NationStates News

by Max Barry
Mon, 02 Apr 2012

A recap, for those who missed the April Fools frivolities, and some questions answered, for those who were here.

So every year since 2004 we've done an April Fools thing. These started out small and quirky, but escalated over the years until I could practically feel thunderclouds of disappointed players hovering overhead as April drew nearer, waiting to shower me with, "Last year's was better"s.

In 2011, under this pressure, I made a last-minute decision to do a haxx0ring stunt, and while this was very effective, it scared the bejeesus out of people, and I felt bad afterward.

So this year I was looking for something a little more fun and a little less email-generating. Our lead moderator, Reploid Productions, had the idea for the IPO, which could be a fun mini-game, where people formed alliances to gain the most shares. Everyone would start with 1 share per million population, and could trade them as they wished.

I also gave myself some shares, as a target for people to beat. I had no real idea how many would be a challenging but not unbeatable amount, but guessed 25 million.

Up went an IPO page, plus, at the last minute, a new subforum in case people wanted to talk about share trading. (Looking back, this is very much like how I added the original forum to NationStates, just in case anyone wanted to talk about their nations.) This forum filled with thousands of posts. With shares as currency, people hawked haiku, nations, art, dignity, insults, influence, ad space, and more. Lotteries and banks sprang up, as did scams, which were sometimes the same thing. There were pyramid schemes and standover merchants and many, many beggars. It was a spontaneous, concentrated eruption of inventiveness. I spent a lot of the IPO days chortling over those threads, because most of them are frickin' hilarious.

As nations pooled shares in order to reach the higher rungs of the share leaderboard, another unexpected thing happened. The leading nation—second on the list, after me—stopped being a faction-based effort, collecting shares primarily from deals and alliances, and instead started representing practically everybody. It was represented by The NationStates Community, and was genuine a community-wide movement as I've seen.

For a long time, it looked like they'd make it, but in the last hour, it tapped out at a little under 20,000,000 shares, five million short of the goal. The rest of the leaderboard was full of people who had decided to hold on to their own shares, or had gone to bed. (Because for anyone in North America, it was really late. It was meant to finish an hour earlier, but I coded in the wrong time zone. Sorry about that.)

At this point, the organizers of The NationStates Community reluctantly decided (via a vote) to transfer shares to the next-placed nation, in order that it, at least, would beat the target. This would be NewTexas.

Obviously, I should have just let that happen, and we all could have learned a somewhat sour yet useful lesson about the power of holding a non-negotiable swing vote in a high-stakes negotiation. But that seemed like a shame, to me, given the nature of the community effort, and how ridiculously hard the organizers had been working. So I decided to transfer my 25M shares to the community. But only at the last minute, as trading closed, so I also secretly disabled the ability of "The NationStates Community" to trade away its own shares in the meantime. This was cheating, of course. But very fun.

In the last few minutes, chaos reigned. There is a whole IRC transcript up here (the IPO ends at 04:00).

Over the thirty-something hours, 37,505 nations claimed a total of 95,407,494 shares, representing 95 trillion NationStates citizens. (It's a big world.) There were 29,448 trades, after which 14,898 nations held at least one share. The other 22,607 nations who claimed shares had given them all away. You needed 251,781 shares to make the Top 25 leaderboard, while 59,763 shares would have placed you at #100, and 11,789 at #1,000. Nine hundred and fifty-nine nations finished with exactly 1 share, for some reason.

Again, I just want to say how much fun this was. And the reason it was fun because of how madly you embraced it, so thank you to everyone who made it so. I've said it a million times before, but I really am in awe of this place sometimes. On the surface it just looks like a website.

Some people are asking if we can make this a regular thing, and I don't have an answer to that. There are a few reasons why this worked for April but wouldn't be the same if done again. But I'm going to look at how it might be possible. Because... fun.

You may now begin preparing for disappointment next April.

— Max.

by Max Barry
Sat, 31 Mar 2012

Since NationStates successfully achieved its primary financial goal of not sending me broke, it's time for the next step: an IPO! All the big gaming companies are doing it.

But unlike them, we're not just interested in making out like bandits while crapping all over our playerbase. No, our IPO is different: we're giving stock to you, the players!

