The WADP or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Endotarters
December 3rd saw the launch of The North Pacific WA Development Program (WADP): a large-scale campaign to encourage all nations in TNP to actively give and solicit endorsements ("endotart", in gameplay parlance). A few of you may be thinking that you have misread, but you have not. TNP is indeed asking every single nation in the region to try and gather as many endorsements as possible. The encouragement is not just theoretical: the WADP gives nations access to software tools to make massive endotarting easier, promotes endotarting through telegram campaigns, and hands out awards to nations excelling at this activity. So far, more than 8000 telegrams have been sent, and two volumes of region-wide awards rewarding more than 400 nations have been published.
Even before the launch of this program, TNP was already uniquely welcoming to endotarters among feeder regions. If you take a look at the other four pacifics, you will notice "endorsement caps" prominently featuring in their World Factbook Entries. The caps range between 5% and 50% of the respective delegate's endorsements, and apply to virtually all nations in the region. Anyone violating them is threatened with ejection. By contrast, in TNP there is a flexible endorsement cap equal to the endorsement count of the vice delegate, typically about 85% of the delegate's endorsements, and the cap is well-hidden within the forum-hosted regional laws instead of being advertised on the WFE. The WADP takes this policy of lax regulation even further, by almost completely liberalizing endotarting activity in the region.
The strict endorsement cap practice found in other feeders has become popular for, primarily, security reasons. The reasoning goes, endorsement caps are useful for preventing a scenario where a nation not approved by the regional government will endotart their way to the top and usurp the delegacy. However, given the current WA populations and delegate endorsement counts of feeders, as well as the widespread availability of tracking tools, it is very unrealistic that a nation could get dangerously close to the delegate's endorsement count without getting noticed and promptly dealt with. The more realistic scenario, especially in democratic feeders, is a nation becoming delegate through the means prescribed by the regional government, then once installed in the delegacy going "rogue" and acting against that government. Empirical evidence supports this: all modern successful or attempted feeder coups, as well as most sinker coups, have been the result of originally government-endorsed delegates going rogue.
Strict endorsement caps not only do nothing to prevent occurrences of this scenario, but also make it very difficult to counter them. Indeed, a strict endorsement cap means that the vast majority of WA nations in a region have negligible influence, making it very easy for a well-positioned rogue delegate to decimate the region's WA population, suppress opposition, and cause severe long-term damage to the region. Simply put, under realistic circumstances, strict endorsement caps do more harm than good and make a region less secure. To facilitate countering rogue delegacies, a more appropriate policy is to go in the opposite direction and encourage active endotarting. Doing so results in the creation of an expansive layer of nations with high endorsement counts, and consecutively high influence and high ejection cost. The larger this layer, the harder it is for a rogue delegate to perform mass ejections and cause damage; and conversely, the easier it is for the regional government to regain control of the delegacy.
The WADP has already resulted in a tremendous increase in endotarting activity within TNP. One way to quantify such activity is by using "endorsement saturation": a term coined by Eluvatar, this is equal to the total number of endorsements that have been exchanged in a region, expressed as a percentage of the total number of endorsements if every WA nation had endorsed every other WA nation. Since the introduction of program, TNP's endorsement saturation has increased from 6.5% to higher than 9%. This corresponds to more than 12000 new endorsements being exchanged. TNP now ranks first among the feeders in endorsement saturation, from third when the program began. As an additional benefit, the WADP has resulted in a strong boost in WA membership within the region: The ratio of WA to total nations has increased from 14% to 16%, with TNP's WA nation count marginally increasing despite the seasonal sharp decrease in regional population.
The WADP is particularly well-suited to TNP because of its uniquely large WA population and high delegate endorsement rates. Similar programs would also work well in other feeders, given their current sizes, and it will be interesting to see whether those regions will follow TNP's example. As for sinker regions, the situation is more complicated. As the Osiris coup of July 2013 demonstrated, a large layer of nations with significant influence is critical for countering rogue delegacies in these regions as well. However, the relatively small sizes of the sinkers make a complete liberalization of endotarting activity risky. Balancing a policy of increasing endotarting with maintaining endorsement count security is an intriguing challenge for all sinker governments.