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