NationStates Jolt Archive

Introduction

For those who have not read the little story Sarzonia (along with a few others including me) have been playing, let me sum it up shortly: after some irresponsible bidding PIW (Portland Iron Works, the company behind the storefront) went into financial trouble. It dragged Sarzonia with it and said nation is now in an economic recession. I wanted to make it worse, others wanted to help Sarzo out. Eventually after me and Sarzonia talked on MSN I told him it'd be a good idea to stabilize his currency before attempting to fix the economy as a whole. Sarzo found it a good idea and followed my advice.

Then Hamptonshire made an OOC post which is quoted here. I find it a good comment, it's true when you say it when looking at earth, but when you look at NS, there are some serious flaws in it. Let me explain.

[OOC: Sorry about this OOC comment but I don't see where else it could be posted. Sarz, do you have any idea physically how much gold you'd need to back up trillions upon trillions of dollars in currency?

Let's say that Gold is at $750 a troy ounce (which is too high with NS gold production levels). If you were to back $10 trillion of currency in gold, which would only be a fraction of what you have out there, that would be 13.333 billion troy ounces. That comes out to about 914,285,923 pounds or 457,142 TONS. And that is less then a tenth of the actual gold you'd need to have a proper gold standard.

Even if, for some ungodly reason, you were to have physcially that much gold simply having that much would make it near worthless. Gold is only valuable because it is rare. If a single nation has 5 million tons of gold in their treasury alone, gold would be about as valuable as stainless steel.]To put it into perspective...

Small important note you might want to keep in mind. Say the NationStates planet is as big as the sun. Let's say the sun is 110 larger than the planet earth, we can assume the rough amount of natural resources on the NS planet is also 110 times larger. However, this is not the case. Since the NS planet is unaffected by geological processes, every nation - if the author is willing - has infinite supplies of oil. Why am I saying infinite? Well, because it is. NationStates ICly means a nation pops into existence. If RPed well, people accept the nation, and if we bar the thoughts from our mind NS will one day cease to exist or our hypothetic nation gets deleted, then the nation is destined to grow infinitely.

Because nations and their resources are RPed and and thusly, in NS' reality, infinite, then we can say the NS planet's resources are as infinite as any nation on it. Hamp is correct when he says the price of gold should be next to nothing. But that also applies to all other metals and goods, such as oil. While oil companies here make billions, on NS finding huge amounts of oil is not a big deal. Finding diamonds isn't either, finding uranium isn't.

What can we conclude from this?

I'd say all prices regarding raw materials do not and cannot work on NationStates. Whereas everything's infinite - growth in population, economy, armies, statistics, production etc - you cannot apply real life prices on any product in NationStates. Everything should be worthless according to the laws of economics.

How can one take a diminishing production of X into account when there's an infinite supply of it on NationStates? You can't. Can you determine set/fixed prices for a product? Nope, you can't. Infinite = Infinite. While people can RP a degrading economy or oilfields running dry: it does not make a difference. On off-site RP communities this might work, but on such a large community such as NS it's too complex.
So... If the NS world is infinite, how big is it? Or is that a weird question?

It certainly is. But on the other hand, it's a very interesting question. People suggested a Dyson Sphere, others just say it's a damn large sphere. When I say infinite, don't think of an endless globe or a huge torus. Think of several plains of a similar reality, connected each other because they somehow overlap each other. Quirky physics and all theoretical. Fun to ponder about though. However, on a more serious note, trying to determine how big the NS planet is, is like asking what was out there before the Big Bang, or what's outside the universe. Such questions simply cannot be answered.

So... what's the verdict?

Nothing actually. Here I wanted to say how much I dislike the concept of regulating roleplays by sassing off others who have fine ideas, but cannot be put to good use because NationStates is supposedly a finite place. It isn't, NationStates cannot be a finite place. Platinum is a rare mineral on earth. On NS, it's more commonly found than iron. The proportions are gone, and since there's no such thing as geography coded into the software, it cannot change. Remember, these are the basics of NS, people who play they do not have one or more resources earn my respect. Still, most players do RP they have everything - a bad form of RP in my opinion I wrote about earlier.

Discuss.

Id just like to add my thoughts on this.

Hamptonshire is correct in the fact that having a stupid amount of gold all of a sudden would crash the price, in RL. In Nationstates there are thousands on countries 3/4 the size of our planet with economies stronger then anything seen at the moment. Instead of thinking whether or not its silly for one country to have so much of one resource we should instead compare it to the entire planet.

Relating more to the issue that sparked this off. The gold would not come from production (which would drive the price down) but it would be bought. A sudden demand for a very large amount of gold would drive prices up and the reason for its purchase (to sure up a currency) would allow traders to extort higher prices from Sarizona. This increase in value of gold would end up with Sarizona having to purchase less gold then if was all bought at the orgingal trading rate.

Personally I think that price fluctuation of anything in NS isnt going to work outside of small rp's without a PHP/MySQL system to give it some realism. I started stumbling my way through one shortly before i left NS but stopped after i ceased rping. If anyone has some skill in PHP it wouldnt be that hard to do if they hought it out properly.

How about new minerals that are rare to everyone. And have a regulated trade for the minerals. They do have to be real just has to be rare. By having a group of nations that strickly regulate the trade of the new mineral. Have it only found in a select few nations. And with such the mineral can from there be strictly regulated. Have a market and price change depending on the nations inflation rate. Now how would you find the nations that would host the new mineral is not quite complete but I am working on it.

