2021 and a Summer on NationStates

Pichtonia

Pichtonia

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AUGUST 20, 2021
AUTHOR: PICHTONIA​

2021 and a Summer on NationStates
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It seems to be common wisdom that, in the months between May and August, "Nationstates slows downs as high school and university students invest their summers in other pursuits rather than spending their study time on Nationstates", as our founder and former President HEM once fittingly described it in the ENN.

This seemingly common wisdom of a "summer slump" is doubted by some, and even those who believe in it would probably do so to varying degrees, if only to the degree that we must be able to influence it somehow, such as recruitment. In light of ongoing regional debates, this interested me a lot.

Can we see a seasonal fall of activity, and is that the reason of our falling nation count?

Ultimately, this article won't be answer the latter. All this article will do is look at a select group of some of NationStates' 20 biggest UCRs and their nation count within the last two month. It does, by and large, not provide an analysis for how these numbers came to be and what individual factors might play into the nation count. It doesn't factor in recruitment methods, regional events, a percentage of puppet nations, or anything else. The regionswe will look at in this article are Europe, 10000 Islands, The Communist Bloc, Europeia, The Leftist Assembly, Forest, Free Nations Region, Anteria, Karma, United Kingdom, Wintreath, Thaecia, Spiritus, Kingdom of Great Britain, The Internationale, Lands of Kings and Emperors, Union of Democratic States, Democratic Socialist Assembly (! here throughout the graphics mistakenly abbreviated as DAS - a typo that I wasn't willing to fix at the time of writing this article), Caer Sidi and Kantrias.

June 15 - July 15​

The biggest region on the 15th of June is Europe with 1 357 nations, at the end of the line starts Kantrias with 127 nations. The nation count of these twenty regions decreased to an average of 93.56 %, from 9235 to 8640 nations.

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Our data of 20 of the biggest UCRs shows that the wide majority of them noted significant decreases in their population between June 15th and July 15th, which on the surface would confirm the “summer slump” theory. Thaecia, the Union of Democratic States, the Democratic Socialist Assembly, Caer Sidi and Kantrias all increased their nation count, with Kantrias leading the bunch with an increase to ~ 117 % their nation count on June 15th, followed by Thaecia with 107 %. Between the months of June and July, Karma takes the biggest hit of the selected regions, falling to 82 % of their nation count on June 15th.

In descending order of nation growth, the regions are listed as follows.

REGIONNation count on June 15Nation count on July 15(De-)Growth to % of June 15




Kantrias127149117.32 %
Thaecia297320107.74 %
Caer Sidi160169105.63 %
Union of Democratic States246250101.63 %
Democratic Socialist Assembly216217100.46 %
Free Nations Region45244798.89 %
Forest48046296.25 %
10000 Islands1111106996.22 %
Land of Kings and Emperors23722695.36 %
Europe1357127894.18 %
Europeia80475794.15 %
The Internationale26023192.40 %
The Leftist Assembly61055090.16 %
Wintreath33830489.94 %
United Kingdom35932089.14 %
The Communist Bloc87977988.62 %
Spiritus29225587.33 %
Kingdom of Great Britain25621885.16 %
Anteria42335884.63 %
Karma34128182.40 %
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Europeia is placed in the middle of the field, experiencing a decrease to 94.15 % of its original nation count (from June 15 to July 15).

July 15 - August 15

Between the months of July and August, the decrease in nations generally slowed down, from 93.56 % of June nations to 97.11 % of July nations remaining. TCB came back with force, increasing its nation count from 779 to 849 (108.99 % of nations from July 15), this time leading the selected regions in nation increase.

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Notably, Thaecia, the Union of Democratic States and Kantrias all continued to grow. Caer Sidi and the Democratic Socialist Assembly did not grow further, and in fact had the biggest decrease of the twenty regions, falling to 88.76 % (CS) and 88.48 % (DSA) of their July 15 nation count respectively.

REGIONNation count on July 15Nation count on August 15(De-)Growth to % of July 15




The Communist Bloc779849108.99 %
Union of Democratic States250262104.80 %
Spiritus255265103.92 %
Kantrias149151101.34 %
Thaecia320324101.25 %
The Internationale231233100.87 %
Kingdom of Great Britain21821498.17 %
Wintreath30429697.37 %
Anteria35834897.21 %
Forest46244997.19 %
Free Nations Region44743296.64 %
The Leftist Assembly55053196.55 %
Europe1278123096.24 %
United Kingdom32030194.06 %
10000 Islands106999893.36 %
Europeia75770593.13 %
Karma28125891.81 %
Land of Kings and Emperors22620289.38 %
Caer Sidi16915088.76 %
Democratic Socialist Assembly21719288.48 %
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Of the twenty regions, eight did worse between July and August than they did between June and July, although two of those were still experiencing an overall increase within that month - Thaecia and Kantrias. The other six, so 10000 Islands, Europeia, Free Nations Region, Land of Kings and Emperors as well as the abovementioned Caer Sidi and Democratic Socialist Assembly all had an even stronger decrease than the month before. The Union of Democratic States was the only region of the selected to not only have an increase in the first month, but an even bigger increase in the following month.

