Hello everyone,
As you know over the last 5 months we've introduced a variety of new events to the region and expanded our options for recurring cultural games and activities. They have been fun and I hope we keep using those ideas, but one thing that is disappointing to me in some ways, is that a lot of our games and events aren't related to playing NS. So I think it would be a good idea to kind of brainstorm around some of the core features of the game and see if we can put some interesting spins on them and have some fun together. The way I see it the features to focus on would be
issues,
challenges, and
cards.
I'll get us started with a few ideas. Please feel free to comment and give your own ideas (even for features that I don't mention)
Issues
- People pick 1 issue their nation answered a week and write a newspaper article about it and we can make a sort of RP paper about our nations through compilation.
Challenges
- Have some sort of fight club. Let's say people sign up to be a part of it. If you defeat someone via a sanctioned challenge you take their spot in the regional ranking. Perhaps in order to stave off absurd amounts of challenges we could put a card price so winner is also playing for some sort of money prize in the challenge.
- Unicorn Jousting. It'd be a combination of roleplay and using the mechanics of challenges. I've already written something detailed up about this idea. Click the spoiler below to read about it.
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So yesterday I was talking about trying to come up with a way to use the challenge system on NS to do some kind of event. The feature itself is flawed because it makes it impossible to overcome the rank gap. My idea uses the idea of the NS stats ranking based challenge and inserts modified rules and adds a sports RP flavor to it a little. You might ask, why are we trying to adapt the challenge system when we could just make an entirely different system and it might even be easier? Well frankly I think it would be good to reconnect ourselves to activities that revolve around actual NationStates mechanics like issue answering and the challenge feature. Anyway shoutout to Manson for giving me the idea of a framing of "Unicorn Jousting" for a separate thing he said for a different idea.
The Basic Idea
People sign up for the Unicorn Jousting tournament and then face off.The default matchup will be best of 3 on ns stat rankings like the challenge feature works. The winner of the series wins the match.
Mechanics
- Each player's nation challenge level is taken into consideration. If the difference between challenge levels exceeds 20 then the 3 round series is expanded by 1 extra game necessary to win. (This is added to give an advantage to people who have used the challenge feature more than others but not an insurmountable one like currently exists on the NS Site, the assumption is the higher the level the more likely you are to win the match so adding rounds means that it reduces the odds for upsets for severely mismatched opponents.). For example:
If a level difference of 1-20 exists, there will be 3 matches.
If a level difference of 21-40 exists, there will be 5 matches.
If a level difference of 41+ exists, there will be 7 matches.
- Typical Sports RPing is done, after the results are released for a round the participants can RP about them or the next opponent.
- People that make an RP post get to choose one stats category that they want to show up in their next match. This is a good advantage because you should be able to pick a stat that you will win with against your opponent.
- After all that all the other categories for the match are picked via random number generation on excel and then the two nations' stats for that category are compared manually. Higher score wins.
1) Use the NS challenge feature and get to the highest rank level you can. It took me about 15 matches to get from 0 to 26 the other day. I imagine it gets harder the higher the rank though. The highest ranks I've seen on the leaderboard are 70 or so.
2) RP before each match. This gives you an automatic win in one of the categories of your match.
3) Be an avid issue answerer on your nation so that you can compile high stats.
4) Be an older nation who has had more time to answer issues in the same ways.
Cards
- Currency system. Cards make for a natural currency system, the problem is deciding on what that currency system is for, what are we spending on?
- Card Stock Market game. Everyone starts with $1 on their nation and nothing else. You have a month to increase your starting value as best as you can. You can't answer issues to get new packs on that nation during that time and you can't gift cards to yourself from another one of your puppets. The object is to see how well you can invest in the market.
