number of puppet nations they can enter into a tournament (usually 1 Main and 1 Puppet)

PERMS (n)

A contraction of Roleplay Permissions. Some events have a list of permissions which dictate what another user can or cannot do with your teams, athletes and characters. Can they choose your goalscorers? Can they kill your players or invade your country? All sorts of things are covered here. A common RP Permissions box for football/soccer looks like this.

My opponent, if they RP first, may do the following:
Choose my goalscorers: Yes/No
Godmod scoring events: Yes/No
RP injuries to my players: Yes/No
Godmod injuries to my players: Yes/No
Hand out yellow cards to my players: Yes/No
Hand out red cards to my players: Yes/No
Godmod other events: Yes/No

GODMOD (n) (v)

Because the scorination of results does not allow you to ignore a scoreline that you don't like, Godmodding in NS Sports refers to events that are outrageously unlikely and often totally impossible. A gridiron team scoring seven safeties, a striker who always scores in the first twenty seconds of a game before getting injured, a baseball deflecting off a passing bald eagle before falling kindly for your player to catch - the possibilities are endless. Players who prefer more realistic RPs will often state, via their roleplay permissions, that they will not allow their opponents to do anything too ridiculous during the game.

MARGARET (n)

”Behind him, leaning against the window sill, is Margaret - wearing her burgundy robe and midnight blue hooded cape. In her left hand is a small leather pouch, with an eagle feather tied to it by a silver strand. In her right hand she holds a battered rubber chicken with one eye and half a wing missing.” :- Snub Nose 38, 28/10/2003.

The goddess of the Random Number Generator on NS Sport. Have you just lost a match you’re sure you should have won? It’s Margaret’s fault. Did one of your rugby teams just randomly win 125-0? Margaret. Did you get drawn against the strongest team in the world for the fourth tournament running? Margaret.

RUBBER CHICKENS (n)

The traditional offering sacrificed to the goddess of the Random Number Generator. To increase your chances of winning an event, you can either RP well and often or you can sacrifice a rubber chicken to Margaret. Both work.

1093 (n)

Do you need a random number? Like, not a number from a random number generator, you just need to write a number and you don’t care which number it is? On this forum, that number is 1093.

CABAÑAS EFFECT (n)

The Cabañas effect refers to the phenomenon of individuals, teams, or other entities with diacritics in their names being often more successful than those without.

NEPHARAN DECADE (n)

A period of nine years.

[Ko-oren]

ENFORCEMENT OF PUPPET RULES

1 - Outlining your tournament's puppet regulations
If you host a tournament on NS Sport, read parts one and two carefully

On NS Sport, secretly entering a 'puppet' (a second nation, in addition to your main nation) into a tournament is usually frowned upon, but is not strictly against the rules.

So, if you’re running a tournament on NS Sport and you don’t want this to happen, you must outline your puppet rules clearly in the first post of the thread. If you do this, the Moderation team can help enforce your rules.

Your tournament’s puppet rules must be posted in a timely manner. You can’t just add them in later; nobody should be taken by surprise by an accusation of breaking rules they didn’t know existed.
Furthermore, you mustn’t remove the rules from your thread, as this makes enforcement more difficult.

Here are three possible examples of what a host might write in the OP of their thread to outline the puppet rules of their tournament:


Maximum number of nations per user: Two.
Each user must confirm ownership of the secondary nation with both their main and secondary nation

If a nation participated in the previous edition of this tournament, they may enter one puppet nation in addition to its main nation. Each puppet must be declared by its owner.

If this is your first tournament, you may enter only one nation. If you participated in the last cup, you may enter a second ‘puppet’ nation as long as its status is confirmed by both the puppet and the master nation.

2 - Identifying breaches of your tournament's puppet rules

If a moderator suspects the puppet rules of any NS Sport tournament have been breached, they may take appropriate action as outlined in section three.

If you’re running an event and you suspect a nation breaches your competition’s puppet rules, you can ask a member of the moderation team to check. You can do this if you’re the host of the event or if you’re the President or Vice President of a sport.

If you’re not in charge of an event and you suspect a nation is an undeclared puppet, it is poor forum etiquette to publicly speculate on its identity. Instead, contact the event host with your concerns. The host can decide what to do from there.

Requests for puppet checks must be made via a Getting Help Request.

