Any bank loss caused by gifting can be handled by selling or even junking cards that aren’t valuable enough for donation rewards (especially epic, there are a flood of epics here, way more than we ever need, junking most of them once all the rewards have been given out seems like the way to go atm) or bank transfer from SPACE’s administrative members (One person with a farm can make enough bank junking stuff in a run to pay for like a month of this). The government can technically request a lot of cards for other rewards leaving us no cards to junk but we can explicitly deny those requests to meet internal goals.
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Don’t really understand most of this but I can help as much as I can. You can keep any rewards I get and put them back in the program.
Honestly, I had fun farming and donating this month! I do think that a good long-term goal would be better card farming guides. For example, it’s not so bad for me just donating to SPACE but I still have no idea how bank transfers work 
and some of my scripts are ones I hacked together myself because there are a lot of them on the cards Discord and I find it a bit hard to search sometimes.
I do want to see this program succeed if for no other reason than the number of government institutions already getting rewards from SPACE 
. Perhaps we could have awards of some sort, or if there were some way to track the leaderboards throughout each month that could help incentivize participation. I just think it’s very common to see parts of our government giving away cards right now and it would be nice to showcase the people farming those cards.
I’m curious also how things felt from the administrative side! I think I went into this with some general ideas about card farming but part of me isn’t sure if I was all that helpful (see: donating 16 epics and no legendaries because I kind of underestimated how rare legs are ).
There are already well-written guides for card farming so we are covered on that front. It is just a matter of copy/paste and editing existing materials for our needs. I am still not clear what the most efficient farming pipeline is though. The mentorship thing can just be a list of experienced traders for contacting or a general “ask if you dont know” or something similar.
I would say just a dispatch listing the recipients is enough, the card rewards are the real trophy with real value.
Adminstrative side is as simple as it can be, no scripts were used, everything was done with google forms and spreadsheets.
Leg count can be boosted if you have a lot of puppets and use scripts to go through them. With a set of 100 puppets + 1 hour of farming your odds are high.
Sure…but are they accessible? Easy to find? And do we have like some sort of SPACE dispatch? Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop on this.
No, SPACE exists solely as an experiment for now. Which mean there is no formal paperwork or guide anywhere rather than what I’ve written here. There are existing materials like DGES’s card guide and a bunch of related dispatches. There is no central location for these so when we launch the program for public use we will definitely have to make it. The existing card guides are a little bit too verbose so I intend to make something simpler but still shares the same content.
At the risk of grave digging, I want to get an update on the status of SPACE and whether the momentum is still there?
I was too busy to write up an analysis now. But overall, I think the thing worked quite well. You can expect me to post something long here with a future plan in a week or so.
Excellent!
I haven’t done a formal analysis on the result of the March test run yet but we do have plenty of legendary and epic cards after the run. In the future, it is expected that legendary cards will become much rarer while epic cards will still be plenty per run. This is something to keep in mind when planning rewards.
Some small modifications to the original plan are needed as follow:
- Since it is costly to gift cards from the monthly storage nation to the permanent storage ones (the Fort Knox nations), we will directly use the cards on the monthly storage nation for external requests (e.g. gov awards)
- We should not clean up all cards after every monthly run either. If there are still cards after all donator rewards and external rewards are made, it will still stay in the nation and be counted in the next month’s run. Only important residual cards like leg cards should be sent to the permanent storage nations after a monthly run.
These modifications are made to save gifting cost and make administration easier.
What we need to do now is to make a guide dispatch, some stuff we will need to settle are:
- How to introduce basic card trading? (use the existing DGES guide or make our own?)
- What card farming methods and tools to introduce?
Aside from launching the card donation program, at some point, we will also need to settle on what card community features we should have such as card giveaways, collection contests, and similar stuff.
SPACE needs at least one dispatch to introduce itself to newcomers. Currently, we only have the card donation scheme (the most important part) in the program so one dispatch to advertise this seems like enough. Some key points it needs to have are:
- SPACE is a card program run by the Coalition for TSPers interested in cards to have fun together and providing reward cards for any regional activity that needs it.
- SPACE has no membership, it only has programs and spaces for anyone who likes cards to participate.
