Crap, is it tomorrow already?

Well I meant to write this today. Shame how the time flies when Rush is on Colbert. Anyways, some of my more astute readers will recall my dwindling fondness for the Facebook application Nations. Well, as you know and indeed this very blog is validation of, I cannot resist an opportunity to put my two cents in. Now, you know I have an uncanny ability to be right, even when I'm clueless (point in case: I successfully argued all matter was made of triangles, unaware that Plato himself agrees with me). Below is a transcript of my message to Nations developer and his response (the funny ends here, but it will be back).

I know you get a million messages about Nations a day, but I hope I might hold some sway since you've had my review on top of the list for about two months.

I have a simple suggestion that could drastically improve the realism of Nations.

Randomize the issues.

Before you write me off as a crazy guy, hear me out.

The problem I've been having with Nations lately is I figured out which of my friends started their nations a day before I did. Now I know exactly what issue I'll have tomorrow. It ruins the gameplay on two levels. First, it gives me an advantage because it removes the surprise value of the issue. Second, it ruins the realism of the game because regardless of how I deal with terrorists, I know that tomorrow I'll have to deal with malfunctioning traffic lights.

I understand why it is necessary to give the bigger, more complex nations bigger, more complex problems. But there is a simple way to solve this.

Before I continue, I must confess I have virtually no knowledge of programming games for facebook. I understand some concepts but not how they should be executed. So I apologize for being vague.

You wouldn't completely randomize all the issues a nation gets. Instead you would create large blocks of issues (for example, a group of seven), have the program randomly order them for each nation, and then give the issues to the nation in that order.

The more issues you can get in a block, the better. It's not the same as creating a comprehensive system of issues that respond to your choices, but that'd be too much to ask of a free game. It would, however, address the issue of predictability and increase the realism of the game.

Thank you for your time.

~Hunter Barry

Hunter,

Thanks for the thoughts. You will be happy to know that we plan on randomizing the issues with the new user interface... once it has all the bugs out.

Cheers,

+ Z. S. Morgan

Translation: You are much more awesome than I could ever hope to be. I bow before Hunterian Superiority.

It never hurts to ask.