3 - What will happen if a nation is in breach of the rules
If you enter puppets into NS Sport events, read this

If a moderator finds a puppet to be in breach of an event’s rules, the main nation will be contacted via telegram. The player will then be given an appropriate time-frame in which to either publicly declare that they own the puppet or quietly withdraw it from the competition. What happens next is up to the event’s host or governing body.

If a player refuses to remove or declare the puppet within the time-frame given, the moderator may then announce in a relevant thread that the nation is a puppet. The mod team will not usually expose the identity of the main nation. We’ll only say that the extra nation(s) is in breach of the rules.

If this is a repeat offence and/or the moderation team believe that it constitutes an egregious attempt to deliberately bypass event rules, the moderation team may decide to take further action. By an egregious attempt to bypass event rules we include things like secretly entering a lot of puppets into a tournament, using undetected puppets to affect host votes, attempting to take advantage of loopholes or technicalities, or secretly using a nation to scorinate results a nation owned by the same player.

Please bear in mind that the use of puppets may in some circumstances be seen as trolling regardless of the rules of the competition, depending on how many of these puppets there are and how they behave.

A summary of the process

1 - The sign-up thread of a tournament outlines its rules on puppets in the first post of their thread. If it doesn’t, we don’t proceed to section two.

2 - If a puppet is suspected, the appropriate user (as outlined above) should file a Getting Help Request.

Your GHR could look something like this:

Hi, I’m running <tournament> on NS Sport and 
there are a few nations I think might be undeclared puppets:

Exampletopia
North Exampletopia
Totally Not Exampletopia
Testlandic Testlandia

The link is here: <link>. You’ll find their signups on pages 6 and 7. 
The puppet rules are in the OP.

These requests are Fire-and-Forget. Aside from a confirmation that we’ve received the GHR, we won’t communicate further with the user sending the puppet check request.

3 - If a nation is not a puppet, nothing will happen.
If a nation is a puppet, the user’s main nation will receive a telegram that will, in most cases, read along the following lines:

You have entered an undeclared puppet into <competition>. 

Please either confirm, in the thread, that the nation is your puppet, or withdraw it from the competition.

If you do not comply within 24 hours of receiving this message, we will declare publicly that the nation is a puppet.

4 - If the puppet is not claimed or removed, as appropriate, a moderator will post in the relevant thread saying ’<Nation> is an undeclared puppet’

While we will not make accusations unless we are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that a user has broken the rules, we will treat appeals seriously. If you feel the moderation team have made an error or have otherwise acted inappropriately, please file an appeal via a Getting Help Request.

---

WITHDRAWING FROM NS SPORT COMPETITIONS

It can be frustrating for a host if a user decides to withdraw their team from the tournament just as it is starting. Nevertheless, our forums have a general rule that says no user should be forced to participate in an event that they do not want to participate in.

Here are the mod team’s guidelines for how to handle this situation.

If a user wants to withdraw their team/participant from an event while the event is in progress* then the host may insist that it fulfil its published fixtures before being removed from the competition.

For example:

• In a league or round robin format, this would mean it played the rest of the games in its league.
• In a knockout format, the final fixture would be the next game, IE the next round of the competition.
• In a Swiss System format (often called the 'Casaran System' on Nationstates), the final fixture would be the end of the Casaran phase of the competiiton. IE if a competitor pulls out on matchday two of a five-game Casaran System tournament, they can be removed after matchday five.
• In racing there are no published fixtures, and so the participant would be removed instantly.
• In a large multi-sports event such as the NS Olympics, the host may insist the withdrawing party complete events for which the host has already finished entering data.

If the host of a tournament would instead prefer to remove the team immediately, then they can do so.

Where an event is not covered by the examples offered above, hosts are encouraged to be specific about the impact of withdrawals/CTEs on their fixture lists in their event OP.

*By 'in progress' we mean the fixtures for first/next phase of the tournament has already been finalised at the point of the participant withdrawing. If a nation withdraws before fixtures have been finalised, then it should be withdrawn immediately.

[Ko-oren]

THE FAQ

SPORTS

Can I make my own sports?
Yes. In your own domestic thread, you can pretty much do what you want. It helps if you have very clear rules and a scorinator (and the other items under 'how to scorinate' if you're going to involve other people).
Is Chess a sport?
Yes.

TIMES, DATES, RANKS, BONUSES, ROLEPLAYS

When is the next World Cup?
Nobody can say for sure, but World Cup signups usually open around when regional tournaments wind down.
If results are (partly) determined by RNG, what do roleplays do?
That's where you describe what happened, how it happened, who did what, when it happened, and build out your characters, teams, nations, and so on. RPs are judged and scored by hosts, and that feeds back into the RNG, giving you a better chance of winning next game. This depends on the tournament and the host, so read the host bid to see exactly how this works for that event.