Raven Corps, adding "unobtainium" seems like a very bad idea, and laying down hard-and-fast rules that only a select few nations have complete control over it sounds like a great way to spread ooc hostilities. This is a free-form RP remember. If you created your own Earth there would be no problem with this idea, but on NS it is doomed to failure.

Well, like you said, there is much about NS that makes no sense. For example, if the NS world was indeed a globe several times larger than Earth, the gravity would crush a human to death. Unless the planet was hollow or made from marshmallows, there is no other possibility. We just assume that the gravity of NSland is the same for simplicity's sake, even though it is physically impossible.

In the same way, you can just assume that resources are roughly worth the same in NSland as they are on Earth, for the sake of simplicity. It may well be economically impossible, but there is a lot about NS that is impossible that we don't let bother us. Even if people RP their nations as having infinite resources, it's just less of a headache for everyone involved to base them around more real-life values than to calculate them on their own. Trying to figure out the continuing value of each and every resource from thousands of nations both RPing and not would be virtually impossible anyway, whether people RPed as having infinite resources or not.

Not all of us RP an infinite supply of resources either. Reloria is presently suffering from an oil crisis due to several factors, and has a distinct lack of much heavy industry or mining. The economy is instead based on agriculture, textiles, consumer goods and advanced technologies. I also factor in environmental concerns from reality, which for some reason a lot of people don't acknowledge at all on NS (though I suppose that is true to life as well).

I think you might have misuderstood what I was trying to say. Or I worte it worng. You add an element The host nations. Would be incharge of sells of the element, but could only own a select amount at anytime. The nations that sell the element would be under watch at all times, and would only RP the element sells, more or less a puppet nation that only dealt with the element.The element would have to be rare enough that many people would not be able to have to much at one time. It would work but it would take time to get everything working.

Wait wait wait, there's a big difference between being infinite and approaching infinity in time. Although the number of nations, populations, resources etc are not only vast but continually growing they are still finite numbers. If they were infinite they could not be held on a database.

And who says infinity automatically leads to valuelessness? Take our own universe which is hypothetically infinte yet we still have values or perceived values based not on the fact there is an infinte supply of whatever we're looking for in the universe but rather its availability to us. A seemingly infinite supply of anti-matter is worthless to us if it is unobtainable.

Instead of viewing NS as an infinite universe I propose we focus more and consider it a very large yet finite galaxy. Furthermore if we viewed each nation as not encompassing one giant planet but each nation could be viewed as residing on their own spacious planet this could resolve resource conflicts, but would not coencide with what people want to RP. And all nations will die in time, do not delude yourself: either from death of the nationfrom inactivity or the inevitable death of its owner. I believe the premise is wrong in stating NS is infinite.

I just don't bother trying to deal with resources. It's not worth the headache. I RP Sumer as having a serious lack in heavy metals (They're around, but rare). And anyone who's talked with me or seen my weapons systems knows this. I RP a way around it for the sake of being different, but that doesn't negate that some things everyone else has, I don't have. Drag me into a war of attrition and you'll quickly see my beautiful composite-ceramicarmour tanks dwindeling in number because they're so hard and expensive to make. That's a fun quirk in RP.
Chaging trade ratios, material abundance, it's just not worth the thought to put into it. I like it when people will put restrictions on themselves in resources because it makes for some interesting trade, but it's not the first thing I'll think about, or usually what I'll think about at all.
It's freeform roleplay, I say just let it go as it goes, and RP with who you want. Worked fine so far.

Once again, another well written essay by Guffingford. Mind if I quote bits of this for my own little rant on II?

Sure, go ahead!

What irks me more than the issue of whether or not NationStates is infinite, which by definition it can not be is my perception that people seem to fancy dictating what resources you have or don't have. As soon as I RP'd establishing a gold standard, people went on as if gold were a rare commodity in Sarzonia because I RP having shortages in other resources (such as oil or platinum). According to my factbook, gold is actually one of my export items.

The crux of the problem in my book is that people who are slaves to realism have to realise that the nature of this game makes it very difficult to be completely realistic at all times. As has been mentioned here and other places, there are countries here whose populations are close to, if not exceeding, that of Earth in real life. There are economies in NS that make the U.S. look like a banana republic. The RP'd convention that people can have everything they need if they want to makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to be completely realistic in this game.

In a game that features nations with kilometre long spaceships and anime-style mechanoids, as well as naval vessels the size of Cuba, I think realism might have to take a backseat at times. Look, the main purpose of this game is to have fun, and this constant harping on about resources is draining the fun out of it for many, myself included. NS doesn't have the inbuilt stats for a real economic simulation - so why complain about gold standards and the such? It makes no sense really.

My nation has no resources apart from Iridium, in the northern mountain regions of Northern Cydonia, For anything else I either need to trade resources or Invade another nation for theirs, it is usually the latter.

Once a Nation has been invaded I set these up (they are multipart kits brought on ships)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v399/HorusGodEmperor/Untitled-1copy.jpg

They are large harvesters that strip mine the Nations resources, inside are various foundries and factories, during sustained wars, I can create weapons, armour and ammuntion with these, or Resources can be stored then shipped back to the mainland later.