June 15 - August 15

If we look at the two months together, the image of the seasonal decrease solidifies. Only three regions - Thaecia, the Union of Democratic States and Kantrias - managed to not lose any nations in the researched time frame. Overall, by August 15, the nation count of our twenty regions decreased to 90.85 % of its June level.



REGIONNation count on June 15Nation count on August 15(De-)Growth to % of June 15




Kantrias127151118.90 %
Thaecia297324109.09 %
Union of Democratic States246262106.50 %
The Communist Bloc87984996.59 %
Free Nations Region45243295.58 %
Caer Sidi16015093.75 %
Forest48044993.54 %
The Internationale26023393.20 %
Spiritus29226590.75 %
Europe1357123090.64 %
10000 Islands111199889.83 %
Democratic Socialist Assembly21619288.89 %
Europeia80470587.69 %
Wintreath33829687.57 %
The Leftist Assembly61053187.05 %
Land of Kings and Emperors23720285.23 %
United Kingdom35930183.84 %
Kingdom of Great Britain25621483.59 %
Anteria42334882.27 %
Karma34125875.66 %
​

These numbers seem to suggest two things.

(1) A seasonal decrease in nations looks to be very likely.

Whether it's summer or something else, the nation count did decrease both on mean and mode average.

(2) We might not combat it as well as other regions.

This enters a territory that I'm hesitant to enter, exactly because this article doesn't look into the reasons for why region A, B or C are doing the way they are. But the numbers do seem to suggest that several regions got through the seasonal decrease better than us, with three actually increasing their nation count. Very notably, in my mind, the Communist Bloc did worse than us between June and July, but then rebounded so strongly, they far outdid us (positively) on the two-month scale.

What do we take from this?

To add to the debate, I asked Andusre, the founder of Thaecia, why he thought his region was doing so well these months. Here's what he shared:

We've been running stamp recruitment hitting new nations constantly for a good number of months now and have supported that stamp recruitment with API. We do not target refounded nations in our stamp or API recruitment because we believe that in most cases players who forgot the game once will likely forget it again. We were not running very much manual recruitment if any at all - manual recruitment without any scripts or tools to support it is a fairly crushing burden on a lot of people and many either were not interested or did not have the time to take part in manual recruitment. The stamp and API recruitment did the job okay, insofar as it kept us afloat albeit decreasing little by little. We have recently thankfully seen a bit of a turnaround likely thanks to the incorporation of a new tool which, whilst remaining within the site's rules on scripts & tools, significantly reduces & outsources the workload of manual recruitment, leading to an uptick in how many recruiters we have, in how many telegrams we are sending out at any given time, and by extension how many recruits we are getting.

Conditions for UCRs right now are quite clearly sub-optimal so I'd say we're very relieved we've found a system that is working for us. Anything to help us keep our head above water in the midst of challenging recruitment circumstances is met with a hearty sigh of relief.
Click to expand...
Comments from August 7th

So technology and a good focus? Are we lacking that, though?

Is our current debate about manual recruitment misguided, or could we even outdo Thaecia if we advanced on that field?

I ask "What do we take from this", but as you see, I have no answer to it. What I hope, however, is that this could add an interesting bit of data to our current discussions and let you reach some of your own conclusions. If you wanted to share them in the comments, I'd welcome that wholeheartedly!

Thanks for reading, and have a good day!
 
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Really interesting article Pichto!

I do wonder what we would gain if we didn't target refounded nations with stamp or API recruitment, I am not 100% sure if that would cause our stamp telegrams to deliver any faster to new nations or would just cause us to use less stamps/API time.

Besides that I think a big takeaway is that large recruiting regions have been doing less well than large regions that subsist more on name recognition/new nations joining because of the name.
 
This is a good article Pichto. I suppose it's at least somewhat comforting that our comparable 10KI and Europe are only doing slightly better than we are though obviously they started in a stronger position.

Is the new tool Thaecia is using just the helper? Or is there some new recruiting technology we are unaware of? Also Thaecia's logic on refounds is probably right for the wrong reasons, in that refounded nations would probably be more likely to go back to whatever region they used to be a part of rather than reviewing their recruitment telegrams. Similar to Peeps though I don't think removing them would be particularly helpful.
 