THE NS SPORTS WORLD

What are the five/six/n sporting regions?
You can get involved with NS Sports from any region in the game. You do not miss out on anything by being in a different region. That said, many NS Sports regulars end up in one of these: Anaia, Arrosia, Esportiva, Rushmore, Mandalanusa, Sonnel.

GETTING STARTED

How do I start a domestic league?
There's no single answer to this. My advice would be this:
1) Look around existing domestic threads to get a feel for how they look and how results are presented.
2) Check out this excellent guide which has all the information you need.
2) Familiarise yourself with the scorinator. For Xkoranate, you can follow this guide.
3) Start small.
4) Get completely overwhelmed by the options and possibilities anyway, and then read these tips. In short: start small (you can always add new features in season 2); you don't need logos, jerseys, fancy formatting, and you don't need to RP every match; a half-done season is better than no season; find one thing that you can use to make other people 'care' about your world.
5) Start small. You don't want to know what my first season looked like. But I've added one or two things from season to season since then, until it looks nice(r). Nobody expects you to present a league at the same level of someone who's been here 5 years.
Do I need x to play?
Where x can mean 'foreign players in my league', 'a complete list of teams', 'rosters for every single one of my clubs', or 'my 3rd string long snapper's favourite salad dressing': no, you don't need any of those. All of those things can be fleshed out as you go. The things you need for entering a competition are (almost) always included in the OP of that tournament.
How do I host a tournament?
That's the neat part: you don't. It sounds harsh, but here's why most tournaments run by completely new users don't go anywhere.

[Audioslavia]

Hello everyone!

This is how the new NS Sport sticky looks. The idea is to have just one stickied thread. This thread will act as the Questions thread and the Guide. Links to the FAQ, Discord, History etc have been put right at the top.

We'd like the Links section to be bigger. If you have any suggestions for what else to include, please let us know in this thread.

[Valentine Z]

Hah, the first one as any other, so overall, I think this looks very lovely, and I do love the scorination on the top there. Just as a small suggestion regarding visuals and formatting, I was wondering as to if you can have an extra line between the green sections, and then a hr before each blue section. I believe that this will help a tad more just in terms of breathing space between each sub-sections.

So something like this:

SCORINATORS

A scorinator is a program, spreadsheet or formula that calculates the result of a match based on the Three Rs. To scorinate your own competition, you’ll need a scorinator. Most likely, you’ll need a copy of Xkoranate.

PROGRAMS
Over the years, a couple of bespoke scorination programs have been developed by NS Sporters.

XKORANATE VERSION 0.33
Developed by Commerce Heights and released in 2011, Xkoranate is the go-to for the majority of hosts. It can generate scores for most popular sports. For a guide to how to use it, see this thread.

XKORANATE COMMUNITY EDITION
The 2011 version of Xkoranate has naturally begun to show its age. It still works fine on Windows and Linux, but newer Macs now refuse to run the original program. As such, various members of the community have begun working on a new version. It’s not yet ready to be released, but we’ll post links to it when it’s available.

NATIONSTATES FOOTBALL SIMULATOR
Developed by Bedistan/Vephrall and officially known simply as NSFS, version of this formula has been in use since mid 2003. It became a downloadable programme in 2010

---

SPREADSHEETS
Some sports more often use a dedicated spreadsheet to scorinate results. These have their advantages and disadvantages over programmes. They can be easier to adjust, but are also easier to accidentally break.

THE RACING SCORINATOR (Motor Racing)
The Racing Scorinator is a veritable Ship of Theseus. Initially put together by Casari in 2006 to scorinate season one of NSF1, the precursor to the current World Grand Prix Championship that serves as our version of F1, it was converted into a cycling scorinator, and then converted back to an F1 simulator by Liventia. Audioslavia gave the sheet a number of overhauls in the early tens, and the scorinator is now looked after by Former Citizens of the Nimbus System. It's twenty years old these days, and a little delicate in places, but if you follow the instructions you should be able to get a tune out of it.

IFCF SCORINATOR (Association Football)
If you'd like to scorinate football matches and don't have access to Xkoranate, The IFCF Scorinator is your best bet.

OTHERS
See the Links section at the bottom of this guide for scorinators for other sports.

