NationStates News
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You Can Watch My Film
I'm abusing the News page for a second non-NationStates item in a row. Sorry about that. It's especially annoying because there are several important NS features that are like 95% implemented, and just need me to finish them off. But am I doing that? No! I am selfishly spending my time on NON-NS things.
For example, this movie I co-wrote:
It's just been released as an advanced sneak on iTunes and On Demand, and is locked in a vicious struggle to the death for the #1 Indie Movie spot. It's also broken into the Top 50 for Comedies.
If you are in the US, you should totally rent it. I'm not just saying that because it would be awesome for my career. I figure there is at least a 50-50 chance that if you like a website I made, you might like a movie I helped make, too. So it's win-win.
Watch on iTunes (US) • Watch via On Demand (US) • Official Website • Trailer • Early Theater Screenings (US) • Max Tries to Act • Max Blogs About Movie Stuff • Syrup Featurette
Seriously, though, I am sorry about those delayed features.
Syrup movie trailer
As my day job, I write books. I'm not sure if you knew that. Anyway, my first novel, Syrup, is becoming a film, and now it has a trailer:
This doesn't have much to do with NationStates. So sorry about that. But GODDAMN, book becoming into film, that's pretty exciting for me. So I had to share.
Grr. Arg.
A few nations are reporting a mild uptick in infection rates of a flu-like illness, it seems. But this is nothing to worry about. Everyone should remain calm.
Update: The illness seems to be more widespread than previously thought. But it's okay. The important thing is not to panic.
Update 2: It's time to panic. The infected are everywhere. Unless you take immediate action, they will destroy us all.
To assist efforts to contain the outbreak, we have made available Infection Charts for the world and for each individual nation and region. You may click on the labels (e.g. "Survivors") to add/remove a line from the graph, which is useful for identifying horrifyingly geometrical trends in the underlying data.
We have also established a Zombie Emergency Command Center for co-ordinating defense strategies.
Good luck.
Update 3: Oh, the humanity! The dwindling, infected humanity!
Here's what we know:
The fastest way to reduce the number of infected in your nation is to turn the military against them. This converts infected citizens into dead citizens.
The infected can spread between nations within the same region. In very infectious regions, it may become impossible for nations to hold off the zombies via military force alone.
Several regions have managed to contain the outbreak by having multiple nations research a cure. When only a small minority do research, however, this appears less successful.
Both the military and research options become decreasingly effective the fewer survivors you have.
Some (current) success stories: Nederland, The Vast, Esquarium, Holdania, The NationStates Community.
Some horror stories: The Moon, The Kodiak Republic, Haven, Equinox.
Update 4: Well, the world seems to have divided neatly into regions where the infected population is small, controlled, and well cared for, and regions being devoured by endless zombie hordes. There's not much middle ground left out there.
But I have good news! The end is in sight! Cure research will soon make a solution available on a global level! This means...
The apocalypse will end in ended 46 days ago.
In the meantime, I present: The Z-Day Tally Board! Which regions will have the most survivors by the end of the apocalypse?
Update 5: The Z-Day Tally Board now also ranks regions by "Most Survivors with No Infected." Currently leading is Noctur, a safe haven for 110 billion people. But that's a fragile ranking! It only takes one infected to cross the border...
Update 6: It's over! It's over! At long last, the nightmare is over!
The "Survivors" numbers were starting to rise at the end there... so it's a happy ending! I mean, not for the dead. Which is 79% of the global population. But for everyone else, excluding those infected in overrun nations who will now starve to death, it's pretty happy! Happiness is relative.
Thanks for being a part of another April 1st on NationStates! For the next few days, infection data and charts will remain available via little "Z-Day" links on nation and region pages. Then they'll go away. So if you want a permanent record, you might want to screenshot that.
A complete log file of the crisis, which includes numbers for every nation and region in the world, hour by hour, will also be made available soon. This will be enormous and difficult for anyone to process, but it will be there. Because analysis is fun.
Should we do this again? I'm just putting it out there. Because this time, it would actually be practical to run a Z-Day on a regular basis... say, annually for Halloween. I think we would need to ramp up the potency of zombie exporters, since everybody would be better prepared for the apocalypse. But it could be done.
