Region Building & Maintenance
This was a course given by Cortath (Blackbird) in the Meritocracy in May 2004, dealing with the foundation and growth of regions.
Some of the parts relating to actively “stealing” players from other regions may now breach NS recruitment rules.
Here is my first lecture. It covers the philosophical underpinnings of region creation. I doubt any vets will learn anything, although they may see something articulated that they knew subconsciously or intuitively, as this is mainly geared towards newer player.
Why do you want a region? Why have you created? What do you want it to do? What do you want it to accomplish? Who do you want in it? Do you want a certain type of nation in it?
These are all questions you must answer in order to successfully create a region. Your region must “be” for a reason. If you don’t yourself know why your region is/shall exist, you should think about it, because potential members will be thinking about it. What makes your region special? What makes “0000TolkietisSUXXOR” different from another region?
Region creation is very difficult. You must fashion a region that has a hook, that has something different, that can fill a niche where there are nations wanting to be. There are numerous ways to create such a region. You can create a region based on a common interest, such as, oh, the San Francisco 49ers. Obviously, your region will be pretty specific, as only 49er fans will be there. You can create a region based on a political ideology, such, as, say the Allied States of Euroislanders, or the Anticapitlist Alliance, or the Exlclusive Capitalizt Zone. Making a region based on common policy or political beliefs is usually a good bet, because after all, this game is fundamentally based on political beliefs, so chances are 100% of the people in this game have some sort of belief.
But what makes your region different from another region based on the same niche? There are more variables here, as well. Your region can sport a novel or seldom used type of government, a well-used but particuarly well-enacted type of government, interesting personalities to attrack people. Your region can be based on common defense or even common conquest. Your region can RP or not RP.
The point of being able to answer all of these questions and determine what your region will be is to be able to fashion your region to be successful. If there are one thousand regions somehow based off of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, chances are, another one isn’t going to be a hit, unless you have a distinguishing characterist. So too, if there is not a single type of a region that you’d like to create, you might want to ruminate as to why that is. Maybe there is not a large enough base to support your region, or, if you’re lucky, maybe you’re the first guy/gal to successfully tap that idea. Although a BDSM Jewish Nazi region might sound very unique, it probably won’t draw enough people to make it viable.
How can you distinguish based on a common ideology? What makes one region, based, say on, liberatarianism, have 100 more members than another similarly based region? If you’re creating a region in a heavily saturated category, you have to distinguish yours from others. Perhaps one region has a thriving RP communitty, or a participatory government. Perhaps it is involved in foreign politics in the NS world. Whatever distinguishes a similarly based (categorically speaking) region from another, it takes work to put into it. For example, The Meritocracy (http://merit.jink.org/) is a shining example of a website that takes a lot of work, but obviously can draw huge numbers of people due to its incredibly well-constructed site, with active members. You don’t have to be a webmaster to have a good region. You can easily set up free invision or proboards forum (whichever of your choosing) and coordinate your region there. Many of the largest invader groups, for instance, work virtually entirely off of their forums and intercommunication networks to coordinate invasions, thus getting their name on the map and in the news, thus getting more members.
Your region has to attract people somehow, be it by a unique or undersaturated category, or distinguishing characteristic.
Keeping people in your region. This falls a bit under my second lecture regarding the form of government (which can be boiled down to “who makes decisions”) and activity.
I advocate a democratically elected executive with a large cabinet and perhaps a court. What’s the philosophy behind this? Well, democracy give your administration legitimacy and support. Of course, you have to win an election to get there. But the cabinet. I support a large cabinet for a couple reasons. The more people involved in government, the more people feel their opinions matters, the more activity your region has. Activity. That’s the most important thing. Anything you can possibly do to get more people involved will keep your region active. If people see change. chagne in particular happening, they’ll want to hop on board. If government is easily accesible to the common citizen, then they’ll feel motivated to post because their opinion matters. When you have autocracy, it’s much more difficult to prevent stagnation.
Who should make your decisions? As many people as possible, again. As the Delegate, you can maintain a veto power, either de facto veto, by virtue of you being Delegate, or formal veto, through a Constitution you can write. But having as many people make decisions as possible, again, makes more people active and more people feel that government is accessible. If government is accesible, more people get involved, and that’s…you guessed it…activity. You might exclaim: “You’re telling me to give up all my power!”. Not necessarily. Certainly your Ministers, Secretaries, whatever you will, will make decisions, but you can still determine policy. If you say, “I want to more regional alliances, with say, Lord of the Rings RP regions”, and your people can go out, do the work, make the decision on which region to establish relations with. You’re happy, he’s happy, more people are active. By posting your political philosophy, people will see it, and try to follow it.
