muses and ramblings of an old man

Recent defender missions, and my observations over nearly three years in the game, have led me to some conclusions which make me want to open a debate. Please read and comment.



The limitations of the gameplay of the core NS game (I am not talking about the offsite forum activity) have been well documented. Many of us hoped that the game would be improved by the advent of NS2, but my personal opinion is that even if Max and the other mods were to pull their fingers out, they would likely find that the niche that NS2 would have occupied has been filled by other games like CN. I think it has to go down as an opportunity missed.

So we are left with NS1, which as time passes is looking increasingly limited and creaky.

It seems to me that much of the enjoyment of a game like NS depends on delicate checks and balances.

A balanced game forces players to find exploitable opportunities within the game, and use them to advantage. Puppetmaster was an example of this, as were endosurfing and unendo campaigns. This leads inevitably to a debate about the morality of all the tactics, and the general response of the mods has been to tighten regulation, and limit imaginative play. Puppetmaster attacks could not be launched nowadays, for example, and unendorsement campaigns have been rendered much less effective than in earlier years. From my perspective pretty much every mod ruling has served to make the game duller. Others are better qualified than I to comment on the influence system, but even this seems to be to have tinkered with the game rather than revised or revived it. Too little, too late.

The main issue I want to discuss is the balance that (for me) makes the game interesting – in particular the balance between invading and defending. My perspective is that the game was at its best when the game was balanced between invaders and defenders, and every soldier counted. But it seems to me that the game is unbalanced at the moment. It is easy to raid a founderless region, and easy to hold it against defenders. It is very hard to dislodge even a semi-alert raider delegate.

The results? Many defenders have lost heart and given up. There are fewer and fewer active defenders in the game any more. And fewer and fewer true liberations.

Does this matter? Of course. Because invaders and defenders need one another, and need to be keenly matched to make the game interesting. I am no invader, but I suspect there can be little real thrill in walking in to an undefended region, tinkering with the WFE, sitting there for a week or two, then moving on to another region to repeat the exercise over again. Defenders need invaders, invaders need defenders. And from what I see we are looking at a decline in that general aspect of the game.

What do I propose? I do not know, really. I am trying to open the debate, and perhaps suggest that there needs to be balance put back in the game – some tweak of the rules or coding which make liberations more possible, and attract people back to the defending side of the game. This would, I suggest, be a benefit for defenders, benefit for invaders, and a benefit for Nationstates generally.

Damn, you're making me feel old!

I agree with pretty much everything you've said. The mods overregulate somethings - UN resolutions, invasion/defense rules - and yet leave somethings so wide open that it's impossible to get anything done - like the NS forums. My last attempt to make a UN resolution was shot down by a flurry of rules I didn't know existed, an irate moderator that claimed "mod approvals don't happen", and a mob of abusive UN forum "regulars" who have completely destroyed the art of debate.

As a result, the game is dying. More and more of the old players are wandering off - few return for good, and there aren't enough dedicated newbies to replace the loss. Defending has become a lost art - the once great ADN has been reduced to a small group of dedicated people, remembered only by those old enough to have known them in their prime, mentioned only in mock conspiracy jokes.

I don't really know what could be done to reincarnate the game. The most obvious fix would be to remove what caused the problem in the first place - to cure the symptoms, remove the disease. But this probably isn't the most viable course for NationStates - the mods, being part of the disease, wouldn't be too keen on removing their handiwork. Hopefully we'll find something, something soon.

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Kind of ended up responding, sorry. Case you can't tell, I think that's great.

I think you're right Flemingovia...as to solutions....dunno...haven't been playing long enough to really have the overveiw you guys have....

Firstly I think it is unfair to blame the Mods for the game 'dying', there is only a few of them just doing their job and in my opinion, they do it very well. They are unbiased and they may be strict but then so is the moderating on this forum.

Secondly there are now no rules on invading/defending a region, they were eliminated after the creation of the Influence system. Also invading/defending is just one aspect of the wide range of gameplay, even when raiding was at its peak the numbers have always been very few. Changing the game just to suite a minority (however vocal) of invaders/defenders will not benefit the rest of us.

Largely I agree with you, but the issue is larger than simply the invader/defender dynamic. It's also possible that invading/defending has mostly died off because people got tired of doing the same thing for years, and it's difficult to place the blame entirely on the moderators. Many players probably simply got burned out.

The lack of anything new happening to the game (influence really didn't change anything), and the absence of any risk is a lot of the problem, and a lot of that can be blamed on the administration of the game. This is probably the only game where it's essentially impossible to lose, which makes "victories" rather hollow.

The campaign to get rid of founders was largely given up when people just got tired of hitting their head against a wall and simply left the game out of frustration.