Special thanks this year to our moderators! They put a lot of work into this day each year, including BRRAAAAINstorming ideas, which I then just pick the eyes out of. So to speak.
And congratulations to those regions that managed to fend off the threat! The Z-Day Tally Board changed a lot at the end, as regions jostled for position. There were some devious moves. Some exchanging of moral virtue for higher rankings. But it's life and death. You have to make hard decisions.
Thank you for being a part of NationStates!
Update 7: 87MB zip file of Z-Day infection rate logs right here, if you're into that kind of thing.
Prepare Yourselves
REGIONS WILL FALL
April 2013
Telegrams and Recruitment
Yes, it's all about the telegrams these days. As the new TG system creeps toward full functionality, rules and game features are changing, clicking into place—transforming, if you will, like how an innocent-looking car turns into a giant killer robot.
Today's announcement is about recruiting for regions via telegram. We've always had very restrictive rules around this, meaning that most of you probably haven't seen a recruitment TG since your nation was first deciding whether or not to make voting compulsory.
But this is about to change! It is now legal to send a recruitment telegram to any nation in the world.
So if you're ready to bask in the glory of having multiple regions compete for your presence, your time has come. If, however, this does not sound all that glorious, it's time to get acquainted with Filters, which are part of your new Telegram Preferences. Filters let you limit the number of telegrams you get and/or block certain kinds altogether.
Recruiter-Specific Info
If you're a recruiter, or interested in becoming one, please take a moment to check out the updated Telegrams FAQ.
Some new rules that may be of interest to you:
It's now required that when you send a recruitment telegram, you must tick the appropriate checkbox to flag it as such. (For the last few weeks, this has been encouraged but not mandatory.) This is so that your recruitment TGs can be auto-blocked by the recipient's Filters.
Please note that we now offer Telegram Templates as a way to send large numbers of recruitment TGs without needing to remember to check that box every time. Templates are free to use and have other advantages as well. More info in the FAQ.
When you tick that checkbox, you may notice it fills in the name of your region. This is to provide a handy "Move your nation to <region> now!" button, and prevent accidental spam. It means that when composing a recruitment telegram, your nation must be a resident of the region it is promoting. It doesn't need to stay there. But it must be in the right region while writing its recruitment telegrams.
Assuming the rules are followed, it's impossible to send more than one recruitment telegram for any given region to the same nation twice in 28 days. This eliminates the awkward situation where recruiters could accidentally double-up and break spam rules.
The Telegrams API is now online! This provides a free (albeit incredibly slow) method of sending telegrams via script for people who want to create their own automated tools.
At this point, the only major part of the new TG system not yet online is telegram stamps: you still can't purchase or use those. They will probably become available without notice in a few weeks' time, depending on how many bugs/exploits/catastrophic server failures we experience in the meantime.*
* Facebook has been attacking us. Seriously. Twice a day, they gather an army of several hundred servers and hurl forth 30,000 requests all at once. That's a lot of requests. Not for Facebook. But for us. Stupid Facebook.
New Telegram System: Slowly, It Cometh
The first part of the new TG system is in, and HOLY HELL BUGS EVERYWHERE. Not horrible bugs. Not the kind that makes data disappear. But still, bugs, requiring fixing. This is, of course, to be expected with any major new project, and not a sign that no-one here knows what they're doing.
So this is just a note to say the system is rolling out, but won't be completely online right away. In particular, we're going to take some time bringing in Mass Telegrams, in order to make sure we get that right. And by "right," I basically mean avoiding a global spam-based immolation.
Also! I realize that two posts in a row about STUFF YOU CAN BUY has struck some people as a little shady, coming after ten years of glorious anti-capitalism. Or six years of anti-capitalism followed by four years of ads. But this is it! This is our grand plan for self-sufficiency, I promise. We have lots of plans for new features and they are all free.
Thanks for your patience!
New Telegram System
I can't even remember when we first began planning to overhaul the Telegram system. It was years ago. In the meantime, people have often asked, "How is the new TG system coming along?" and "When are we getting that new TG system?" and "My God, what do you people do all day?"
The thing is, the new Telegram system turned out to be kind of enormous. As in, hundreds of hours of work.