Code: Select all

[align=center][size=193][b][i][color=#fc1093]SCORINATORS[/color][/i][/b][/size][/align]
A scorinator is a program, spreadsheet or formula that calculates the result of a match based on the Three Rs. To scorinate your own competition, you’ll need a scorinator. Most likely, you’ll need a copy of Xkoranate.

[b][size=109][color=#1093fc]PROGRAMS[/color][/size][/b]
Over the years, a couple of bespoke scorination programs have been developed by NS Sporters.

[list][b][size=109][color=#109300]XKORANATE VERSION 0.33[/color][/size][/b]
Developed by Commerce Heights and released in 2011, [url=https://www.thirdgeek.com/ns/xkoranate/]Xkoranate[/url] is the go-to for the majority of hosts. It can generate scores for most popular sports. For a guide to how to use it, see [url=https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=55249]this thread.[/url]

[b][size=109][color=#109300]XKORANATE COMMUNITY EDITION[/color][/size][/b]
The 2011 version of Xkoranate has naturally begun to show its age. It still works fine on Windows and Linux, but newer Macs now refuse to run the original program. As such, various members of the community have begun working on a new version. It’s not yet ready to be released, but we’ll post links to it when it’s available.

[b][size=109][color=#109300]NATIONSTATES FOOTBALL SIMULATOR[/color][/size][/b]
Developed by Bedistan/Vephrall and officially known simply as NSFS, version of this formula has been in use since mid 2003. It became a [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220116190208/http://ten93.com/nsfs/nsfs3.html]downloadable programme[/url] in 2010[/list]

[hr][/hr]
[b][size=109][color=#1093fc]SPREADSHEETS[/color][/size][/b]
Some sports more often use a dedicated spreadsheet to scorinate results. These have their advantages and disadvantages over programmes. They can be easier to adjust, but are also easier to accidentally break.

[list][b][size=109][color=#109300]THE RACING SCORINATOR[/color][/size][/b] (Motor Racing)
[url=https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?p=37239935#p37239935]The Racing Scorinator[/url] is a veritable Ship of Theseus. Initially put together by Casari in 2006 to scorinate season one of [i]NSF1[/i], the precursor to the current [i]World Grand Prix Championship[/i] that serves as our version of F1, it was converted into a cycling scorinator, and then converted [i]back[/i] to an F1 simulator by Liventia. Audioslavia gave the sheet a number of overhauls in the early tens, and the scorinator is now looked after by [nation]Former Citizens of the Nimbus System[/nation]. It's twenty years old these days, and a little delicate in places, but if you follow the instructions you [i]should[/i] be able to get a tune out of it.

[b][size=109][color=#109300]IFCF SCORINATOR[/color][/size][/b] (Association Football)
If you'd like to scorinate football matches and don't have access to Xkoranate,  [url=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u9D7dwDDgJvGE-nQ4q2Lsft6y44qxazXaK7vtIdz6Bs/edit?gid=607355355#gid=607355355]The IFCF Scorinator[/url] is your best bet.

[b][size=109][color=#109300]OTHERS[/color][/size][/b]
See the Links section at the bottom of this guide for scorinators for other sports.[/list]

[Valentine Z]

Oh yes, I would like to request adding the NSSCRA one into the discussion threads: viewtopic.php?p=33428096#p33428096

It's still quite ongoing, and has a following of its own, after all. <3

[Audioslavia]

Cheers! NSSCRA was already there listed under Motorsports (Stock Car Racing). I've renamed it NSSCRA.

EDIT: Whoops, see below

[Ko-oren]

I added it between both of your posts. If there are other Motorsports discussion threads, lmk.

[Visayas Islands]

Well, what is now my ranking and KPB in football?

[Tumbra]

Well, what is now my ranking and KPB in football?

Perhaps the World Cup Discussion Thread could be the place for your answer.

[Ko-oren]

Welcome to everyone who got here via the News page! The way the World Cup works until it starts is as follows:

- First we sign up and some people indicate that they would like to host the Cup or the Baptism of Fire for new nations (we are here!)
- Then we select a host for the Cup and the Baptism - if you're new here, no need to bid.
- Then we get a Baptism of Fire thread for your Rosters, RPs, and where the host posts Scores. This is where most of you will get their start in NS Sports.
- After the Baptism of Fire final we get new threads for the World Cup: a Roster thread where your players go, an RP thread where your stories go, and a Scores thread.