What would getting rid of founders accomplish? Well, for one, it could certainly give the invader/defender dynamic a definite shot in the arm, as regions would have a vested interest in keeping themselves secure, and give invaders a wider range of targets (instead of having to raid small and inactive regions that aren't worth anything to anyone).

Two, the influx of newer members to the game is decreasing (as is expected, given that the game is four, five years old). There are probably thousands of nations who get recruited to upstart regions that never become anything, and they sit there idling and not really doing anything. If regions became harder to maintain and develop, then the number of nations idling in inactive regions would dwindle, as there would be fewer inactive regions.

Of course, given the lack of a truly active invader/defender dynamic, it's possible very little would actually happen as a result. But I don't believe it could hurt the game.

But a large part of the game's decline is the fault of the community. Many players have developed reasonably deep OOC connections with others, and are more interested in simply maintaining the basic status quo and maintaining those friendships than they are in doing anything new or shaking things up.

This isn't necessarily wrong to do, but it has definitely had a large and negative impact on the game.

all I can say right now is "Postzillas! They're everywhere"

I'll probably have something more useful at a later time

I have mixed feelings about that. I agree that eliminating founders would help the invading/defending game, not only because it would widen the possible targets, but also force the invaders to split their forces between attacking other regions and defending their home from attack. However, many regions have no interest in invading/defending, and might just leave the game if they couldn't opt-out via the Founder.

You may have a point about the OOC connections. But it's a big world, and I don't see any reason why friendships in one region would keep one from shaking things up elsewhere, perhaps with a different nation.

Invader/Defender dynamic was one of the stupidest things the game ever had. Originally there were regions that stood alone, extraregional conflicts were politically-based (UN national movement was an extension of roleplay now relegated to a single subforum on a region's Invisionfree), with the odd "invader" group such as that mysterious roaming hoarde of Frenchmen.

A couple of things happened. One of them was the Pirate invasion of The Heartland. Ineptia carried a grudge on that for a long time. It precipitated rule changes in the game which created Regional Controls. Ackbar, Juxtapositions, Architeuthis, they argued it would create a worse group of invaders, ones that could really do damage to a region. And, surprisingly, they turned out to be right and the mods wrong.

The Rejected Realms soon became easily one of the world's largest regions. An immature delegate, given unprecedented power over his region overnight, could empty his region in a moment. NS History's version of the Hittites would make emptying a region a point of military conquest.

A few people got upset at that.

The Rejected Realms Army was formed because a schmuck got pissed at being ejected from his region for being a schmuck. Their goal was to "invade" (yes, invade) regions like that and remove tyrannical delegates. He soon gained scores of soldiers.

Civilization watched fearfully. The dichotomy then was civilization vs. anarchy. The barbarians were at the gates!

The failed invasion of The East Pacific, though not the immediate cause, signalled a turning point in the strategy. Shortly after that time Siggi, who was originally an AA double agent (Atlantic were good guys then) gained more influence in the organization, Gres lost influence (a multie and habitual liar, he increasingly became a liability for the RRA over time), and the non-Gres 'faction' changed the RRA's focus to fighting the Hittites. That was my first tour of duty in the RRA, and I remember those first few actions.

Meanwhile in the world, the Allied Liberation League, envisioned by Thomasia (of The Meritocracy) specifically to have the ACC as its military wing, collapsed on itself over Nederland and North American objections to Pilmour and the ACC's focus. Supreme Commander Accelsior (Thomasia's alter ego) disappeared. Men grew restless, Pilmour filled the vacuum of Accelsior's departure and hijacked the Atlantic military apparatus as a Pilmourian private army to be used on personal crusades of his.

The Met abandoned us. We became a pariah. The RRA became the good guys. The gameplay philosophy the Accelsior ACC would have led did not materialize; instead it was this new thing the RRA was doing which would spread and take dominance.

It was helped along by NetWorkRadio, as some of its most prominent reporters (Jerome Hawkins, Yasmine Hawkins) were RRA officers. Being the first widespread media agency of its kind (Associated Press region had only a shadow of that success), where there was no other cultural medium connecting farflung nations together, it made Civilization. What was an easy and exciting source of activity? Invasions. Typically from the POV of the defenders, or of invaders as alien outsiders. A strange new word appeared during the summer of 2003, and soon most armies would be known by it or its opposite: defender.

It's more "good" to be a defender than an invader. Defender regions talked to one another. They held three feeders* and encouraged immigration to the player-created feeders. They held friendships with moderators which led to routine favoritism. If you weren't a defender you were an invader. A single military action would have your region blacklisted on the ADN's "Known List of Invaders".

