Expanding the WADP to other GCRs

St George

St George

RolePlay Moderator
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Deputy Speaker
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Coming out of the Pacific embassy discussion, I suggested that we should be approaching GCRs that don't have our level of security, such as Osiris and Lazarus, with our expertise and our experience with regards to the WADP and how to institute such a thing in their own regions.

There are obviously some issues with expanding such a program to our sister GCRs, both practical and political. Firstly, the regions this would benefit have thousands less nations than TNP, and may not have the WAs to be as secure as the near uncoupable TNP (although this may also mean it would require less endorsements to reach high influence levels, someone more familiar with current influence than me will be better equipped to tell).

Secondly, we must consider whether we want to potentially entrench regimes which would act against our interests in the future. I don't mean this in an R/D sense, but in a political/diplomatic sense. Were imperialists to gain control over Osiris, for example, that would potentially cause problems were we to do more on the Balder issue (this scenario is unlikely, sure, but all possibilities should be considered for a program like this).

Further to that, these regimes may not even want this, for varying reasons. So obviously we'd have to approach them and further to that make every effort to not let disagreements on other, more trivial issues disrupt this work.

I'm not saying we should do this or anything, just opening a discussion that the cabinet may wish to pursue.
 
Let me say before anything else that expanding the WADP to other GCRs and founded UCRs is something I have discussed with the previous administration (D. Eluvatar and VD SillyString), and I have been working towards myself, if somewhat slowly, by pitching the WADP to TEP and Europeia. TEP is currently in a (slow) process of launching their own version, and Europeia already have. I'll discuss these operations in more detail in the last section of this post; before that I want to create some context.

With respect to GCRs, one important thing to consider about the WADP is that it is only useful for democratic regions, where there are (relatively) frequent delegate changes and where the main security risk comes from an elected delegate going rogue. Autocratic or oligarchic GCRs gain no benefit from the WADP, and to the contrary it is detrimental to their regime's security.

Given the above, this narrows the list of GCRs that could benefit from a WADP-like down to four: TEP, TSP, Osiris, and Lazarus. In the two feeders, things are straightforward: just copy what TNP does. In the sinkers' case, the situation is more involved.

One of the premises of the WADP as applied in TNP is that, due to the number of WAs and scale of endorsement counts, someone endotarting on their own as a solitary nation will never reach close enough to the Delegate to be dangerous. Delegate and SC-level endorsement counts are accumulated through not just consistent endotarting over a long time, but also taking advantage of in-game promotion (WFE, official mass-telegrams, and official RMB advertising). This remains true in other feeders' case, making it possible to completely liberalize endorsement gathering.

In sinkers, the above does not hold true. Sinkers have much smaller WA populations and endorsement counts. A solitary endotarting nation can easily surpass the regional guardians (whatever they are called)- that's something I have tested personally in the past. And, even if they may not reach the Delegate, they can get close enough to be pushed to the top with support from a foreign military. Keep in mind that nowadays there are multiple militaries that can mobilize around 20 WAs or more within an update.

Therefore, while democratic sinkers certainly can benefit tremendously by encouraging increased endotarting activity, there are risks in doing so while at the same time removing all endotarting restrictions.

With respect to founded UCRs, even though there are no security advantages for them, they can benefit from the increased WA activity WADP creates. The WADP can provably help boost the percentage of regional population that is in the WA, the Delegate's endorsement count, as well as be a valuable naturalization (getting nations involved in the offsite activity) tool.

For the vast majority of founded UCRs, due to their size, a WADP will only bring them marginal gains and is not worth the effort. Looking at the current total population and WA population regional rankings, I believe only regions in the top-20 would benefit from this. Among those, there is a puppet dump (Nugut), a region we are hostile towards (DEN), and two isolated communities (Europe and NationStates). The Internationale also have a unique system of government that is probably not well-suited to the WADP. The remaining six regions (10KI, Europeia, TCB, KGB, Albion, and Spiritus) I believe could all benefit from the WADP. However, I believe we should be disinclined towards exporting it beyond UCR allies, so that narrows the list down to just Europeia and Albion.

One thing I want to emphasize is that the WADP is not just about removing endocaps. It is also not just about giving nations a tool they can use to endotart with.

The most critical component in the WADP is the consistent, large-scale promotion of endotarting. This happens through dispatches, the awards programs, frequent mass-telegrams, and RMB advertising.

When the promotion stops, the WADP becomes ineffective in continuing to boost the figures critical for regional security. We have seen this in TNP, where during the period of February-May, when except for relatively sporadic award volumes there was limited WADP promotion, our endorsement saturation fell to pre-WADP levels.

I am emphasizing this here to make it clear that exporting the WADP does not mean just convincing other GCRs to remove their endocaps. It means convincing them to invest into the entire promotion mechanism that TNP currently operates.

Finally, let me describe my experience with the two regions I have so far made successful pitches towards.

