www.nationstates.net

30 April 2005

Issue #177 Is In The Game

After much brainstorming between Frisbeeteria and myself, we finally perfected and honed issue #177 until it was quite possibly the finest piece of literature ever produced.

Nations should be receiving it shortly at the next game update. Enjoy!

Sirocco: A Potted History

For all those who have ever wanted to know just how I came to be attached to this site for so long, I have compiled a potted history. Lucky you!

14th of April 2003: joined NationStates after being shown it the previous day by a friend.

May 2003: founded Lancre, and encouraged my allies to come with me to a brave new world.

June 2003: started The Lancre Cup so everyone had something to do.

Late June 2003: went on the forums for the first time. Until then, I had no idea what a forum was, but I was soon enthralled and became a budding Generalite. Yes, that's right. I was a Generalite along with Normack, Nyborg, Beeker, Marathon, and all the other oldies. The main difference between me and them was that I was interested in all the forums and I was a regular/semi-regular poster in every single one. Especially the Technical and NationStates forums.

15th of September 2003 (I think): became a forum moderator. Much to my surprise as well, as I'd never really given the moderators that much thought. They were just there, you know? And soon I learned what their nations were, what they were like, and all the rest. I knew my destiny when I got a telegram from Reppy and I thought 'why not?' (I know now, of course. I'm suffering from a premature old age from listening to complaints for two years). I moderated the forums for the next four months (well... when the forums weren't down anyway as they often were) and memories of that period are quite vague now. One thing I do remember is that Tactical Grace (who was modded at the same time as me, though I was first by a few hours) had much more praise from the already-existing mods who thought he'd be a great addition to the team (and he was). All I had was a passing mention from Reppy and only got the job because no-one else objected!

13th of January 2004: became a game moderator, much to my recalcitrant disappointment. I had really liked being a forum mod and wanted to continue as one, but I also wanted to edit issues as they fascinated me. The boss said I'd have to be a GM as it required access to the modcentre and I was thereby promoted. I decided that I'd carry on as a forum moderator qua game moderator that only edited issues. It worked for a while, but I often helped out with the tasklist too and now I have to juggle between the two. My forum modding skills have pretty much fallen into decay.

14th of October 2004: became a senior game moderator. Didn't make any difference to anything. Just showed that I'd done a lot of hard work.

After that: usual turn-of-the-mill stuff. There's lots of other details of course, but they're either not interesting, imaginary, or simply too broad to stick in this one post.

Anyway, that's all you didnae want to know about me. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Then at least I could laugh about something!

29 April 2005

Issue #177 Under Construction

The next issue may be a while in coming - the crash that happened the other day threw the tasklist into chaos and the mods are now folornly picking up all the pieces like paramedics attending an unlucky trapeze artist.

The tasklist (to all those not in the know, this is the general name given to the list of Getting Help requests) is still increasing all the time and it's bulging horribly. As such, it's taken up a higher priority than the issues, so it'll have to wait. But I can still provide some hints.

The issue will have three options and its author belongs to a region named after a RL country. It is about halfway through the editing process.

Not much of a teaser, I know, but I do so love surprises...

28 April 2005

For I Am The Mod And The Resurrection

On NationStates, your nation is auto-deleted after 28 days of inactivity (60 days should you activate vacation mode), but there are lots of people who return, wanting their nations back. To get their nation back, they send a request to the Getting Help page.

These requests paint an interesting picture of NS society. I have categorised the different types of request we sometimes get, simplifying them out a bit as I don't want to detail the compound categories we get too. Here they are:

The Frugal Request:

These requests are terse and simple, only giving the name of the nation needing restored - just how I likes 'em. Ship in, ship out, next task.

The Nervous Request:

These requests are polite, earnest, and lengthy. The requester details a mini-sage of why s/he let his/her nation die and how s/he will never let it happen again! It's mildly amusing to think that some people are afraid we're going to say: "Good God, he didn't have enough time to play NationStates? I suppose he forgot, did he? Hah! We'll just not restore his nation, see how he likes that! Mwahaha!