Invader regions existed in the barbaric outlands, with little ability to conduct diplomacy with "mainstream" regions, and little source of activity other than invading. Whenever a new invader region started intelligence agents of the alphabet soup would have it infiltrated to the kilt; this would be followed by a string of defender successes, brought on by pre-knowledge of movements and sabotage, slowly killing that region with boredom. And whenever an "allied pullout" was engaged, the region would collapse.

I'll leave the Franciscan Wars (known for a time as the Great Patriotic War in The Pacific), the "third way" The Pacific introduced being neither invader nor defender (and yet repeatedly invaded), the excesses of corruption of various defender leaders and their failure -where everywhere else they had it rigged- to remove that harranguing thorn in their side, and the tri-polar world to another post. While I'm inclined to give Francograd credit for winning the war, I've written enough for this early in the morning.

There's a tendancy among children, we like to think this is only limited to children, to have the COBRA Organization outnumbered while GI Joe is given every possible advantage to insure "the good guys" win. This phenomenon carried itself into NationStates.

Except didn't Cobra Commander always kick ass until the last five minutes of the episode? If he didn't, if instead GI Joe beat the sneat out of him at the very beginning of every episode, would people have cared to watch at all? Weren't the Franciscan Wars more fun than Children of the Grave is now?

What about Great Bight? Where other despots gained longevity through tameness, he was all-too-willing to cackle MwaHaHa and curl his mustachio -and, in the end, recognize a climax and bow out of of scene gracefully. I think there's something to be said of Snidely Whiplashes out there. I bet everyone who was part of that campaign was proud they were.

Shrews do not make interest-sustaining enemies. Giants are hard and scary. That's why the struggle means something. But for so many defenders it was about "winning", not playing the game.

You "won". Then all your defender armies died of boredom. Go figure.


[size=-1]The South Pacific was a "defender" region in that prior to June 2003 it was part of the great reaction against Atlantic militarism. However, during the summer when Atlantic was a Met colony being retooled as a proto-defender force The South Pacific had a string of Atlanticist delegates, and while its foreign stature rekindled for a time leading the anti-Francos alliances, it eventually succumbed to an apathetic isolationism which has scarred it. [/size]

Yeah, the holier-than-thou defenders sure got what they wanted!!

Completely untrue. Invaders don't need defenders, in general thefun comes from actually taking the region and pissing off a few of the louder natives. Part of why DEN held Ayn Rand so long was Iroqious or however it's spelt constantly yelling on the RMB - it was funny and gave an incentive to stay.

The game does however, need something to make liberations more possible, that will bring more defenders into the game and thus, make it more challenging for both sides. However the mods have proven themselves incompetent in this issue. They never get it right, it either goes too far towards defenders, or too far towards invaders, so we might as well leave it for the moment and have some sort of summit on what to do. A game wide summit on how to revive that part of the game?

I think the activity problems in NS do lay along those lines. People naturally will look at NS and think "well you can affect your nation, but where is the trade, the economy, the war?? This game is actually really limited!"

Meh, defending is coming back. There just needs to be unity as there once was. Besides, it seems like a good time for defenders to become interested in the game once again, with so many invaders running rampant. A lot of n00bish behavior from them, as well. It's easy to distinguish the experienced, professional invaders from most of the new generation. Critics of defenders used to say that without defenders, the invaders would get bored and stop invading, which has certainly been proven incorrect now. When I first started being pulled away from the internet by RL, invaders had definitely been quelled and diminished, and only the strongest and most organized groups were still around in any kind of active and/or effective capacity. Defender activity has seemingly been in steady decline since then, and the invader population has skyrocketed in all of those months. Many of them don't even bother to clean their puppets anymore.

Defending was most fun very long ago (almost four years now? wow...), when the ADN was still very young and learning. I barely knew what I was doing, as was the case with most of us barring a select few. New People (and the Atlantic Alliance) was an excellent nemesis. There was a true sense of intelligent competition, the requirement of advance strategic planning, undercover ops & counter-ops (for awhile even without the worry of IP tracing, just good old fashioned detective work)...and a healthy competitive relationship between invaders and defenders that respected each other (and for the most part all knew how to spell and form complete sentences). In any case, rule changes and player manipulation of game mechanics changed things dramatically more than once, and it's felt somewhat like the gameplay side of things has been struggling to find a firm niche more and more each time. Gameplay has never been as engaging nor as exciting since then.

I don't feel as though it's a lost cause yet, though. I haven't had time to check out the Jolt forum to see the kinds of reforms people are suggesting...will have to do that soon. Sounds like it could be fun.

I think defending might actually be coming back. ADN may be dead, but I think that Pope Hope may be able to resurrect it. We will have to wait and see if the balance is returned to the game.