ForceBoard

Index

• Game-Created Regions See Delegate Shakeups - Crowheim

• The 2021 Card Awards - Minskiev

• The 2020 Reject Awards - Toerana

• Inflation - The Death of the Cards Game - Toerana

• April Elections in the Rejected Realms - Toerana & Dyllypoly
  

Game-Created Regions See Delegate Shakeups

Opinion | WRITTEN BY Crowheim | EDITED BY Dyllypoly

Over the past few months, the Game-Created Regions of NationStates (also known as GCRs) have seen a slew of newer delegates taking the reins. Since these regions don’t have founders, selecting a delegate is very important as it means the election of someone who will have near-total control of the region’s onsite functions. Four new delegates in particular have seen a somewhat recent rise to power: McMasterdonia in The North Pacific, Beepee in The South Pacific, Chimes in The Rejected Realms, and Zukchiva in The East Pacific.

About 70 days ago, McMasterdonia assumed the delegacy of The North Pacific for a staggering fifth time. As TNP’s previous longest-serving delegate - setting a record of 251 days during his second tenure - McM is a well-established figure in the region and is well-known across NationStates, having been commended by the Security Council several years ago and having served as the de facto face of TNP for many years. His predecessor, Kranostav, who had been elected after Prydania stepped out of the role due to real-life reasons, ran against McM in the election but was handily defeated in what many perceived to be a more lopsided victory than expected. This was a return to form and precedent for TNP, and McM started his term off immediately with a bang, as the quorum raiding debacle between them and defenderdom began very shortly after his election. One could consider his term beyond that to likely be a typical one, though - a “safe” choice to lead The North Pacific.

Meanwhile, in The Rejected Realms, Jamie (Chimes) was elected after challenging for the role following Sarah’s (A Leaf on the Wind) resignation. They ran against Nequedem (Glacikaldr), Gorundu, BowShot118, and perennial candidate (as well as game moderator) CrazyGirl, sweeping the competition and quite easily securing election for what is likely to be a six-month term. Jamie continues the trend of defenders holding the TRR delegacy, succeeding Sarah and Dead I Jack (both are members of the Grey Wardens and Sarah is a member of the RRA), Kyorgia, who had a more mixed past, and Frattastan, Commander of the RRA and the owner of Libcord. Jamie had previously served as Speaker and World Assembly Officer in the region (as well as Delegate of TNP, being the predecessor to McM’s second term). This can be considered another “safe” play by TRR in electing an established regional name, noted defender, and all-around good guy on NS to represent the region.

The South Pacific’s new delegate, Beepee, has only just assumed the in-game role despite being elected in January, a much longer transition than the other three regions in the article. Nonetheless, Amerion continued to serve as TSP’s in-game delegate while Beepee closed the 300-endorsement gap. In a previous TRT article, Purple Hyacinth, Chair of the South Pacific Assembly, surmised that Beepee would assume the role in around a month but that time came and passed. Beepee ran in a very close election against Rebeltopia and Jay Coop (Qvait) for the role, winning 27 votes to Rebel’s 26 and Jay’s 25. The race was then moved into a gameside poll between Beepee and Rebeltopia, in which the former dominated the competition despite the tight earlier race and secured the delegacy for himself. It’s unclear what he will do in the role, as his campaign was somewhat lacking in the way of promises, but we will hopefully soon find out.

Lastly, The East Pacific, as expected, elected their first Dele-goose, Zukchiva, to serve as the region’s leader. He succeeded Serge (Libertanny) in the role, who moved to his newly founded UCR, Kaer Solas, soon after leaving the delegacy. Zuk ran in a rather uncompetitive election, securing a vast amount of the vote against several competitors. This has been cited as something of a problem in The East Pacific, as elections are non-competitive even quite far ahead of time: Sammy (New Leganes) is already favored to become Delegate after Zukchiva leaves the role. It will be interesting to see what Zuk does in the role, given the broad support he had from TEP’s surprisingly small voting population.

