The Wishlist

There's a lot of obvious things that could be done to make NationStates more interesting, so why aren't they there? Here's my top ten of wants (well, yours I suppose, there's a few here that I couldn't care less about), and explanations as to why we can't have them (or at least, satisfactory answers).

1. More Customisation: I want to list the name of my ruler! I want to tell everyone what my capital city is called! But no, we've only got the national animal and currency. Why? Well, this is a guess, since I haven't asked Max Barry personally, but I reckon it's because NationStates was never expected to be so popular (nations were only set to exist for 14 days of inactivity originally!), so only things relevant to the issues would be necessary. We can't add anything new now because it would require such an overhaul to the way the game works. So this has to be set back to NationStates 2.

2. GIVE ME WAR!!!! Woah, hold on, put that loaded rocket launcher with added fancy bits with odd concatenations of numbers and letters down and listen for a second! War would be a very complicated thing, and is only accessible through roleplaying (or, to a lesser extent, region crashing or the Warzones) at the moment. This is set for NationStates 2 also.

3. Trade: ah yes, good ole trade. This is also set for NationStates 2. I don't know if currency exchanges are included, but a fair few enthusiastic entrepreneurs have made their own websites (most notably, Thinkgeek), but these websites tend to be wildly inaccurate. Still, an interesting diversion!

4. More UN categories! More UN proposal categories! With regard to the first, it's not going to happen, as it would require a whole reworking and reconsideration of the entire game. As for the second, we have actually drawn up a bunch of new categories, but I've no idea when we'll get around to incorporating them.

5. More issues per day: this isn't going to change for a multitude of reasons, including the size of your nation's page descriptors, the actual number of issues we've got in the game right now (at present this is 178), coding problems, and the fact that there's no actual point.

6. Maps: I believe this is on the cards for NationStates 2, but until someone comes up with some fantastic way to incorporate the whole of NationStates (130000 nations) on one map with nations constantly dying and coming into existence... well. Nothing to stop you making your own maps of course. A good computer program for this is Terragen

7. Alliances: again, this is set for NationStates 2, and there's many interesting ideas on how these would be created in the NationStates 2 forum.

8. Regional flags: an idea which I'd really like to be realised, but alas alack, we cannot have them. Why? You're gonna hate the answer, but it's because the administrators don't want to. Please don't hurl tomatoes at me!

9. A better region search: unfortunately, the way the game was initially coded means that this is impossible. It would be great to be able to search for regions only beginning with P, or having a certain number of nations, but no. It cannot happen.

10. Ability to save telegrams: this isn't going to happen because it's a waste of time. Use a pen and paper!

Well, I hope that's helped some people. Other questions can be probably answered here: http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=382519