The Informative request:

These guys, through either ignorance or an unwillingness to read the FAQ, insist on telling us everything about their nation so that we'll definitely, no-deviation-whatsoever, make sure that they've provided all the necessary info for resurrection. They tell us their nation's full name (If I wanted mine restored, I'd just have to say 'Sirocco' - not 'The Holy Hippocracy of Sirocco'), their password, their e-mail, their region, their motto, their best friend's middle name - it's an endless stream of text which invariably seems to be in a block paragraph. All we need is the nation's name and we'll restore it. It helps to be logged in when you make the request so we can telegram you the good news. We (or at least I) ignore e-mail addresses.

The Uninformative Request:

These requests tend to be along the lines of "Can you restore my nation? I can't remember what it was called, but I think it began with p."

Not much we can do there.

The Absent-Minded Request:

These guys will witter on for a novel's length about why their nation died and then forget to say what the nation was called.

The Atlas Request:

Argh! Every mod growls when they see one of these ones, as they know it's going to take a while and will kill your fingers with Repetitive Strain Disorder. It generally consists of a gigantic list consisting of about 30-50 nations needing restored. 'Why?' we feel compelled to ask. 'What uses could you possibly find for all those?!' But we do it, because we're nice.

The One-By-One Request(s):

These guys send out a separate task for every nation they want restored. Incredibly annoying when in conjunction with the Atlas Request above.

And finally...

The Unfathomable Request:

A made-up example:

"'The Incestuous Animal Rapage of Fukkinshitcock' is gone! I don't know why it was deleted as I logged into it just last week so could you please resurrect it?

I swear to God.

Well, that's all I have to say on the subject today.

On another note, though, my computer was broken the other day so I missed all the hoo-hah about the game crashing and data being lost due to lack of disc space. Maybe we know now why everything kept crashing before? But all fixed now, so everything's swell.

Ciao!

26 April 2005

Getting Metaphysical

The NationStates world (mostly known as The NS Earth) must be, when you think about it, a damn big place. Our Earth has about six billion people living and breathing as we speak, but the NS Earth, at the last count, had 83.4 trillion people. To be more precise, it was 83408807000000 citizens. This was spread across 131574 nations and 15803 regions. Here's the data in full:

Number of Nations: 131,574
Number of Regions: 15,803

World Population: 83,408,807 Million (83.4 Trillion)
Avg. Population: 634 Million
Median Population: 247 Million
Max Population: 5733 Million Praetor
Mode: 5 Million (3241 nations), 2nd place: 20 Million (1842 Nations)

Avg. Region Size: 8
Largest Region: The North Pacific (8395 Nations)
Largest Player Region: Gatesville (1061 Nations)

All data from March 18th


Now obviously this must mean that the NS Earth is a lot bigger than the world we inhabit today. When I envisage the NS Earth, I see a gigantic orb spinning slowly through space with regions like The Sun, or the Moon (and The Earth?) orbiting it. Discworld orbits round it too, I suppose. There's also random space nations orbiting it like large gouged upside-down mountains as they revolve on their own axes (presumably they inhabit regions like SPACE and The Universe). Occasionally as you look upon its terrene might you will see countries go flying through the skies as they are moved via helicopter. Or via giant robot boot for ejected nations. That'd be pretty amusing.

But, I wonder, if The Sun is so much smaller than the NS Earth how does every nation have a day and night? What would happen to all the nocturnal animals and crops? Where would all the badgers go, huh? Huh?! The answer is obvious of course - The Sun illuminates the Earth and only illuminates the place it's near at the same time. Impossible, I hear you say! But no, it's not.

For the world is truly a magical place.

25 April 2005

Time Shortage

Being an NS mod is stressful. Any of us could tell you that. But recently it's got even more so - we're verging on about 100 new requests for help from players each day and it is grueling in the extreme. Right now we've got a fair number of the mods who are either working their boots off in real life or are studying for exams or are taking exams or are on holiday etc. etc. and so the few remaining have to take over! I'm one of them and it's eating up my issue-editing time faster than it takes for a new religious-themed thread to appear in the General forum.

But never fear! We'll manage, and I will get a new issue up within the next week or so. It's just going to require a lot more hard work and patience.

(and before you ask, no I'm not going to say what the issue's about!)

24 April 2005

We Are The Champions!

