NationStates Jolt Archive

I've only been playing NationStates for a month or so now, but even still I often find myself bored of the region I'm currently residing in and don't really know where to look for what other regions are out there. Though this may have been brought up before, I feel like I should get out my idea, also though it may never be heard by anyone who can actually make a difference.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a daily/weekly NationStates Feature Region? It'd be something fairly easy for the NationStates system to handle, atleast from what I've seen of it. It could operate something like this...

Founders may submit their region for possible acceptance of a NationStates Feature Region. If, and once, it is accepted (acceptance could be decided by Moderators, relying on the region meeting certain criteria... ie. neutral in defender/invader warfare, strong nation activity, etc.) then it would go into a random draw, waiting until it is "chosen".

It could appear in the home page or wherever.

What do you think?:confused:

It sounds interesting to me. I'd leave out some of the unnecessary complications, though. Having regions being submitted and reviewed is a lot of overhead. Our mods are overworked as it is. Also, that list of regions would have to be stored somewhere. I would just make it random. Maybe I'd throw in some requirements about number of resident nations, not being a school region or password-protected, etc.

Then, there's a matter of where to put the link. Maybe on the region page next to "move to a new region" would be a good spot.

And now I'll shut up and wait for more opinions.

You could probably find someone willing to do the sorting voluntarily, like Komokom with UN resolutions and Goobergunchia with Wiki. I think I've already seen a thread where someone was asking for neutral regions or nations, but, sorry, I don't have time to chase the link right now. Wasn't Fris or Euro involved in some sort of planning for a War region?

If you're going to leave it up to the founder to submit the listing, you're going to disadvantage a lot of founderless regions. If you leave it up to the delegate, you disadvantage regions that don't have enough UN nations to have a delegate -- often the ones who really need this sort of exposure.

Could you make a series of stickies in, say, Gameplay, with links to them in the World Factbooks of the feeder regions?

I'm thinking, say, categories such as School regions, Defender/Invader regions, Theme* regions, Specific Tech regions (eg, Future-, Past-, and Modern-Tech), Fantasy regions, Alternate History regions. That'd be six links.

*By "Theme regions" I mean those based on a specific author, book, game or movie, those RPing specific styles of government (including theocracies), those favouring a particular viewpoint (eg LGBT) and those who have detailed made-up languages. It wouldn't matter if there was cross-over (eg magic-using regions might be fantasy as well as theme). You could just restrict it to one entry per region, and that would force them to decide which was their major interest.

True. A nice search system would be fantastic as well, but it seems like all too simple of a thing for them not to have a reason why they don't have it.

Having NationStates Feature Region could be more random but then it really wouldn't be as worthwhile. There needs to be some sort of criteria so we don't have some of these very extremist regions getting the nod.

There needs to be some sort of criteria so we don't have some of these very extremist regions getting the nod.
Why not? This is a political simulation game. One man's extremeism is another's everyday paradise. Who are you, or we, to decide?

Random is probably the best. I'd eliminate any region with a password by default, as they probably don't want random newbies joining up. I'd say that ... hmmm ... three nations should be the minimum. There's no call for advertising all the onesies and twosies.

If you really insisted on having a buy-in, maybe we could program in an "opt-in" switch in regional control. New region selected every update, being selected removes the opt-in switch for 30 days (to avoid repeats), and so on.

I can see several ways to make something like this work. What I can't see is any good reason to do so. Thanks to Pythagosaurus, we have a solid Regional Search feature. If you really want to find a Middle Earth or Star Wars or Anarchist region, you should have no trouble at all searching by name. As for a 'selected Feature region', no way. Mods have enough to do, and we STRONGLY disagree on many political fronts. If you want featured articles, go to NSwiki.

Well I guess that about settles it. Thanks for the words, Frisbeeteria.

While there may not be a real *reason* to do it, could we have it simply because it's cool? It would be nice to be able to learn about other regions randomly. :)

This is, of course, if Pythagosaurus wouldn't mind doing it. :p

I like this idea and could see doing it:

Pure random, no password, not a class region, more than 3 (or so) inhabitants.