For a limited time only, you can claim 1 share in NationStates Corporation Pty Ltd for every million citizens in your nation. Also, as kind of a last-minute thing, you can trade shares with other nations.

I have, of course, assigned myself a sufficient number of shares to ensure that I remain the largest shareholder. Obviously, we can't have the lunatics running the asylyum. That would be a disaster.

The NationStates IPO

Update: Two hours in and I'm close to losing my majority holding. This isn't going well.

Update 2: Well, it happened. I no longer own a majority of the company. Luckily, though, I'm still the largest individual shareholder, and there is no plausible way anyone could overtake me.

Update 3: There's plenty of trading going on in the new IPO forum. (Note: Please ignore any threads about a revolution.)

Update 4: So it seems that some people think it's possible to overtake me as the #1 shareholder. Ha! Well I'm not worried! That would take, what, some kind of massive pooling of shares on a ludicrous scale. People trusting each other and working toward a common goal? On NationStates? Hahahaha!

Update 5: Ohhhh, now it's got a warm and fuzzy name. "The NationStates Community." How completely heart-warming. You're never going to make it, don't you realize? You only have twelve million shares with less than seven hours left! You're throwing away shares for nothing!

Update 6: Okay. Okay. Let's just take a breath. I may have been a little hasty. It's possible you could make it. But how—by giving absolute power to one nation? Is that what you want? Because you know what that smells like? Tyranny! How much do we know about this "The NationStates Community," anyway? Do we really want to take orders from a College State?

Update 7: That's it. Hoard your shares. Hoooooaaaaarrrrd them.

Update 8: And so I watched as "The NationStates Community" crept closer toward its goal of 25,000,000 shares, ever-more slowly, until it became obvious that it was destined to fall just short. I felt relief... and something else. An emotion strange and unfamiliar. Was I perhaps... moved? These disparate nations that had come together in shared puropose, discarding personal glory in order to shift the world together: had that impressed me? Did I find them... admirable?

Clarity filled me. Yes, many of those nations that donated to the cause had done so to oppose me, while many of those who held back were my greatest supporters. But this wasn't about me. Not any more. This was about NationStates.

So I have chosen to trade my own 25,000,000 shares to The NationStates Community. It is a privilege and an honor to be a part of this place. Thank you.

P.S. Most fun April Fools Day ever.

by Max Barry
Sat, 11 Feb 2012

And we're on a new server! But some data is taking an awful long time to copy across, so we're the kind of back where not everything works yet. Specifically, what's not working is new nation creation and old nation restoration. We should have that within the next day.

Also, not everyone's custom flag is displaying. Those have almost finished transferring, though! Resist the temptation to change yours, and it'll be restored shortly.

Thanks for bearing with us!

Update! Normal service has resumed.

by Max Barry
Sat, 11 Feb 2012

Downtime imminent! As mentioned, the game will be down for a few hours as we migrate data to a new server. This will happen soon!

by Max Barry
Wed, 08 Feb 2012

Almost exactly three years ago, we boldly embarked on a quest to answer the great question: if I pay for hosting myself, am I going to go bankrupt or what?

Not yet! is the answer. We've been able to keep the game going and support its growth, as we've added our own forum (now home to 7 million posts and running on two servers) and nearly doubled active player numbers.

Now it's time to upgrade the game server! Because that thing is really struggling. There will be some game downtime over the next few days as we do that, during which you also won't be able to log in to the forums (although you'll still be able to browse them). Also, we have temporarily disabled nation restoration.

For those of you who have been with us all that time: really? You didn't... you didn't find anything better to do? Well... okay. And thanks.

by Max Barry
Wed, 04 Jan 2012

Happy New Year! And for the first time, nations have started hitting 20 billion population. Congratulations to the somewhat crowded The Most Ancient States of Korinekia for being first to pass the milestone!

And very closely following: The Republic of Kyupaa.

(These statistics sniffed out by handy resident number cruncher Ballotonia.)

by Max Barry
Thu, 15 Dec 2011

So! Now everyone has been successfully rejiggered (OH YES YOU HAVE), I can reveal that new feature. Nation pages now have an "Analysis" tab, which will take you to a whole new world of graphical excitement! Hmm. I could probably phrase that better. But click and see!