In regional news, I WON THE LANCRE CUP! It's taken nine Cups, but I finally did it. I'm chuffed, I really am. Here's Bestiville's match review of this momentous occasion:

Fireworks dashed the night sky with streaks of colour, people threw toilet rolls and huge riots took place. A typical final in many respects.
The before mentioned riot took place immediately before the match, and included the Hippie Dude supporters (angry due to them not getting to the final), the Dregruk team (which still hadn’t been taken back to Dregruk) and a crazed BLF president doing more damage than all of the convicts put together. It was carefully broken up by the LCOT, carefully in the sense that they made sure that they didn’t kill any of the rioters.
Despite this riot, the game still went ahead. According to the acting BLF president ‘They are outside the stadium. We are inside. There is a good solid wall between us and the rioters’.

The teams soon came onto the pitch and sang their national anthems with absolute determination, despite the constant booing of the Bestiville supporters.
King Siroc said a small speech, without any mistakes or hestitations, despite the booing of the Bestiville supporters.
Emperor DTAS said a small speech and signalled to the LCOT, despite the booing of the Bestiville supporters.
All of the Bestiville supporters were chucked outside to join in the riots, despite their booing.

With the removal of the irritating Bestiville supporters, and to the sounds of rioting, the match kicked off.
There was more in the playing for than just the title of ‘Lancre Cup IX champions’. The title of top scoring team was also being contested, Sirocco and DTAS LAND being drawn on goals.

The first half was dull. The Sirocco players’ ‘Magic Boots’ didn’t seem to be working, as this midfield battle was never more than just a midfield battle. The players went off the pitch with tired faces and -in Sirocco’s case- hitting their boots to see why they weren’t working.

‘We don’t know what was wrong with our boots’ Redd Fantazmo, Sirrocan captain said at half-time, ‘They just weren’t working right’.
‘You shouldn’t need magic boots to win’ a DTAS player quickly chipped in, ‘No one else had magic boots. You should win with skill, not with magic’.

The second half had no goals until the very end. A player ran with the ball towards the opposition’s net, squealing madly and flailing at any player which came close to him, and blasted the ball into the goal. He then went mad and jumped into the stands.

‘What?’ the acting-President of the BLF asked the irritated people reading the match review, ‘You want to know who won?’
There was a general muttering of ‘Of course we want to know who won you tit’.

‘Really?’

‘Yes!!!’

‘Honestly?’

Someone now attacked him and grabbed the piece of paper out of his hands.

‘The winner’ the man said with dramatic tones, ‘Is… SIROCCO!!!!!!!!’

Sirocco won the match Sirocco 1 DTAS LAND 0


Final results table:

1st place, and hosts of Lancre Cup X- Sirocco

2nd place, and honorary Lancre Cup runners up- DTAS LAND

3rd place- Bongostan

4th place- Hippie Dudes

Top Scorer- Sirocco

The Bestiville award for crappiness- Joint- Yesnono, Rachels Insanity, The Hartlot of Babylon, Troon and Utter Complete Idiots


Final words

So… It looks like we’re going to Sirocco for the next Lancre Cup. Hopefully they’ll be as entertaining hosts as Sliponia were. I’m sure they will be.
Thank you for watching the Lancre Cup. I can only hope you enjoyed it. Please TG me with YOUR ideas for what to change in the next Lancre Cup e.g. ‘Smaller Commentaries’, ‘Less Dregruk’ and ‘Don’t organize it again’.
It hasn’t been too hard. In fact it’s been fun.
I’m sorry to people who won the Bestiville award for Crappiness, I can only commiserate you and wish you better luck next time.

Thank you,

Emperor Besty, Signing off

Issues With Issues

This post contains spoilers about NationStates issues. You have been warned.

Being the editor of a great deal of issues (there are now 176 or so in the game I believe) my nation's name appears as a link in many an NSer's daily NationStates session. As a result, I get a lot of telegrams. The majority ask the same mind-numbing question: how do you become a game moderator? But that's not what I'm talking about in this post, oh no. This post is about the people who plague me with telegrams about issues (I'm not including the ubiquitious 'how do I submit an issue?' here though).