The 2021 Card Awards

News | WRITTEN BY Minskiev | EDITED BY Dyllypoly

Over the past year, the cards community has grown tremendously, with new organizations popping up, new traders influencing the market, and new collectors building dream decks. In recognition of this, the North Pacific Cards Guild created the 2021 Card Awards to celebrate the past year’s highlights. The event included individual awards intended to celebrate various aspects of the cards scene and recognize the efforts of some of the most notable members of the cards community.

First was the Best Overall Trader award, won by none other than Koem Kab. As first in the world in Deck Value, it's easy to see why they won this one. Next was the Best Rising Star Trader award, which went to Witchcraft and Sorcery. In just three months, he surged from nothing to a Deck Value within the top 20 - definitely deserving of this award! After that, r3n (also known as 1 very fast endotarter or the Northern Light) was named the winner of the Hero of the Year award. r3n is well known for their generosity and involvement in the North Pacific Cards Guild, so this was no surprise. The Villain of the Year was Koem Kab, as they were the first condemned cards player and someone to always look out for on the market. In recognition of their excellent technical work and creation of widely-used scripts to speed up card farming, Racoda was awarded the Most Innovative award. Finally, the winner of the Most Popular award was 9003, a very well-known cards player and organizer. They're also known for trying to collect every common card - a feat they're well on their way towards!

Following these individual awards, there were several awards for events, collections, the best card, card news services, tools, and more - not to mention fun titles given to infamous players and things in the cards community. Overall, the Card Awards were nothing short of good fun and a way to celebrate cards players’ work this past year.

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The 2020 Reject Awards

News | WRITTEN BY Toerana | EDITED BY Dyllypoly

The Reject Awards - a yearly celebration of the events, the people, and the achievements of the past year - began on the 8th of March and were run by Culture Officer Nakari. They ended with an Awards Ceremony for the winners on the 23rd of March.

Through the course of the event, over 200 votes were cast across 13 categories:
Most Outstanding RMBer, Pen & Paper, Quote of the Year, Best Staff Member, Best Legislator, Greymarshes Achievement Award, Veteran Reject Award, Best Government Member, TRR Event of the Year, Most Outstanding Officer, Best Newcomer, RRA Newcomer Soldier and, of course, Reject of the Year.

The Pen & Paper Award was a new addition for this year, while all other categories returned from the 2019 Reject Awards. However, unlike previous years, 19 awards were handed out for the 13 categories, as many votes saw close races and multiple ended in draws.

As to not spoil the results of the awards, they won’t be listed in this article. However, the winners and a full breakdown of the results can be found in the Awards Ceremony thread on TRR’s forums.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Inflation - The Death of the Cards Game

Opinion | WRITTEN BY Toerana | EDITED BY Dyllypoly & Minskiev

Since its reintroduction in December 2019, the Cards “minigame” has grown into a vibrant community of players trading cards, completing collections, and amassing thousands of bank worth of cards - often independent of any region in particular. With the Top 10 Players being valued at 3.86 Million Bank combined, it shows an incredible ability to collect valuable cards - or does it?

Card inflation is the method by which wealthy players artificially boost their deck’s value to extraordinary heights without collecting more conventionally valuable cards. Inflation is created by collecting a fairly large quantity of a rare card (typically CTE’d commons), effectively creating a monopoly on it, and then proceeding to buy and sell it to yourself for a large quantity of bank, thus increasing the value by orders of magnitude. The practice has been used to immense success by prominent members of the card community: 91 inflated cards are now more valuable than the most valuable legendary card in the game, Season 1’s Testlandia, with 75 of these inflated cards being valued at 1,000 bank or more apiece.

However, card inflation was not always so heavily used or as relied on by big card farmers to boost their deck’s value. Before its explosion in popularity, card inflation was used sparingly as a way to give artificial value to a select few rare Ultra Rares, Epics, and Legendaries, with the Season 1 card Soops holding the top spot in value for an extended period of time. This rare use of inflation made users like Farrakhan, TRR’s long-standing informal Vice Delegate, a novelty within the community with their deck of primarily inflated copies of themselves. In more recent times, players have continued to boost their cards, with 9003 recently holding the most valuable epic spot with their Season 1 card. Unlike more recent examples of card inflation, however, these cards were more easily obtainable through card farming due to their lack of ceased-to-exist (CTE’d) status and the lack of a preexisting monopoly on the card. With new cards being pulled by farmers and casual players alike, it also forced the inflators of these cards to consistently spend large amounts of bank to maintain their card’s value, ensuring there was a high cost to maintain the equally high value.