Most of the other tournaments we do work the same way, but the World Cup is unique in that it has a pre-tournament for new nations.

[United States of Nova Calania]

I'm not a mod but I noticed a few things while lurking at the most recent signups:

1. Welcome to NS Sports forum, the place where your nation can play sports!

2. The signup thread is only for signups. Please do not trash talk with your friend who also sign up, this will be considered like spam.

3. No need to quote the 1st post of the signup thread. Just say you sign up for both BoF and World Cup (or just WC).

4. New nations are encouraged to sign up for the Baptism of Fire (BoF), a competition only for new nations. To enter this competition, you need to explicitly state that you want to join it. If you don't, you will only play in the World Cup.

[Audioslavia]

Surely number two is actually an important part of NS Sport. This is one of the few times where my sign-up hasn't included a thinly veiled barb at Kry or Ko or someone.

Either way, I think with the amount of newcomers we're getting, we can afford to be lenient with these sorts of things

[Visayas Islands]

Can I change my nation? Because I'm going to have a team uniting Visayas and Mindanao, and they're kinda founded in the 1900s.

[Saint-Lazarus]

Hi, I'm Visayas, am I accepted to change nations? Because of my lore of Visayas and Mindanao uniting..

[Liventia]

Hi, I'm Visayas, am I accepted to change nations? Because of my lore of Visayas and Mindanao uniting..

You can use whatever nation you want as long as you comply with each competition's puppet rules. If you want an answer as to whether you can carry over any previous rank in a certain competition, please ask in the relevant discussion thread.

[Saint-Lazarus]

Hi, I'm Visayas, am I accepted to change nations? Because of my lore of Visayas and Mindanao uniting..

You can use whatever nation you want as long as you comply with each competition's puppet rules. If you want an answer as to whether you can carry over any previous rank in a certain competition, please ask in the relevant discussion thread.

Any links? So I can retain my ranking

[Tikariot]

You can use whatever nation you want as long as you comply with each competition's puppet rules. If you want an answer as to whether you can carry over any previous rank in a certain competition, please ask in the relevant discussion thread.

Any links? So I can retain my ranking

There's search function. We're not going to do the work for you and serve you links to the threads...

[Recuecn]

Wow, you point out that Ko-oren lost three Market Cup finals in a row and he immediately locks the thread. What an abuse of power!

[Harea Odolgarria]

Are there any resources to help allocate goalscorers / individual player performance

Specifically hoping for one that can be used for Rugby League / 13s, but I'll take Union / XVs if that's all that's going

Equally would like one for lacrosse but could make do with a soccer one

[Free Republics]

Are there any resources to help allocate goalscorers / individual player performance

Specifically hoping for one that can be used for Rugby League / 13s, but I'll take Union / XVs if that's all that's going

Equally would like one for lacrosse but could make do with a soccer one

To the best of my knowledge (admittedly limited about the last 5 years of NS Sports), such a tool probably doesn't exist because that has traditionally been understood to be something you're supposed to RP. The scorinators are intentionally limited in the detail of their output because we don't want to recreate FM or OOTP.

I guess you could use Random.org's List Randomizer to generate a particular scorer and insert players who are more likely to score in the list multiple times. Or you could assign 1 or more integers to each of your players then use the Integer Generator to pick scorers at random. A spreadsheet or computer program to do this would just be a random number generator underneath the hood anyway.

The name generator spreadsheet that I use to generate random last names for Saintland's players would also work for this. Column A consists of 561 names. Then I have this formula in cell D1:

=INDIRECT("A"&INT(RAND()*(562-1)+1))

If you have a different number of values than 561 in Column A, you'd just need to change the 562. To generate random values, you just select cell D1 then drag the box at the bottom right corner of the cell with your mouse to generate however many names you need. If it's the same number, drag it down a row then back up to force Excel/LibreOffice/whatever spreadsheet software to recalculate. As with the other methods, you'll likely want to include duplicates of certain players' names to make them more likely to score.

[Equestrian States]

I've actually recently been working on an excel-based tool for generating goal times, goalscorers, and player ratings for soccer with an eye towards using it for both my domestic and international RPing. As FFR said, it is effectively just a fancy RNG, although I'm working on trying to make it weighted so as to prioritize strikers scoring more goals, certain players receiving higher average ratings, etc.

In the past, I've used the same random.org site FFR linked to determine both the order of goals and when they were scored and then build my RPs around what's generated. It's not a perfect solution, but it can be used to do the job you're looking for.