About 50% of the telegrams about issues I get are about typos and contextual errors (like when I mistakenly referred to AIDS as a Sexually Transmitted Disease - it's not, it's HIV that's the disease. I'd originally put AIDS in as a filler until I found out how to spell syphilis and then forgot about it. D'oh!) and another 45% is about suggestions for new options on existing issues (but we don't do that for a plethora of reasons I'm in no mood to explain here!). About 0.01% is praise for issues, usually just saying that they liked a certain bit (I got one recently about including a Minster of Silly Walks in an issue). The other 4.99% however are from people who are angry and want my blood.

A good example of this is an issue I wrote (didn't edit - I was a forum moderator at the time) called 'Streaker in Snooker Game Fiasco' where you can either ban streaking or actively encourage it. I was totally unprepared for the backlash I received because of it, and it wasn't because they were particularly averse to streaking - it was because of the issue's description which reads thus:

After a sixty year old man with psoriasis streaked past cameras and millions of sports fans during the snooker league playoffs, protesters have called for tougher action.

Did I have something against people with psoriasis? Was I cruelly depicting these people as horrific freaks? The answer is no, of course I wasn't. The point I was trying to make is that many people get totally hysterical about nudity sometimes (I remember hearing somewhere about someone trying to sue Janet Jackson after being 'traumatised' by seeing her accidental exposure on the television. For a billion dollars. Or some such figure.) and just how much the physical appearance can make them even more hysterical. Had it been a pretty, buxom, blonde, twenty-year-old woman there may have been much less fuss. But the fact it was a sixty-year-old man with psoriasis, oh dear me!

Happily, most people understood after I explained this. But some other complaints I've had have just been bizarre. Like the woman who claimed to be an ex-prostitute and was said to be very offended by the issue on the subject of prostitution ("Give The Red Light District The Green Light?") and advised me that I should 'get some first-hand experience' on the matter. She even supplied some handy links in case I wasn't sure where to start.

The last complaint I'm going to mention was over this issue description:

Recent studies showing that the sources of @@NAME@@'s most common street crimes (vandalism, muggings, joyriding, and witchcraft) are children under the age of responsibility has prompted a national outcry for governmental action.

This one caught me totally by surprise. I received a rather irate telegram from a follower of the Wiccan religion who was outraged that witchcraft had been listed as a crime, despite the fact that it still is in most of the world today. That asides, it had never been my intention to offend anyone, I had just thought it would be funny to juxtapose something totally un-streetlike amongst the crimes. I originally considered embezzlement and forgery, but the idea of street punks selling their wares spliced with eye-of-newt and wing-of-bat was too much to resist.

All in all, when people argue with me about issues being politically incorrect I have only one thing to say: it's not me doing it, it's the crazy people you get arguing in the issues!

23 April 2005

NationStates Is Down!

This has been happening more and more frequently recently and it's beginning to bug my usually mellow self. Everytime it happens, any mods around will hot-foot it to either get as much relaxation time as they can or try and find SalusaSecondus or [violet] to fix it.

But why does it keep going down? I've no idea. Sal spouts technical gibberish when I ask him. Jolt seemed like such a breath of fresh air when we joined them, but things are slowly degenerating... slowly and painfully. I don't think it'll be as bad as the pre-Jolt days where the site crashed at odd intervals and the forums moved with only a glacial pace and got lapped by statues though.

But ah well - at least we've said goodbye to the notorious quadruple-post and those heart-sinking error messages which informed you that you'd just lost half-an-hour's writing in your RP.

I think Jolt may need a short, sharp shock to get up to speed!

More on Jolt later...

22 April 2005

Feelin' Sporty

On the 24th of April there will be a grand final. It will be of epic proportions. It will be like the clash of titans, of Heaven against Hell, of Light versus Dark- it will be the Grand Final of, drums and trumpets please, The Lancre Cup!

"What, you gibbering imbecile, is that?" I hear you ask.

The Lancre Cup is a fictitious football tournament which is competed in by nations of, duh, Lancre, my region. I originally came up with The Lancre Cup as a way of attracting people to join Lancre, as, with most small regions, the biggest problem is trying to maintain a good size. No-one wants to join a region with less than ten nations which have messageboards stretching back to the year dot. Likewise, no-one will want to join a gigantic region which has a constant flurry of communication because they'll be swamped instantly unless there's an offsite forum. What new (and canny I suppose) nations want is a small/average, active region where they can build up friendships and alliances and set themselves up for glory.