- Introduction to card trading using DGES guide. If there is no need to launch this thing quick, we can make a simple card guide ourselves
- Promote links to card discussion areas on Discord or forum (may have to create these first of course)
- SPACE has a donation program where one can donate valuable cards and potentially get another (may be more) valuable card as a reward. The details of how this works is here: [SPACE] Donate cards to receive valuable cards (Experimental)
- We may need to introduce newcomers on efficient card farming as well. This is an area to debate on as there is no standard tool and workflow for mass card farming.
Not related but it’s worth it to look into implementations of regular initiatives like card request program, collection contests, and similar things too even if we don’t do it early.
Ok, so I’ve read through this. If you still need someone to write the dispatch, i could do it, but that seems more like a Pronoun responsibility.
Already, I can visualize a couple ideas for gathering more cards, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem as far as I can tell. What are the main things you need help with from an On-Site perspective? I can promote it, I can have special events to run along with it, and I could probably do some other things if you point me in the right direction.
I consider myself Minister of Integration, not Minister of Dispatches — I don’t mind helping out with publication (if Viet needs help with that lol) but my knowledge of actual card farming, transfers, etc. is quite limited.
Do note that we need to clarify these two things:
- How to introduce cards for complete beginners
- How to introduce card farming. Or not do this at all.
Since once the program goes public, its audience is no longer card enthusiasts here but newbies as well so we’ll need to guide them so we need to clarify these two things before moving forward. The main issue with the dispatch is these two things.
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I think the best way to introduce new players to cards could be some sort of NS card game, or a competition (although it seems like the system in place is already semi-competitive)
I am going to bump this thread up. The current proposal for the program along with some extra ideas are covered here: NationStates | Dispatch | A card program for the South Pacific? We would like to hear your opinions.
This thread will continue to be used to discuss the program but if you guys want a new thread, I will make one.
Do note that we don’t have to plan up everything before doing it. We should launch whatever has already been planned and tested (such as the card donation scheme) and experiment with new ideas.
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This topic will be the official place to discuss about operations of our card program: The South Pacific Card Exchange (SPACE) until there is a dedicated card subforum.
Membership
The program offers membership which currently does not have any requirement. You can DM me or ping me on Discord (USoVietnam) to become an initial member. Being a member means you can vote on policies/decisions and help operating the program. You have no other benefit for now but asking for favor will be easier than non-member.
What we will do now
All the current ideas for SPACE is in this dispatch. As you can see, there are many cool parts to do but we don’t have to finish all of it before launching our program for public.
Season 4 cards have come and I want the card donation scheme to be the first thing up. This requires these tasks in order of importance:
- Create a dispatch to explain the card donation scheme
- Find someone to run the scheme (dealing with the donation forms and spreadsheet)
- Finalize the rules of the card donation scheme
- Create the basic card farming guide
- Make a logo for the program
- Create a basic card trading guide (Until then, we will use the NationStates FAQ and DGES guide)
All the dispatches will be hosted by the Coalition of the South Pacific nation. Members who want to directly edit and maintain those dispatches can contact me, you will be provided access to the nation.
The card donation form is like this, and the spreadsheet to track donations and calculate rewards at the end of month is like this. Donations are made to this nation in odd months and an other nation in even months (haven’t made yet). We will have to calculate the scores, decide on the reward cards (via this list of the appropriate donation storage nation) at the end of every month. We use two nations so cards of current month don’t contaminate the value list of cards of the previous month which we are processing.
The donation score formula is currently like this: Score = No Legs * 10 + No Epics
If a card is from the n previous season, it has an additional weight of n10. If it is CTEed, it has an additional weight of 30. One proposal I want to make is to prevent a donor from being rewarded the same cards they have donated in the month. If the reward card for a donor was donated by the donor, use the least higher value card, if none found, use the least lower value card. Some thoughts on this are welcomed.
After the card donation scheme is up, we can start realizing the other ideas in or not in the dispatch. A card giveaway program and maybe a competition event may be the first things to do.
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I love the ideas here and am looking forward to this getting off the ground. I am willing to help with some administration if it is needed, thought I’m not able to spend more than a half hour on it per day. Though I haven’t looked into the NS API yet, I can code, so lmk if that’s helpful anywhere.
Hope this gets started up soon : D
Plans for this program now that CAPTCHAs are gone:
- Frequently card farming on SPACE-specific nations (already set up)
- Daily giveaways and other giveaways for special events (SPSF, voting?)
- Collection contests?
- Incentives for card farming/teaching people card farm
I’d like to get the first two done sometime this week (I’m on vacation rn so it’ll be kinda hard) and the next two in early April.
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