This lack of sustained cost and the monopolization of inflated common cards are only harmful to the cards community. While there are many different ways to play the game, the total value of a player’s deck is the obvious, go-to achievement advertised by the game. It has built-in rankings for the most valuable cards and decks, as well as a stats badge for deck value, which may just serve as further motivation for cards players given the believed impact gold badges have on a card's rarity. The sheer value of some cards players’ decks - such as Koem Kab, the first player to surpass a deck value of one million - is incredibly daunting to players new to both cards and NationStates in general, which may only serve to demotivate those without the dedication to farm hundreds (if not thousands) of puppets to gather wealth more “organically” and could put users off cards for good. Unfortunately, this is a problem that has no solutions that will please both sides. There are, however, possible solutions for this problem.

Firstly, one of the problems helping to exacerbate the issue is the fact it is harder to pull CTE’d cards than non-CTE’d cards. This is a problem that all sorts of cards players face - in particular those in the region collecting community, who often see collections slow to a crawl as they wait for excruciatingly rare cards to be pulled even a year into the season. The fact these cards are hard to find means they can’t easily be deflated by those who want to sell the card to a “market value shark” for a quick buck or by those who intentionally deflate cards. Furthermore, it prevents these cards from seeping into the general population, keeping the artificial value with those who spent effectively nothing to collect it. Making CTE’d cards as easy to find as regular cards would help to reduce the drastic growth in the number of these cards, as it would be easier to deflate them through natural means.

Pushing the idea of player-caused deflation further, increasing the pull chance of a card based on its market value may help to do the trick. Doing so would ensure that people who rely on inflation for their value are constantly working to maintain that value, making these cards more common and thus significantly easier to deflate.

Finally - and likely the most unpopular idea of the three - placing a cap (soft or hard) on the value of cards based on their rarity will ensure that cards do not inflate too far. However, if placed too low, it could see lower-rarity cards of prominent players (such as GCR delegates) be undervalued because of gameplay mechanics. It’s a tricky balance to strike and, if introduced, would be unpopular at implementation.

With the most valuable legendary card nearing being pushed out of the top 100, we could see a continued shift away from traditional methods of gathering deck value and an increased focus on self-centered monopolies on otherwise-worthless cards, being inflated to be valued at thousands of bank, possibly seeing a gradual decline in interest in the cards game for all but a few highly-dedicated inflators and card farmers, unless changes are made to "restore" a more traditional style of play.

April Elections in the Rejected Realms

News | WRITTEN BY Toerana & Dyllypoly | EDITED BY TRT Staff

Regularly scheduled elections for all 4 Officer seats and the position of Speaker occurred in The Rejected Realms at the beginning of April. Seven candidates ran for Officer and two candidates (along with a disputed third) ran for the position of Speaker.

Officer Candidates

The Officer elections saw only one incumbent - Agalaesia, who was also previously Editor-in-Chief of The Rejected Times - run for reelection. They ran on an Outreach-centric campaign, which focused on continuing the work that they had been doing alongside the rest of the Outreach Staff. Their previous term saw the reintroduction of the RMB awards and the beginning of the revamping and rewriting of guides designed to help new Rejects further their understanding of the game and the region.

Alongside the continuation of existing work done by the department, Agalaesia mentioned that they wanted Outreach to work closely with other departments to ensure internal activity - a role typically associated with Culture. They wished to see Outreach staff running events and activities for both citizen and non-citizen Rejects, as to encourage new players to become citizens.

Chipmunker, a two-time General Assembly author and relative newcomer to the region, ran on a World Assembly-focused platform, though sizable sections of their campaign were dedicated to Outreach and Culture.

Their World Assembly campaign touched upon many areas. Most notable were the reintroduction of voting recommendations from the World Assembly Office and an emphasis on record keeping, documenting both past and present delegate votes to provide a record of how the region has voted on resolutions.