I love the idea. There are so many people out there looking for an interesting region to join and I don’t think everyone out there has time to browse through the entire region listings. It’s another good way of giving nations in the feeder regions a hand in finding their way.

I like the idea of some sense of randomness. Nation States is after all a lot of different things to a lot of different players. What makes a region great for one player makes it terrible for another. Some regions focus on certain facets of the game or are theme regions for people with a specific interest. Others are generalist regions, where there are many different facets to explore (these tend to be the larger ones).

I would think of a parameter of regions with 20 or more inhabitants being a benchmark for inclusion. If you can’t get 20 nations in your region, including your puppets, it’s not much of a showcase for the immigrants of the Nation States World (except for people looking for a soft target to invade).

The Bruce

Three words.

Oh. Hell. Yes.

:fluffle:

Okay, maybe a few more.

I tend to think 5 nations or more, personally.

A few useful stats about regions (as of early this month):

Total Regions: 14375
Average Size: 8.2

Min: 1
First Quartile: 1
Median Size: 2.5
Third Quartile: 5.5
Max: 7300

Or, more specifically:
Size: Count
1: 5656
2: 2495
3: 1480
4: 953
5: 701
6: 529
7: 366
8: 294
9: 234
10-19: 975
20+: 625

So, if we restrict it to regions with more than 5 nations, only one in four regions will be eligible. That's not too bad. If we do 20+ (as recommended by The Bruce) it's only 4% (which seems a little small to me). You guys can work out the numbers if you want. I do like this idea.

Another thing to look at is how often they'll repeat. With only 625 regions in the list, you can expect about 35-36 days between repeats.

I'm inclined to agree with Fris. Also, I have visions of lots and lots of complaining from various regions when one of their largest foes gets featured.

I'm inclined to agree with Fris. Also, I have visions of lots and lots of complaining from various regions when one of their largest foes gets featured.

Or regions that get featured when they're having a lot of internal problems not being very happy about having their dirty laundry aired to the entire site.

People always find something to complain about. C'est la vie.

I will personally warn them for wasting the mods' time with their own problems. 8)

What about making it a featured site of the week thing? That way you won't go through the regions as quick. Then maybe require 5 or 10 members. And have it opt in...?

Just my thoughts. I like the idea..

Good idea. Then we could have featured nations, and featured UN Delegates, and featured trolls...

Well, ok, maybe not. But still, I'd certainly be glad to see this implemented. *thumbs up, or <nationality> equivalent to Pythago*
[Oh, and I love the avatar. *sneaks glance at one of his 7 cats*]

I will personally warn them for wasting the mods' time with their own problems. 8)

Thanks Pythag! That saves us know-it-alls the trouble of smacking them down. ;)

I just noticed the icon and am curious as to when it was installed?

Also I remember the thread where is was proposed and I was just wondering what the specifications have been set to?

Lastly thanks for good, new feature :) .

Congratulations! You have won for noticing this is less than an hour. ;)

http://siroccothemod.blogspot.com/2006/03/featured-region.html

There'll be a proper NationStates News post later

Congratulations! You have won for noticing this is less than an hour.

:)

I just noticed something was different and then realised it was the idea that had been mentioned a few months ago.

Also interesting blog Sirocco.

Is this a new feature? How does your region become featured region?

Bumping this to a Sticky for a bit, and merged a few odd threads for good measure.

It's random, Quaon.

Schweet

I personally really like the idea of a Feature Region. I think it’s a great idea for showcasing random samplings of the Nation States World, especially regions you might not otherwise ever notice.

The thing I noted today was the transit spammers using the Regional Happening to create links to their regions, because it was suddenly featured as the Feature Region of the World. I can see how this could cause a rapid increase in transit spamming after this catches on (this being the first day) and possibly lead to a general increase in spam. It won’t be long until other transit spam is canceling out transit spam, if this continues in Feature Regions. This would make it very difficult for the locals to keep track of the comings and goings of legitimate travelers. Fortunately, at least being the feature region, it’s not like the Mods won’t notice an increase in questionable activities in a daily feature region.

