NationStates Jolt Archive

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Gameplay in NationStates
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Comments Thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=499397) - Collected Gameplay Rulings (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=11670471&postcount=2)

In NationStates, gameplay consists of several broad categories of activities, namely nation management, region management, and inter-regional warfare. There are many facets to each of these activities. These are the sorts of things you should discuss here in the Gameplay forum. For a more detailed look at what you should discuss in Gameplay, see this thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=301573) by Tactical Grace. For the set of rules applicable to gameplay within NationStates, see this section (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=8784627&postcount=2) of the One-Stop Rules Shop. I highly recommend reading it, just to make sure you stay on the right side of the rules when playing on and enjoying the site.

Nation Management

The management of your nation, in gameplay terms, involves answering issues to improve in particular UN Rankings, getting a nice flag to impress other nations, and gathering endorsements from other nations to improve your Influence, and filling out the customizable fields on your nation, such as your national animal.

Nation Flags

Many nations want a nice flag, and a number of people on the site who have ability with graphics and image altering programs provide others with customized flags that they will like more than the basic options. One example of this is the The NationStates Flag Service (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=281405).

Government Types

There are a few resources you can use to better understand the government types that exist in the NationStates world. For a listing of the available types, as well as a listing of the member ranks on Jolt, see here (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=392208). For a guide to getting a particular government type when you set up your nation, see the Nation Creation (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=297403) thread.

Nation Building

Many players have dedicated extensive effort to making a more complete simulation of their nation, either through roleplaying in the NationStates or International Incidents forums, roleplaying it on an offsite forum, or by creating their own representation of their nation on the web. For a sample of the websites that have been created by players for their nations, see the Nations' websites listing (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=364550).

Region Management

The management of a region can involve many things, including recruiting new members to the region, building an offsite forum and other features to attract members to your region and keep them there, keeping track of the members of a region for security reasons, making sure you have an active Founder or an active Delegate with a good number of endorsements.

Recruiting

The recruitment of new members to a region is essential to the success of a player-created region, and is therefore an important aspect of gameplay, and the way players go about recruiting has been subject to controversy and dispute for a long time. Unsurpringly, as a result of this, concerned players have written some guides to effective and non-abrasive recruiting. See the Suggestions for Regional Recruiting (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=413109) and an Open letter to region-advertisers (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=301514) for more information on recruitment. Recruiters also frequently post advertisements for their region in this forum, and eventually a listing of such advertisements (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=294809) was created, though it is not currently being updated. Fortunately, there is now a New and Improved NationStates Yellow Pages (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=499508) that is being updated by Ceorana.

Offsite Activity

Much of the business of regions, and the headquarters of their social and political institutions, are housed on offsite forums. Most regions of significant size, and often those that are relatively small, have an offsite forum. One of the sites that provides free forums, InvisionFree (http://www.invisionfree.com), hosts so many offsite forums for NationStates that a petition was started to have a section for them in the IF Forum Directory, as you can see here (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=464673).
Inter-Regional Warfare

Warfare between regions or war waged on regions has not been terribly uncommon in the history of NationStates. For a very long time there have been folks who wanted to control other regions, whether because they enjoy the power or because they like the challenge of taking a region back and giving it to whomever they think are the rightful inhabitants. Others do it just because it's fun and amusing. For a sample of the groups that engage in inter-regional warfare, see Euro’s list of Region Invaders/Defenders (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=455270).

More Information

If you want more detailed information on gameplay issues, a good place to start would be a search of the NSwiki, specifically the article on gameplay (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Gameplay). For a list of the largest regions in NationStates, see Safalra's web site which has a listing of them (http://www.safalra.com/special/nationstates/regions/) (and lots of other good stuff) or the NSDossier (http://nsdossier.texasregion.net/) hosted by NewTexas.

Regional Happenings Spamming Via Puppets

;11559889']Oh, and by the way, I agree that doing almost anything with vast numbers of nations is spamming. Players should be made aware of that. It's understandable that they might think from the FAQ that creating and moving around an unlimited number of non-UN nations is okay. But it's not; not when you're talking about these kinds of numbers.