If you find raw numbers as stimulating as I do, you're in for a treat. Also, you might want to see someone. It can be serious problem. But in the meantime, add a bunch of nations to an Analysis page, pick a metric from the drop-down menu, and you can see exactly how they stack up.

Some metrics have a "World Average" line, but this hasn't been calculated for them all yet. So in many cases you'll have to wait to see where you sit compared to the "typical" NationStates nation. If such a thing exists. Which it does, because, mathematically, it has to. Did you just get a shiver? I did. Oooh, yeah. Numbers.

by Max Barry
Wed, 07 Dec 2011

There's a nifty new feature coming along shortly, which will allow you to analyze your nations like never before. Well. That's maybe overstating it. To be honest, it lets you analyze your nations like before, only slightly more so.

Anyway, while testing this feature, it became clear that some of our internal algorithms—the things we use to, you know, simulate nations—are broken. They work fine most of the time. But at the extremes, in some situations, weird things can happen.

We've known this for a while, but let it ride, because, hey, it's NationStates. Weird things are supposed to happen. Also, my thinking was that if you've worked hard on making your nation weird like that, you deserve it. But what's become clear is that in a lot of cases, we've crossed over from weird to just plain nonsensical. Also, the results can be wildly counter-intuitive, so nations with bizarre internal values—values clear off the scale—often seem to get that way from luck more than hard work.

To correct this, there will be a Grand Rejiggering. For most nations, this will do nothing. Some, though, will see changes in their internal freedom values. These will probably be minor, but may be visible as a change in your Trend graph, in certain World Census rankings, and possibly (if you are rejiggered particularly hard) in your main Civil Rights, Economy, Political Freedoms ratings, as well as your overall Category.

Want to check exactly what will happen? Use the Rejiggeration Predictor!

My apologies for messing with nations in such a heavy-handed way, but hopefully the result will be a more realistic nation simulator. Although maybe "more realistic" is overstating it. I mean, "less ridiculous."

by Max Barry
Sat, 29 Oct 2011

The main page has a nation counter. Did you notice? Well, it does. And it recently ticked over three million. Three million nations! That's impressive, you have to admit. If NationStates was a country, we'd be bigger than Kuwait. And comprised of three million nations. Which each have a population of... wait. This doesn't make sense at all.

Congratulations to our 3,000,000th nation, The Three Millionth Nation of Terrible Books! Which was probably made with one eye on the counter, by the way. Bunch of nations all created in a hurry. But still! That's pretty sweet!

And thank you to all of you, without whom there would be no nations at all! Except the ones I play myself, of course. But that's like a few thousand, tops.

by Max Barry
Wed, 19 Oct 2011

Sometimes nations die. It's sad but true. They are neglected, they stagnate, then they simply cease to exist. Empires, silenced. Cultures, lost.

But sometimes they come back! And when they do, they've always refounded in Lazarus, the world's welcome-back region. Over the years, thanks to this steady influx of resurrected nations, Lazarus has grown to become the world's largest region, with over 6,700 residents.

Yesterday, something changed. The regions Balder and Osiris were created as official "sinkers," providing two new homes for returning nations.

For the first hour or two, things were pretty quiet. Then people noticed. Nations moved in. There were celebrations. Questions. And, pretty soon, debates over how these regions should be run. Who should be the Delegate? Various well-organized alliances—I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we have those—got edgy at the prospect of some other, well-organized alliance seizing power. Shouldn't the region be left in the hands of the native residents? But who were they? And didn't they need to be protected?

Solid questions. I don't know the answers. But after only half a day, we can see differences in the new regions' emerging political structures. Good luck, all.

by Max Barry
Wed, 12 Oct 2011

We've had two bouts of downtime over the last couple days. The first one lasted about three hours, the second for about forty-five minutes. During this time, the game went down completely. The forums stayed up but refused to let anybody log in, since login details couldn't be authenticated against the game.