But it's finally here! Or rather, it's about to be! I'm posting a few days ahead of implementation so you know what to expect.
The aim of the overhaul is to make the core system better for everyone, to solve some difficulties we've had with regional recruitment messages, and to make available at a premium some extra features that we otherwise wouldn't be able to support.
In a few days, everyone will get:
- A stylish new not-so-2002ish look
- A "Sent Items" folder that holds a copy of every TG you ever send from now on
- A way to reply to a telegram that doesn't involve navigating to the sender's nation page, scrolling to the bottom, and trying to remember what you were talking about
- An "In reply to" link and a Conversation View, so when you get a telegram that just says, "I totally agree," you can see what the hell they mean
- An "Archive" folder with a capacity of 20 TGs, so your total capacity including the Inbox just doubled to a total of 40 TGs
- Icons that identify TGs based on type (regional recruitment, WA campaign, message from regional Delegate, etc)
- The ability to opt-out of TGs based on their type, including fine-grained control for blocking "all", "most", or "some" of each type
- A Telegrams page that doesn't automatically mark every TG as read but rather only the ones you actually, you know, read
- A way to delete a TG that's faster than clicking a little box, scrolling, clicking a button, and waiting for the page to reload
- The ability to address a single TG to up to 8 nations
If you purchase a Postmaster account in the NS Store (US$4.99), you'll also get:
- A "Deleted Items" folder that holds your deleted TGs for 24 hours 100 deleted TGs, in case you delete something but then are like oh crap no wait
- The ability to create 3 extra folders and name them whatever you like, like "WA business" or "Regional Plots" or "Forbidden Love"
- Folder storage capacity of 100 TGs (up from 20), meaning that altogether your Inbox, Archive, and three custom folders can hold 500 TGs
- Removal of site ads
- "Site supporter" trophy for your nation page
- Everything mentioned above
- No limit on TG storage; your TGs will never be automatically deleted
- The ability to create as many custom folders as you like
- A "Deleted Items" folder that holds TGs for 14 days
- 500 Telegram Stamps (see below)
If you purchase Telegram Stamps in the NS Store, you'll get:
- The ability to address a TG to a region or special group (e.g. "WA Delegates") and have that TG delivered to everyone in the region or group
- Delivery Reports showing who received your Mass TG and who blocked it
- The ability to use the %NATION% token in your message, which automatically expands out to the name of the recipient
- The ability to queue TGs for future delivery to nations that don't exist yet, by addressing them to a special group like "New Nations" or "Refounded Nations"
- (Recruitment TGs:) A button appended to your message that allows the recipient nation to move to your region in one click
- (Recruitment TGs:) Recruitment Reports showing who moved to your region after viewing your TG
If you are a World Assembly Delegate or Founder, you'll get:
- The ability to send TGs to your own region for free, i.e. with no Telegram Stamps
So that's why it took a while. I hope you'll enjoy the new TG system! Because if you don't, I really wasted a lot of time.
Questions? Find answers here!
Update (7-Feb-13): Modified how "Deleted Items" folder will work, based on discovery that feature did not work as intended and could not easily be made to.
Ad-Free: You Too Can Be This
People have long complained that there was no way to give us money. "Please," they begged, "let me pay you for this wonderful site." But no. We would not take it.
Now I can finally announce: You can give us money! And as if that wasn't enough, the ads go away! For US$2.99, your nation need never be sullied by commercial imperatives again.
(If you are concerned that we are turning into one of those games that charge for everything: We're not doing that. This isn't the beginning of a Zynga-like devolution, I promise. I don't like games like that. There are some things I think it makes sense for us to offer in-game, like an ad-free experience, because that won't give anyone an unfair advantage, and we can't offer it free to everyone. I mean, servers don't run on air. Another possibility in the future is a larger inbox for Telegrams. But we will never sell better stats or gameplay bonuses. That would screw things up.)
You can even gift to other nations! Just if you are feeling generous. The store uses PayPal and Google Checkout, which accept any credit or debit card.
A Decade of NationStates
We just turned ten. Seriously. In Internet Time, that's like a hundred years old.
Visit our 10-Year Anniversary Page! Chat! Mini-game! Memories!