This is really interesting to see it visualized like this! It's tough, really, I mean I've been MinInt for a few terms and you try so hard but it seems like it just never sticks, sometimes. If that's to do with the time of year or some other bigger trend within NS (the general population decline) or what, this shows that everybody's feeling it. The ones who are doing well are the exceptions, and I don't mean to sound cynical or anything, but is the success of other regions (like Thaecia) due to them doing something super different or is it just chance?
 
Wow, I completely missed this! This is some really good data. I think at this point that it's fairly well established that a reoccurring slump in activity over the summer does exist: we not only have data from this but also rough information about nation creation that can be inferred from our stamp use (we tend to use fewer stamps in the summer months and more in the winter months). The tricky thing is figuring out how much population loss we can attribute to the 'summer slump' and what is due to factors under our control.

It is kind of weird how Andusre states that Thaceia is "not running very much manual recruitment" when interviewed in this piece, despite the really impressive numbers shared by Peeps. Churning out that many manual telegrams could be a large factor in their unique population rise in contrast to most regions. Those numbers also give me a hunch that Thaecia doesn't adhere to a concept of 'responsible recruitment'.

I guess this brings up the question for us of whether we want to reconsider doing away with 'responsible recruitment' in Interior. The negatives would be that the research we've conducted in the past shows that recruiting young nations is significantly more effective, and it also might not even encourage players to recruit in greater quantities (or at the least quantities we need to see the change in our population trends we want). I personally don't think that Euro's 'max recruitment potential' would be raised much higher by completely eliminating the 45 or below recommendation. But recruiting nations that are 45+ minutes old isn't exactly throwing a telegram away, as some might have once thought. It's something to think about.
 
Le Libertie said:
It is kind of weird how Andusre states that Thaceia is "not running very much manual recruitment" when interviewed in this piece, despite the really impressive numbers shared by Peeps. Churning out that many manual telegrams could be a large factor in their unique population rise in contrast to most regions. Those numbers also give me a hunch that Thaecia doesn't adhere to a concept of 'responsible recruitment'.
Click to expand...
Andusre stated that Thaecia were not running many recruitment telegrams until recent times, when the introduction of a new tool made it very easy for Thaecians to recruit, which in turn, attracted a decent number of manual recruiters and thus, Thaecia's manual recruitment numbers went significantly up. But before the tool was introduced, as Andusre stated, Thaecia didn't send that many recruitment telegrams manually. I think you confused the tenses, which led to this misunderstanding :p
 
I'm assuming their new tool is probably similar to what we have, probably not something "better", per se. Because, I can't really think of an easier or quicker way to send manual TGs than what we have. Perhaps a surge in recruiting because the new tool is novel and fun to use?

Either way, they're doing great for their numbers. Let's try to hit those numbers and see where we are then. Have we been looking at what many other regions' TGs are saying? Are any of the regions with month-over-month gains doing something different in their TGs?
 
Prim said:
I'm assuming their new tool is probably similar to what we have, probably not something "better", per se. Because, I can't really think of an easier or quicker way to send manual TGs than what we have. Perhaps a surge in recruiting because the new tool is novel and fun to use?

Either way, they're doing great for their numbers. Let's try to hit those numbers and see where we are then. Have we been looking at what many other regions' TGs are saying? Are any of the regions with month-over-month gains doing something different in their TGs?
Click to expand...
I know there’s a new tool via discord bot — it can do fun things like generate a link to sending a telegram with the 8 nations filled in, so all you have to do is hit the send button. There’s also a command that will start a countdown timer and ping you when you can send the next batch of telegrams to the next 8 nations. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ease of being integrated with discord makes it more likely for some to recruit, I think we’ve seen that with stages vs mixlr even
 
Prim said:
I'm assuming their new tool is probably similar to what we have, probably not something "better", per se. Because, I can't really think of an easier or quicker way to send manual TGs than what we have. Perhaps a surge in recruiting because the new tool is novel and fun to use?

Either way, they're doing great for their numbers. Let's try to hit those numbers and see where we are then. Have we been looking at what many other regions' TGs are saying? Are any of the regions with month-over-month gains doing something different in their TGs?
Click to expand...
I did some very informal investigation under Kaz's term, though it wasn't done in a way that you describe. It was more of a general search for good ideas we could implement.
 