The Bruce

There are 3680 regions with at least five nations, so people shouldn't get their hopes up about being the featured region any time soon.

I’ve seen already that as a result of the Feature Region addition, there are now the expected migrant nations moving from Feature Region to Feature Region. Also there was an increase in transit spam today, to create links to other regions. So much so that transit spam is pushing other transit spam off of the Regional Happenings records.

On the positive side, the founder actually noted the increased activity and quickly redid their WFE to encourage more settlement in their region. All of the attention was generally good and probably will have an influence on encouraging the founder of this region having a renewed interested in the Nation States World as a result.

Tomorrow will be whatever tomorrow is though. I have a feeling that the first Feature Region without a Founder that is featured will almost certainly be invaded.

The Bruce

Yes, I thought about that yesterday. We should probably add it as a requirement. However, I think the defenders will be more than ready to prevent such invasions. With the numbers the way they are, invaders must have the element of surprise, and invading a featured region is not the best way to go about it.

But everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people.

One nation in particular has gone from excessive transit spam, of many region’s regional happenings, to actual spam by posting an advertisement for their region every day in the Feature Region, trying to call attention to their home region. If Toujours Pur wasn’t involved in over the top transit spam elsewhere on behalf of their region, Allied Regions of Middle Earth, then I might believe that this was just an innocent greetings on the Feature Region board every day.

Let’s face it while there might be some intelligent invaders groups out there, there are also small Invader groups that are barely functional and hit the first vulnerable thing they do while advertising on civic HQ’s closely monitored by Defenders (see the Rejected Realms).

The Bruce

Report it to the Getting Help Page. Spam is spam and still against the rules.

Report it to the Getting Help Page. Spam is spam and still against the rules.
He did, and it's been dealt with.

Transit spam, eh? Somehow that brings to mind the grafitti-covered subway cars of NYC in the 70's. Thank goodness there's no spray cans in regional messageboards. I don't think I could stand there with solvent spray all day long to remove this ...

http://www.krmi.net/walls/specials/01/13.jpg

Before the implementation of the Feature Region as reality, at least Nation States Reality, I was on record for being against it including regions with less than 20 nations, feeling it would be a waste of time to feature them. After seeing a couple of days of it in action though I’m now coming around to thinking that the opposite is true. The magnitude of the impact of being a feature region is based on how small a region is. A region of over 300 nations would barely notice the wash of immigrants, temporary or otherwise; while if you’re only 5-10 nations then effect of the sudden surge of immigration is huge.

It’s still very early, but I’ve seen regions that looked like they were on the verge of packing it get a shot in the arm of enthusiasm for this site and it’s good to see. It will be interesting to see what these Feature Regions look like a few weeks after their time in the spotlight but I think that at least a few of them will have turned things around for the long term.

The Bruce

The fact that feeder adspam still works tells me that there are enough new people joining to keep Featured Regions active. I'm sure the oldtimers will get bored soon enough, but it is kinda neat.

I think a region like Liberalia would think this could actually help, even though one of the largest regions in game.

Is the feature region coming back? When I logged on this afternoon it was gone. Is that just part of this morning's crazyness?

So did the 16 hour reset wipe out the new change of featured region?

So did the 16 hour reset wipe out the new change of featured region?
Unfortunately, the chosen featured region is not saved as data. According to Sal, it should be back tomorrow. Today we will have to endure no featured region. :(

Unfortunately, the chosen featured region is not saved as data. According to Sal, it should be back tomorrow. Today we will have to endure no featured region. :(

Hmmm. I hope someone is keeping track of the Featured Regions on the wiki, since there's no way to get an easy list of them later if they're not saved as data, right?

Hmmm. I hope someone is keeping track of the Featured Regions on the wiki, since there's no way to get an easy list of them later if they're not saved as data, right?
I'm keeping track, didn't really think it was worth it to put it on the wiki though.

Back hill hillbillies, we hardly got to know ya. I’ve been keeping track of them, partly just to take a look back at them and see how being a Feature Region changed them, short term and long term (this is just the thing you do when you’re temporarily off work with a gimped foot :) ).