The problem seems to lie somewhere in our software (as opposed to a network fault or, as is usually the case, a NOT-QUITE-SO-UNINTERRUPTIBLE power supply unit). We haven't figured out what, exactly, so it's possible that this may happen again before we do. But! Like I always say, every failure is a step along the road to success. So we are succeeding SO HARD right now.

by Max Barry
Sat, 08 Oct 2011

The Ancient Name Release Program is underway, and a host of familiar-looking names have begun to emerge. So welcome back Russia, Korea, Norway, Scotland, and many more!

by Max Barry
Wed, 28 Sep 2011

The Settings page looks different. So does the Create a Nation page. And not only that! Courtesy of Northrop-Grumman, we have gained a Dark theme. Select it under "Theme" in your nation's Settings to make it stick.

by Max Barry
Wed, 21 Sep 2011

Since we began, over 2.97 million nations have been created. Wow. That's really close to three million. I just noticed that. We should have a prize for the three millionth nation.

Anyway, the point is, when you create a new nation, it's not easy to think of a unique name. You have to come up with something that hasn't been used any of the 2.97 million times someone did this before you. So new nations today tend to have names like somebody randomly mashed their forehead against the keyboard.

The solution has long been obvious: allow the names of long-dead nations to be re-used! And we've been planning this. But it was tricky, because the way the game is coded means—but you don't care about that. What you care about is that soon you'll be able to re-use old names!

Which names? Find out in The Boneyard! Here you can plug in a name and see if/when it will become available.

In a nutshell:

1. A name will only become available for re-use if the previous owner is long-gone (ceased to exist five or more years ago), didn't hang around very long anyway (population of less than 250 million), and didn't do anything noteworthy (found an existing region, author a World Assembly resolution, get banned, etc).
2. When a name is re-used, the previous owner will be permanently designated as "ancient" and will not be able to be resurrected. (Normally, you can bring back an old deleted nation just by entering the password.)

For details and discussion, please see this forum thread. This is also the place for your questions and comments, should you have any. Like: "What took this so long to get coded?" Although the answer to that is: "Shut up."

by Max Barry
Wed, 20 Jul 2011

Whatever happened to mystery flights? You know, you'd pay a hundred bucks, turn up at the airport, and they'd fly you somewhere random. Ten years ago, everyone was doing mystery flights. They were so exciting. Now I never hear about them. I guess nowadays not knowing where or when exactly the airline is going to fly you somewhere is part of the standard package.

BADOOMTISH! Thank you, thank you. Anyway, the point is that the Regions and Nations pages now have a "Surprise Me" button, perfect for those times you want to visit someplace but don't care where. It will show you a randomly selected region or nation. Maybe even your own! That would be like the most disappointing mystery flight ever. But in this context, kind of eerily cool.

by Max Barry
Sun, 10 Jul 2011

I've been distracted lately, with my first novel being made into a movie and my new book Machine Man coming out next month. It's no big deal. Seriously. Stop going on about it.

So please excuse the lack of NationStates news updates. It's been a great few months for the site, with active nations briefly topping 90,000—almost double the number only a year or so ago!—before our traditional Northern Hemisphere summer lull. We have a couple of major features in the works, to be unveiled toward the end of the year, and we continue to implement minor bugfixes and minor improvements.

Such as this one! The real world has just gained its newest nation state, South Sudan. Thanks to our resident flag-maker Tiago Silva, we now include it in our list of inbuilt flags. Just to say hi.

by SalusaSecondus
Tue, 10 May 2011

Sometimes an idea comes along which makes you go, "Why didn't we think of that before?" This is one of them. So, after a few weeks of work, debugging, slacking off, and still managing to be productive enough that my real boss doesn't fire me, I'm thrilled to present Region Tags.

One of the oldest problems with NationStates is finding regions that interest you. This will provide an easy way for delegates and founders to tag their regions and let other players search for them.

There is a ton more to be said about this change, and we are looking for player feedback, so please visit us in the forum.

by Max Barry
Wed, 20 Apr 2011

There's a little checkbox in your Settings now that says, "Email me warnings of impending apocalypses." I thought this was pretty self-explanatory, but there have been questions, so I guess not. What it does is send you an email seven days before your nation will cease to exist due to inactivity. Which happens if you don't log in for 28 days, or 60 days with Vacation mode turned on.

(Deleted nations can be restored again. They just don't exist within the gameworld in the meantime.)

So basically: the checkbox means you'll get emailed if you don't log in for 21 days. Or 53 days in Vacation mode.