How do you get people in there?
That is the art of recruitment. Advertise, advertise advertise. Advertising works, but just as in real life, word of mouth is the most compelling and powerful means to get people to come to your region. If your region is distuinguishable, or caters to a unique clientele/group of users, then simply by merit of its existance, it can branch into those users. If you, say, are, a Liberal Democrat (UK political Party), and you make a region based on that, tell Lib Dems you know in game. They’ll come to your region. They tell Lib Dems they know, and so and so and so forth until your region becomes a Lib Dem haven. That is if you cater to a unique clientele (Lib Dems are pretty darn specific). If you work on distinguishing characteristics, normal methods of advetising, such as messages in the feeders, NS messages boards will do. The best method truly, is to form a “core” of players (this is an extensive part of my philosophy). You cannot rule alone, and by finding perhaps half a dozen players who are truly active and dedicated to running the region, they are your “core”. The core can help in many ways. By word from their mouth, hopefully being influential, they can get people to join. Also, they can help recruit by lodging messages in the pacifics, and also enticing, through conversation, to get influential members from other regions (“stealing” if you will). If you can “steal” popular or noteworthy players from a region, you can trigger migrations. Of course, the region in questions that remains won’t like it, but it can be subtlely and there is nothing illegal or illicit about it.
Recruiting, who to recruit
Ah well, now hopefully you have a core and you want to recruit.
There are several ways of recruiting, all of which have their drawbacks and advantages.
One of course is direct advertising. You create a message advertising your region. It should be short, sweet, listing who your region wants, as well as advantages and possibly a history of your region. You can post them at the Civil HQ’s of the feeders/sink or send them in TGs. The upside is that often you can get a lot of people using this method, but the downside is that these people won’t necessarily be active, you can offend the leaders of regions you advertise in, and you may not draw a large clientelle if your advertisemetn is drowned out in the cacophony of other advertisemetns. Advertisements can also be placed in news sources, such as SeattleNews, NetworkRadio or NBC, where some nations may find them. Also, advertisements can be placed in the Nationstates forums.
Two. Individually recruit nations. You can pick out nations who seem to be active and bring them to your region. This is, of course, exceedingly difficult. You find diamonds set in jewelry, not among grains of sand, but the expert recruiter can sometimes pick out a potential active player before they are attached to another region. There is little point, in most cases, to have an already active player place a puppet in your region. Although it artificially increases the size of your region, the player behind the nation, unless particularly motivated, will still hold theier primary loyalty, and thus their primarty attention to their original reigon/organization. Thus, one’s motive should be to recruit newer nations, rather than older ones who may not be as active with you. You can find active nations in many different ways. You could find ones that fit a political description by looking at the world “top” lists in NS, which is of course, a random grab in the dark. A more effective way of finding active nations is to find small, dying regions, that have only a few active members and invite them to your region, shifting their primary loyalty from a region in decay to your region in growth.
Your “core”, or a couple other active people can help you by rotating times to send puppets to spam messages in feeders/sinks, sending advertising TGs or otherwise recruiting nations in. Remember, it’s exceedingly difficult to do these things alone and you’ll need all the help you can get.
Founders
I’m going to begin another section of this, on the benevolent leader type.
In the modern NS world (and I say modern, because, well, I hate to pull the “vet” card, but I can), there are founders. And by having a founder, whether you like it or not, you have a dictator. Now, there are many different kinds of “dictators”, but really two extreme ends of the spectrum.
There are those dictators who are worthy of the name. There are totalitarian dictators in the sense that although not necessarily trigger-happy with the ejection button, they entirely dominate the political scene of their region and maintain either de facto or de jure rule over their region. These founders often are particularly charismatic, because, as stated in previous lectures, accessibility to government is a significant “pull” facto to your region, so the charisma and love of the founder is often very great ot have a successful region governed in this style. A founder who is not charismatic yet still maintains nominal control over the region may have trouble creating a stable and large region, because their charisma and draw towards their government does not outweigh the inaccessibility of government.
Then, there are the benevolent dictators. Many founders create constitutions or charters for their region that grant all powers to the Delegate or some other elected assembly. This allow the democracy and accessibility of government to be maintained, while one can still get the advantages of having a leader that new nations may be drawn to. One might say this is the preferred method, but of course, the great disadvantage (to the founder) is that if they do not like the policies or actions fo those who they (via their Constitution or other method) gave power, there is nothing they can do without becoming a founder who takes control of everything.
The third, and by now incredibly rare category, are the founderless regions, which are democratic (at least, as democratic as the gameplay mechanics allow), but these do not need to be spoken about, as these types of regions are increasingly rarer and rarer.
That’s my little harp on founded regions.