I was contemplating a possible link to the decrease in the numbers being particularly prevalent in the larger regions, with 500+ nations. During the summer slump, it is a well-known fact that most nations do not stay for long, and thus their nations cease to exist. And so, I checked XKI, Europeia, and Europe's number of CTEs, and compared it to regions smaller in size, for instance, region A. While these three large regions had about 10-15 nations CTE in the last 1-2 days each (I'll have to check for the precise number again), smaller regions, like region A, tend to have a smaller number of CTEs. And if we consider that they send the same amount of recruitment telegrams, both larger and smaller regions can integrate only a certain amount of nations, with the amount being almost the same for both the types of regions and so if they have the same number of recruits and integrated nations like the bigger regions, they are likely to have a comparatively higher gain in nations compared to the older regions. Recruits-CTE=Gain in nations, and so with the larger and smaller regions gaining almost the same number of nations (an assumption), the fact that there's a larger number of CTE nations means the gain will be negative for the larger regions, while it will be positive for the smaller region. If 10 recruits join each of the types of regions, there will be 25 CTEs in the larger regions and about 8-9 CTEs in smaller regions, and thus, while the net gain is positive for the comparatively smaller regions, it will be negative for the larger regions.

This is why regions with a size of 200-350/400 have better odds of gaining than regions with the size of 700-1,000 nations.

Note: I am making the assumption, they send the same number of recruitment telegrams as us, but since both types of regions integrate a certain number of nations and the CTEs will be bigger for the larger regions, the gain is likely to be higher for the regions of 200-300 nations.

(Sorry if this does not make any sense, if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask)
 
Wouldn’t a larger region mean more CTEs anyway in the first place, because they have more nations anyway? Have you looked to compare ratios/percents?
 
Monkey said:
Wouldn’t a larger region mean more CTEs anyway in the first place, because they have more nations anyway? Have you looked to compare ratios/percents?
Click to expand...
But during the non-summer slump time, larger regions are at an advantage because, at that time, players tend to stay for longer, and thus would like to stay in a place that offers a lot, which most larger regions can afford.
For example, in the last 2 days, 10 nations estimated joined Thaecia and 20 nations estimated joined Europeia (which indicates Europeia and Thaecia are both doing well when it comes to recruitment and in fact, Europeia is doing better if we only count the recruitment stats), but 3 nations CTEd in Thaecia during that time frame, whereas 18 nations CTEd in Europeia in the last 2 days.
So this indicates, larger regions like Europeia, are at a structural disadvantage during this time, or we should instead try out the route of focusing on integration to make sure the CTEs don't cancel our gain in nations, at the end of the day.
 
Random belated comment from someone who at one time spent too much time thinking about recruiting... Some thoughts...
1) I'd be curious to see how the overall NS population changed (probably shrank) during this time period. How did our population change compare to the game overall? I believe more nations CTE over the summer (eg some people only play at school, or go on trips during the summer).
2) If there's a surge in nations being created as students go back to school, have we looked at possibly revising proposed TG templates?
3) Has anyone created a puppet just to look at what TGs are being sent be other regions? We obviously don't want to carbon copy anything, but if there seems to be somewhere our TGs could be improved... Things to look at.

Totally get that some of this might be inside Ministry Intel, or better directed at MinInt, but... Thoughts from my brain tonight. I could not keep them contained. 🤷‍♀️
 
Mousebumples said:
Random belated comment from someone who at one time spent too much time thinking about recruiting... Some thoughts...
1) I'd be curious to see how the overall NS population changed (probably shrank) during this time period. How did our population change compare to the game overall? I believe more nations CTE over the summer (eg some people only play at school, or go on trips during the summer).
2) If there's a surge in nations being created as students go back to school, have we looked at possibly revising proposed TG templates?
3) Has anyone created a puppet just to look at what TGs are being sent be other regions? We obviously don't want to carbon copy anything, but if there seems to be somewhere our TGs could be improved... Things to look at.

Totally get that some of this might be inside Ministry Intel, or better directed at MinInt, but... Thoughts from my brain tonight. I could not keep them contained. 🤷‍♀️
Click to expand...
I'm sure there's more data elsewhere, but I had this link on-hand about the topic, analyzing total WA population over the course of 2011-2019. It does look like Mid-Summer through Back to School time in August/September sees a decline in population, whereas springtime and Spring Break tend to be peak season.

1631149525630.png

https://nationstates.news/summer-surge-or-summer-lull-answered/3174/
 
Sorry for the double post, didn't want to bury it underneath the large image in the last one -- Llo from NSToday also has run a series analyzing populations in major regions for a while. The most recent one is from May though.

https://nationstates.news/tag/the-shift/
 
Thanks! I'll have to check those out.

I think some of the recent Reddit-booms have all happened in spring, and I'm not sure how much that has impacted the numbers.

And i do see some fall peaks, but it's not consistent year by year, for WA membership, at least.
 
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