And that's what it's all about. The first thing any small nation wants to do when they join NationStates is to take control. Part of the appeal of NS is that you can do that with no-one else's help. You've got your nation, and you can do whatever you like with it! Mwahaha! No Harry Potter for you, sunshine! But for a lot of people, this simply isn't enough. When you join the United Nations, suddenly whole new vistas of opportunity appear. Find a region, and grab UN delegacy! That's the way! Then I can do anything I want, yes? But, no. It doesn't work like that. Everyone else wants it too, and before you know it you're in the middle of a frenzy of endorsement-swapping and you're no better than how you started. And invasion rules make any wanton ejections very dangerous.

So what then? The answer is clear: found a region! Founders can do anything they want with their region, including ejecting anyone they don't like. And this is where we get back to my problem - I needed to get people to join so I could make a point of not ejecting them. How to do this? There's a lot of regions all wanting the same thing. The answer came to me in a flash of divine inspiration. Make them feel important! I indiscriminately urged everyone to go for delegacy, I impressed on them regional rules (very simple and easy-to-abide ones, though. Complex rules are disheartening.) and, of course, started The Lancre Cup.

The key to the Cup's success, I suspect, was that it didn't require any input to take part. I wanted to get people to join the region and stay there, but they wouldn't be inclined to stay if they had to submit an involved roleplay story every other day just to be in on what the rest of the region was doing. So what I did was make entry into the Cup automatic and the scores random (well, semi-random. I co-devised a new scoring system which would take previous matches into account with another nation, now sadly gone to the Happy Region in the Sky.) and bingo! Instead of having a long, laborious tournament which would bore everyone to tears I had entertainment. Every day a Heat or Semifinal or whatever was on, I'd post a small match review on the messageboard to roughly detail what happened during the match. This started out as quite serious but the Cup got more popular as sillier stories were contrived.

And there you have it. The region peaked at 54 nations but has since stabilised at around 30 after I stopped organising the Cup (too busy being a moderator) which I think is quite perfect. The Cup made a comeback this month after a nation called Bestiville volunteered to do all the spadework and I agreed. As for the final on the 24th, by some dint of coincidence it's going to be me versus the delegate, DTAS LAND which should be very entertaining. Yay me!

If you're interested in setting up a Cup for your own region and want to know how the scoring system works, feel free to telegram/e-mail me. More information on the Lancre Cup can be found here: http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/The_Lancre_Cup

Introduction To The Blog

Hello, I'm a rather optimistically cynical fellow known only as Sirocco. I'm a moderator of the site www.nationstates.net where you get to create your own nation and care for/abuse the denizens. Or whatever you want. Mostly they get legislated to Hell and back. I expect that anyone who reads this will be familiar with the site anyway so I'll quickly continue.

The aim of this blog is simply to give an account of the trials and tribulations of modship, talk about issues I've written/edited, my region, and anything else that should happen to be interesting enough for me to relate to anyone interested enough to listen.

But today the big news is that I have no new mail! Isn't that fantastic?! www.gmail.google.com certainly thinks so!

My e-mail address is siroccothemod@gmail.com which I mostly have so that anyone wanting help writing an issue can get personal advice from me. On one or two occasions people have actually done this but most of the time what I see when I log in to the account is this chipper little message:

"No new mail! There's always Google News if you're wanting something to read."

Now I don't know why this irritates me, but it does. Why the exclamation mark? Why is it so euphorically delighted that not one person has sent me an e-mail? Does it want me to feel bitter? Perhaps it should read something like this:

"There's no new mail, you poor, lonely bastard. Get up and see your friends. Maybe you'd have more if you didn't sit in front of the computer all day."

No. Maybe not. Too honest. Perhaps something a bit more supportive, to keep my chin up.

"There's no new mail, but never fear! You'll get one someday! Just remember that I'll always be here for you for on that happy day when one comes! I have nothing but the deepest respect for you, you remember that! In fact, if you'll indulge me, I composed a small poem for you, ahem..."

... And so on and so forth. I really think there might be something in this - perhaps I should patent it? Anyway, I'll stop here for now - ciao!