That actually wasn't self-explanatory at all, was it? I see that now.

by Max Barry
Wed, 06 Apr 2011

There are many sides to NationStates. Some you know about. Some you don't want to. Seriously. Don't go there. But some are both obscure and awesome, so how are you supposed to discover them?

Guest posts! That's how! Here is our first one:

The NationStates Olympics

Guest post by Quintessence of Dust

Every year, roleplayers in the NationStates Sports forum hold two sets of Olympic Games: summer and winter. The program of sports is similar to that used at the real-life Olympics, but with a few differences: for example, women started competing in boxing at the NationStates Olympics several years ago, while this year's Winter Games featured a demonstration sport invented by a player.

Like most events in the Sports forum, Olympic results are generated using a program called a "scorinator". This combines a skill ranking for athletes assigned by the player, a bonus score earned by posting funny, interesting or inventive roleplays, and a random number element - this last feature is colloquially known as "Margaret", a mysterious goddess of fortuna believed to be swayed by sacrifices of rubber chickens.

One player hosts the Olympics, taking charge of generating the results and helping others roleplaying by providing information about the city and venues where the events take place; hosting is a very big responsibility, and the NationStates Olympic Council conducts a vote to determine who gets the duties each time. All players are free to participate by sending athletes and reporters.

Players competing in the Olympics can earn roleplaying bonuses for their characters and teams by posting reports of the previous day's action, interviews and profiles, or writing narrative storylines from one of their athlete's points of view. Inventive roleplayers have even gone so far as to create websites about the Olympics, record radio broadcasts, or draw cartoons.

The most recent Olympics were the Sixth Winter Olympics, hosted in the city of Ashton, Krytenia, in the Atlantian Oceania region. A total of 58 different NationStates took part in the Olympics, sending hundreds of athletes to compete in 15 different sports, plus the demonstration events of bandy (a Scandinavian game similar to ice hockey) and Winter Pentathlon (a multi-sport combination devised by Ad'ihan).

The Sixth Winter Olympics saw many dramatic moments, with new Olympic records set in several events, diplomatic crises, arrests, and even deaths of competitors; there were also some rather more light-hearted occurrences, such as teams skipping the competition to go on holiday to the beach, a bobsleigh team of women wearing fake beards so they could compete in a men's event, and numerous skiing Orthodox monks with very real beards. The world of NationStates has provided rather more variety of competitors than is the case in real life: athletes who won medals in Ashton included elves, dwarves, vulpines, and some surprisingly graceful figure skating bears.

Now there will be a break of several months for the Olympic Council before July or August, when they reconvene to vote on a host for the Sixth Summer Olympics, while in the Sports forum, other events take precedence. The oldest and largest sports competition in NationStates, the football World Cup, is heading into its 55th edition; there are stand alone events in many other popular sports, such as American football, baseball, basketball, cricket, ice hockey and both codes of rugby, as well as sports invented by NationStates players themselves.

If you want to learn more, check out the Guide to Sports Roleplaying and General Sports Roleplaying Questions threads, or look up some articles on NSwiki, the unofficial NationStates encyclopedia.

If you've got a piece of NationStates you'd like to share, please propose a guest post here.

by Max Barry
Fri, 01 Apr 2011

It's not easy, being well-known for April Fool's Day pranks. In the hours and days beforehand, many players were speculating what we might do. Is it even possible to prank people when they're prepared for a pranking?

Generally yes, I think we found. Although I am sorry to those of you who suffered minor heart attacks during the course of the "haxxing." It sounded funny in theory, but when you saw it on the screen, man, that really was terrifying. I know this because I forgot for a minute and scared myself.

April Fools aside, it's probably a good time to think about the passwords you use in your online life. Because many people do use easy-to-guess passwords, and do lose their accounts. If it's your NationStates nation, that's probably not the end of the world, but you'd hate it to happen to your email or Facebook.

P.S. For the record, this is what happened:

• When you logged on, you were notified of 337 bad login attempts.
• There was also a line saying you'd posted too many times on your Regional Message Board.
• Your nation's motto seemed to have been changed to "HAXX0RED!" (To everyone else, it looked the same as usual.)
• The last post on the RMB seemed to be from you, saying something inane. (No-one else could see this.)
• When you clicked the "Delete" button beside the fake post, it said, "April Fools."