I have been working with TEP for a couple of months now. I made a successful pitch to Ramaeus and their Viziers in August, and since then we have started creating the infrastructure. I have given them their versions of all of the technical infrastructure (WADP spreadsheet, endorse page, reports gathering, telegramming, dispatch templates). Where it has been lagging, quite annoyingly if I might add, is in getting TEP's officials to do their end of the legwork. This involves primarily designing the icons for their awards, and perhaps making edits to the dispatches to make them more in line with TEP's culture. Ramaeus unfortunately has been very short on time during the last month, and this has hindered the operation considerably. I hope, however, that we will see TEP's WADP launched before their next delegate election.

Europeia was much more quick to get their WADP up and running. Once again I provided the technical infrastructure, and they have made the aesthetic and cultural edits. Since the launch of their WADP, there has been a very rapid and consistent increase in all WA-related figures. Within a couple of months, Europeia broke the records for WA percentage ratio, WAD endocount, and WAD endorsement rate, the last record being especially important given that it had not been broken since 2012. All these happened during summer, meaning that even the annual summer slump was overcome.

On the GCR front, I am focusing on TEP. Once that is done, I would consider working with either TSP or Osiris, both of which already use endotarting and telegramming infrastructure from me.

On the UCR front, I am considering approaching Albion next. However, Albion generally places little focus on their WA activity, so I doubt they will be interested.
 
I would say that Osiris would be a more interesting next focus. TSP might be interested, and if so I'm all in favor of helping them set it up, but it's pretty much a solved problem thanks to seeing it in action in TNP and then seeing the changes necessary for TEP.

Osiris, on the other hand, as a sinker, has the associated problems that you described, and if we can work with them to figure out the ways that their WADP would need to be different, we would be well placed to share that with Lazarus or Balder as well, if they wished. In short, it expands our repertoire.
 
As an aside, Taijitu actually has a (slightly) greater WA population than Albion or Spiritus. It may be useful to review world WA statistics rather than review regions by overall nation count. Of course, Taijituans are already quite aware of the sensibility of something like the WADP, and have developed their own infrastructure toward this end.

Edit: On a more related note, I've shared a document with Sillystring and r3naissanc3r that I had been working on toward Osiris long term security.
 
SillyString:
I would say that Osiris would be a more interesting next focus. TSP might be interested, and if so I'm all in favor of helping them set it up, but it's pretty much a solved problem thanks to seeing it in action in TNP and then seeing the changes necessary for TEP.

Osiris, on the other hand, as a sinker, has the associated problems that you described, and if we can work with them to figure out the ways that their WADP would need to be different, we would be well placed to share that with Lazarus or Balder as well, if they wished. In short, it expands our repertoire.
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Yeah, I agree with your points and that Osiris should be next. I also have a much closer working relationship with Osirans than with TSP, given that I was an admin and member of their security team for a good while up until my retirement from NS.

On the subject of Balder, I contemplated listing them in my previous post, among the GCRs that a WADP-like program would be sensible for. Whether or not it will be depends on the direction of their ongoing government reforms. From a very quick skim through the reform discussions, it looks like they are moving towards a model of parliamentary democracy, where the delegate is a long-term head of state with relatively weak executive power, and there is a powerful separate Prime Minister as head of government. While such a system can be democratic in practice and not just in name (depending on how exactly it is implemented), it doesn't provide for frequent delegate changes. As a result, a WADP-like program may not be suitable for Balder.

Eluvatar:
As an aside, Taijitu actually has a (slightly) greater WA population than Albion or Spiritus. It may be useful to review world WA statistics rather than review regions by overall nation count. Of course, Taijituans are already quite aware of the sensibility of something like the WADP, and have developed their own infrastructure toward this end.
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Good point. I admit I only checked the total (not just WA) population numbers, and even those very hastily, as I needed to leave for work.
 
I don't have quite the knowledge of influence mechanics that others do, but I can definitely say I would support a sensible implementation of WADP-like programs in other regions. Stability is always better than instability and tends to support native-approved governments.
 
For reference, these are the allies of The North Pacific by WA population as of the last major update:

Region[c]WA Population[c]The East Pacific[c]536[c]the South Pacific[c]478[c]Europeia[c]438[c]Taijitu[c]122[c]Albion[c]99[c]Equilism[c]41[c]International Democratic Union[c]22[c]Stargate[c]8
 
An update to this:

As you can probably tell, launching TEP's WADP before their delegate election did not happen, as Ram was extremely short of time. He suggested waiting for the new term to start, and working with the new delegate.

Now that the election is over, I spoke with Prussia, the new delegate. He was very excited about the whole concept of the WADP (he was not aware of the program until now), and said that he would like to see TEP launch their own version. However, he said he'd first like to discuss this with the rest of his region (not sure whether this involves the Cabinet, Viziers, or Magisterium), as it's a pretty drastic change in the way they do security in the region. He said he is hoping other citizens will also be excited about it, and that he'll contact me once a discussion has taken place.
 
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