I remember coding this game up and hoping one day it might get 1,000 players. That, I figured, was the number that would make all the time I was spending learning programming worth it. I remember weeks of freaking out about ballooning player numbers, which hit my long-term target on day 13 and kept doubling every day from there. I remember being kicked out by my web host for overloading their service. I remember mass downtime and lag and Jen being pissed at me because she hadn't seen me all day and I was heading back to my study because every time player numbers doubled, the site went down.
Against all odds, this site turned into something awesome. And that happened because people like you showed up and breathed life into it. You created nations and regions and communities. And that's the reason why we're still here ten years later, while plenty of other online games have disappeared.
I've tried to do my part to keep us running, but it's the ongoing contributions of so many different people—admins, moderators, and players—who have made it all possible. I'm deeply grateful to all of you. Thank you.
M-M-M-Mega Update
Hello! There haven't been any news posts for a while. But there have been changes! I've just been so busy making those changes that I haven't had time to post about them. Either that or lazy. It's one of those.
- New forum hardware! Seriously, the forum doubles in
size like every six months. It's a beast. Things were getting pretty
slow, but a few weeks ago we completed a major move to new hardware,
and now it's super-fast again. For at least the next few weeks.
- Rippling Flags! When you upload a custom image for your nation's flag, you can check a "Ripple" box, to make it look more like an actual rippling flag. Unless it's very dark. It doesn't work so well on very dark images. But everything else: beautiful! This feature uses a template designed by deviantArt user alxfa, who has kindly allowed us to use it here!
- Advanced Dossiers! Hardcore players who manage lists of hundreds or thousands of nations can now download and upload their dossiers for offline management.
- More API Shards! We have an API. You probably didn't know that. You probably don't even know what an API is. That is okay. You have a life instead. But for those of us who think life is meant for building web sites that automatically suck data from NationStates and display it in new and innovative ways, we have an API. Which now supports more data calls than ever!
- WA Vote Percentages! When you consider a World Assembly Resolution, you are shown numbers on how the rest of your region has voted. Some people argued that this would function as a kind of peer pressure, increasing the "lemming effect" of votes. I'm not sure if that actually happened. But you could figure it out with the API.
- Random Nations! When you create a new nation, you can set its starting government type as "Random." There used to be a "Psychotic" option, but that's gone, because frankly it was too psychotic. It didn't make sense even by our standards.
- Daily Update Speed Variance: The update time of regions (i.e. the time at which votes are tallied to determine the WA Delegate) has become a lot more predictable since we shifted to new hardware, and this means invaders can time their attacks to within a few seconds of perfection, making them near-impossible to stop. This isn't quite how things are supposed to be, so the update now has inbuilt cleverness to randomize its speed a little. There's more planned in this area, but that's what we have for now.
We also have a few major new features that have been in the works for a long time and are nearly ready to let loose. I can't tell you what they are! That would spoil the surprise. But one of them rhymes with "Bent Bitems Bolder bor Belegrams."
By the way, did you know that November 13, 2012 is our 10-year anniversary? It totally is. Expect something for that, too.
New feature: Factbooks
Nations now have the ability to write their own Factbooks, which are collections of "facts" about themselves. I put "facts" in quotation marks because obviously they will be full of lies and distortions.
But that aside, I know this is going to be nifty, because it's an extension of what's been happening in the forums for years: nations expanding on their own descriptions, often in amazing detail. You go there, you can read about historical events and cultural landmarks and how the current government gained power for as long as you want.
But these have never been easy for most players to find, and deserve to be more visible. In the future, we also want to add ways to quickly find the most well-regarded Factbooks in the world, so that good content can be seen by more people.
Also planned are more uses for dispatches beyond Factbooks, allowing nations to issue inflammatory statements about each other, for example.
But for now it's just Factbooks! You will find a "Factbook" link on your own nation, in amongst "Overview," "People," "Government," and so on. This link will also be present on other nations you view, but only if they've written something.
What Went Down
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.
NationStates IPO: Share Offer
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.
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.
Back, Kind of
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.
Here Goes Nothing
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!
Onward, Ever Upward
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.
Big World
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.)
Analyze This
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.
Algorithmic Rejiggeration
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."
Three Million Ways To A Better World
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.
