Z-Day Autoposy: We Did Great But We Could Do Even Better

[Spode]

Z Day Comprehensive Note

I have been thinking about Z-Day for awhile… Perhaps too much

I Have Opinions
Regarding what direction we go in for Z Day this year, I would still support a full cure policy. The complete domination of old GCRs, UCRs, and increasingly puppet dumps on the Dead and Infected leaderboards will mean there will be no broader game recognition of our action besides doing well in curing.

In theory we could do okay with a coordinated euthanasia campaign, but in the past our attempts to choose that path have ended in disaster, and with the resurrection of all dead patients at the nine hour mark, we are effectively locking ourselves out of nine hours of what could be more effective treatment.

How do We Save 1 Trillion People?
Keeping citizens alive comes down to keeping the rate of spread as low as possible, and the fastest means to achieve that is to cure a large proportion of the region’s population as quickly as possible (I believe, more on that later). Since we get diminishing returns on how well we can cure a nation’s citizenry, it thus follows that the most efficient means of curing all citizens is curing the largest populations first, causing a massive decrease in the proportion of citizens with active infections.

This is part of why I believe part of our strategy for this Z-Day should be the mass importation of citizens from abroad. Specifically, between the earlier portion of my Spode SEO Specialist Series, my Rakeo Air Core series, and Makasta’s… Makasta series, we’ll have a tremendous amount of population to work with in both The League and Concord.

Development of New Technology
The technologies we need this year can be sorted into three categories.

Enhanced Monitoring
We’ve made some enemies in the R/D space, and some of those enemies may currently be angry enough to try and disrupt our event response. Ideally, we don’t have to go off of a constant vigilant watch for 36 hours, because that’s probably unsustainable, but we can probably use a mixture of gameside technology and mass surveillance to judge when the most dangerous periods are, and when an account engaged in unproductive behavior has joined us and needs removal.

This should check The League and Concord every 30 seconds, and using the Brimstone technique, it will determine any new nations in the region, see what their respective Z-Day decision is, and report them if it’s not in line with our Z-Day policy. Every two minutes, it’ll run a more comprehensive but time consuming check to see if any nation in the region is violating policy. When a policy violator is detected, an alert will be posted both gameside and on discord.

Better scheduling
We have obligations to society and our frail human bodies, and those don’t usually like to take a backseat for 36 hours straight. It would be good to have a 36 hour calendar where people can mark their approximate availability, to ensure that we have at least someone holding down the fort at all times or taking point as the regional Czar for either The League or Concord. Experience with this style of scheduling is dual use - It will undoubtedly be useful in future military operations.

Better Curing Tech
My best strategy last year was using six nations, each open in either a browser window or its private browsing variant to cure faster than the 20s superweapon cooldown would normally allow. But this is not a great way of doing things, or at least, not as good as it could be. If we could figure out a way to hold even more browser sessions open with nations at once, and in a better format, we could cure at speeds not yet seen in NationStates history.
Research
From some of the earliest Z-Days, I’ve sought to try and use data analysis to give the region an advantage. Now this year, through enlisting the aid of Blue Chevron, we can start getting some answers.

Project Ares
A shallow exploration of the passive participation effect using 150 puppet in various regions to simulate varying levels of passive engagement with the event.

Project Neptune
It’s been hypothesized that infected population percentage scales research speed- But this has never been experimentally confirmed. Project Neptune aims to either confirm or reject this hypothesis, and has enough nuance to hopefully provide some actionable information for future events.

Project Pluto
There is a possibility that outside forces will interfere with Z-Day this year. In that event that outsider interference is proven and responsibly can be positively assigned, new and existing technologies will be deployed in an offensive capacity against the enemy on their own grounds.

I’m… not entirely sure what this will entail.

Awards, Honors, Recognition
I think that we should keep the main event badge as something given to people who are very involved with the effort, as the Consulate did last year, but I think it could also perhaps motivate more members of the region to participate if we had awards modeled more on achievements, that would be given as the event progresses or at its conclusion, through a dispatch.

Here’s some ideas I’ve had for possible achievements thus far-

• Medic!: Choose cure as your main nation’s specialty.
  
• Curve Flattened: Have zero zombies with a nonzero survivor population by the end of Z Day.
  
• Part of the Quaran-Team: Apply for membership in the Z-Day Taskforce
  
• On Notice: Register for Z-Day alerts either on Discord or through NationStates directly
  
• Turn the key: Fire a cure missile during the event
  

Removal of the Unproductive
Whenever some people try to do something, there will always been someone who doesn’t want to play along, either out of some weird contrarianism, or a sense that the right to play a game in whatever manner they please our ways the wishes of others to play it in their own fashion. These are people who have the “raider instinct”, and should be removed if they display it and refuse correction.

Prevention of Unproductive Behaviors
I believe that at least some unproductive behavior can be averted through the introduction of Eusocial Linguistics and vocabulary modification software. The word “zombie” and “apocalypse” should be erased, replaced with “infected patient” and “pandemic”, as should the physical button to help the infected patients.

Foreign Affairs Possibilities
Some of our allies and more tentative friends in the near abroad have ambitions in this space, and we should help them where we can and where our help is wanted in order to build goodwill. There’s three areas we can help in that I can think of off the bat

1. Technology sharing and collaboration : We already have technology sharing work with Balder, and we could further expand that relationship, or see if any other partners would be interested in it.
   
2. Passive participation: Leaving a pre-agreed amount of population and/or puppets set to a particular Z-Day policy in a region on request. The precise benefits of this should become more apparent after Project Ares concludes.
   
3. Direct participation: This is perhaps the best at developing goodwill because we’d actually be getting more cross-membership in each others’ discord servers and be generally vibing, but consumes a resource that cannot simply be duplicated and shared- Us and our time.
   

Max Barry is a Doofus
This would be so much simpler if Max had just made Z-Day, and it had never changed mechanically all that much. Unfortunately, Max (let’s be honest, staff on behalf of Max) has gone ahead and added a bunch of mechanics that make Z-Day not just hard, but unfair.

We need to be able to deal with the resurrection, cure progress being disabled, and cure progress reset- At minimum.
That means

• have a regional telegram drafted telling everyone to restart cure progress
  
• Having someone online with the comms permission to actually send that regional telegram
  
• All involved puppetmasters putting in the time to reset all puppets to cure again
  
• Surfing active cure puppets from WTZ or somewhere similarly late in the update cycle (I’m using the dangerous assumption that Z-Day updates using the same ordering system as normal update) to early updating regions as soon as we become aware that the reset is taking place.