Acceptable Flag Policies

;9445233']Apparently there's some confusion over our policy on acceptable images for flags (the kind you upload yourself). In particular, there's a mistaken belief that any image is fine so long as it doesn't include a swastika or nudity.

Nope! As per the FAQ, flags are subject to the same minimum standard as any other content: they can't be obscene, illegal, threatening, malicious, defamatory, spam, or have the primary aim of offending or upsetting people. And:

This has been the case from the beginning. However, I once answered a question about a three-pronged red and black flag by saying something like, "Only swastikas and swastika-like images are banned, not anything else," and the "anything else" was taken more literally than I intended. I apologize, particularly to the mods, for this confusion, and I'm sorry if it's lead to some inconsistent moderation.

To make life easier, here are some examples of what is and isn't acceptable. I expect there will be many borderline cases (there always are), but it's a simple principle. If a flag celebrates death, slavery, violence, or other not-nice things against real people, that's malicious, and will have the primary effect of offending.

Acceptable or Not? A Rough Guide
A swastika: not acceptable (Yes, it was used by Buddhists in the third Century, etc, etc, but that's not what it represents now. To the vast majority of people, the swastika represents the Holocaust. A nation with a swastika appears to be endorsing that event; that's malicious and has the primary effect of offending.)
A swastika with little flowers and happy faces, on a nation called "The Friendly Nazis": fine
A swastika with little flowers and happy faces, on a nation called "The Friendly Nazis" that has the slogan: "We kill Jews with kindness": not fine
A flag of Hitler looking all stern: no (Only one interpretation available there.)
A flag of Hitler wearing an apron with fake boobs that says "Kiss the Cook": fine
Actual boobs: no (I know, I know, who gets offended by breasts? But it's only fun to post them because it's naughty, and that's why it's banned)
The iron cross: my feeling is it's usually okay, because I don't think most people even recognize it. But if the nation also had a name, slogan, etc, that seemed to be glorifying Bad Things, then no
That SS lightning slash thing: no
Something that looks a lot like a swastika if you squint just right: mods would need to judge the intent. If it's just a blatant attempt to get around the swastika ban, then no. If it seems coincidental -- e.g. nothing else about the nation seems to endorse violence against real people -- then it's fine.
A swastika and it's on a clearly pro-Nazi nation but honest it's just roleplaying: no. Sorry, you might be RPing but if that's not obvious to other people, then the primary effect of your flag will be to offend and upset, even though you don't intend it.
The hammer and sickle: fine (Yes, I'm aware of the hundreds of millions of deaths. But when people look at the hammer and sickle, they think communism, not mass graves. If you can point me at a survey that shows otherwise, then we'll deem this one malicious, too. But until then, it's just a Soviet flag.)
The Japanese flag, or the American one, or the British one, or... : fine (Most people don't primarily associate any of these with death or violence.)
The Japanese flag on a nation with the slogan, "We bombed your grandparents": no
To make that point again: we don't ban particular patterns of colored pixels, we ban any content that is malicious in nature. The mods' job is to judge which is which, according to guidelines like this.

And because I know this is going to come up again: I realize that you can point out a bunch of different groups that committed terrible acts, and yet we're not banning their flags. That's because we're not banning the symbols of every group that scored a particular body count; we're prohibiting content that is malicious in nature and to most people will have the primary effect of offending. Not a few people, not just you, but most people. That's the criteria.

The forums permit relatively free speech on a range of issues, so, as the FAQ says, if you've got a political ax to grind, do it here, where people can argue back. Please don't put it in your flag when you know it will piss people off.

CopyCat Threads

Ladies and gents, if we see too many of a "trend thread", we will lock some of them.

~Kat

Know the Rules

The One-Stop Rules Shop (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=416023)


... is a new compliation of all the rules of NationStates, both Games and Forums.

Click the link above to read the Moderation topic. Comments welcome.

Highly recommended for all NationStates players and posters in ALL forums.

What formatting tags can we use in World Factbook Entries?
The code for this is hand-rolled. The tags that we support are:

- bold -
- underline -
- italic -
- color -
[hr] - Horizontal Rule
[thread ] - Links to a thread in the forums
Remove the trailing space before the ] before use.

For the last two, check out the news page (http://www.nationstates.net/news/2005/02/02/index.html#sal_changes) for the syntax.