Their Outreach campaign focused on a renewed effort on the welcoming program, which encourages Outreach Staff to reach out to new members of the discord personally, and a vision which saw Outreach in a "supporting role" to serve as a source of promotion and recruitment for the region's other programs and departments.

In their Culture platform, Chipmunker (Crowheim) most notably proposed the idea of "coup days" - a popular event in The South Pacific where "every week the WFE and possibly a little bit more of the region is rethemed for a day."

Dyl (Dyllypoly), the incumbent two-term Speaker, ran on a platform that emphasised Foreign Affairs as their preferred portfolio.

Their Campaign opened by touching on their past work in Foreign Affairs, then went on to applaud the steps made by Nequedem (Glacikaldr) (the incumbent Foreign Affairs Officer) and Robespierre, including joining the Partnership for Sovereignty. Their campaign then proposed expanding the Diplomatic Corps and introducing junior Ambassadors to allow for greater participation in Foreign Affairs, which is currently limited due to a lack of open Ambassador positions.

Alongside expanding the Diplomatic Corps, they displayed a desire to run more large-scale culture events in cooperation with the Culture Officer and produce a TNP-Style Foreign Affairs Report in order to "keep Rejects up to date with foreign happenings and events."

Grea Kriopia, another relative newcomer to TRR, ran a Culture-focused campaign which called for the continuation of the Culture Calendar first implemented by Deadeye Jack with the inclusion of a greater variety of activities for Rejects to partake in. Alongside this, interregional cultural events and the Discarded Cards League were viewed as both "key FA assets" and "great ways to introduce more [Rejects] into the cards world."

Their platform then moved on to discuss cooperation between Outreach and Culture, hoping to see greater promotion of events on the region's RMB to entice and encourage new players to participate in the region offsite.

Visionary Union, a former Deputy Outreach Officer, ran for Officer on a Culture-focused platform. They advocated for furthering TRR's "legacy of cultural events" through the use of the popular Culture Calendar as well as bringing greater activity to a regional discord favorite - Werewolf. Vis also noted their intent to work with the Foreign Affairs Officer and Outreach Officer to organize interregional events and bring RMB-based Rejects into the discord fold, respectively.

Vis's platform also touched on some ideas for the Outreach portfolio. They wished to continue many of the projects started under Agalaesia but noted that their primary focus would be on increasing regional activity. Vis suggested both drawing the RMB crowd to the regional discord and establishing an endorsement program aimed at promoting both activity and TRR's standing in the Partnership for Sovereignty.

Merlin (Kingdom of Circle of Magi), largely known for their work as a defender in The Grey Wardens, focused on both Culture and World Assembly in his campaign. They supported keeping the Culture Calendar and bringing back more long-term cultural contests. They also called for dedicating Fridays to the worship of both themself and Kyorgia. The World Assembly side of Merlin's campaign, meanwhile, advocated for increased native resolution authorship and the passage of the long-awaited Commend Kyorgia draft.

Kral ran in the election, but didn't publish a portfolio.

Speaker Candidates

The Speaker election saw 3 candidates run, although only 2 were placed on the ballot.

Both Minskiev and Gorundu ran campaigns on maintaining the work done by Dyl, with Gorundu expressing a wish to expand on the newly-created Bill Writing Guild.

Former delegate Kyorgia, in sharp contrast to his opponents, ran a smear campaign, emphasising the fact that Minskiev, as a walrus, is "fat," and made accusations of an apparent attempt by Gorundu to take over TRR as a North Pacific plant. These claims have yet to have been verified. However, Kyorgia never ended up on the ballot.

Results

The Officer election saw Dyl elected first, followed by Chipmunker, then Agalaesia, and finally Grea Kriopia. The Delegate, Chimes, then assigned each Officer their first choice portfolio, assigning Aga as Outreach Officer, Chip as World Assembly Officer, Dyl as Foreign Affairs Officer, and Grea as Culture Officer.

In the Speaker election, Minskiev beat Gorundu 14 to 11 and was thus elected as Speaker.

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