Reploid Productions wrote:Nationstates 2 was the aborted sequel to Nationstates, developed by Jolt/OMAC. While it had some things in common with classic Nationstates, the developer went against Max's wishes and did an extremely poor job of making the new game workable. It maintained the classic NS style of randomly selected issues to change the stats on your nation, however this system meshed horribly with trying to do things like keep people from starving. The trade and war systems were defective, as largely the only way you could keep said systems from completely mucking up your economy was to have everything set to neutral.
It was buggy, badly designed, and the dev team seemed almost completely unresponsive to user feedback from the early alpha that the NS1 moderators got to participate in onward. In addition to that, the subscription perks were unattractive ($5 to have a custom flag... oh wait, I get a custom flag for FREE here...) and it quickly became clear that the company was not putting much work into the game, instead bombarding users with "Hey, try this OTHER game we run and give us more money!" nonsense.
It was short-lived, with the company taking it down July 1, 2009, claiming they were putting the game on hiatus to work on it some more. Given that the nationstates2.net domain name instead began redirecting users to one of Jolt's other games, the claim that NS2 will ever return is dubious at best. Max still owns the domain name, and took it back after this happened, and the page load a brief description of the situation and provides a link back to classic Nationstates.
There was other drama behind the scenes between Jolt/OMAC and the Nationstates team, which contributed heavily to classic Nationstates leaving Jolt and going independent again around the same time. Mostly it involved Jolt mods overstepping their bounds, and OMAC failing blatantly to follow through on their contractual obligations regarding the use of the Nationstates name and the money they owe Max Barry for that usage.
And that's the really abridged, cleaned-up version. There's a lot of hate among the mods for Jolt/OMAC, and I'm pretty sure I've been quoted somewhere for my comment about Jolt applying suction to syphilis-afflicted genitalia.
Apparently, there's A LOT of hate.