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by Galiantus iv. . 176 reads.

Fighting Against the World Assembly

How to Fight the World Assembly

This brief guide is an introduction to methods of inhibiting the function of the World Assembly.

So you want to crash the World Assembly, do you? Well you've come to the right place! This guide explains how you can be effective in furthering this goal by introducing you to basic methods for opposing its power. You will be enraging delegates in no time!

How the World Assembly Works

For starters, it is important that you know how the interior of the World Assembly works. Unless you understand what you're trying to manipulate, it's going to be difficult to make it stop working. No amount of misguided effort can help you achieve anything in the face of an organization as powerful as the WA (that is how I will refer to the World Assembly from now on).

You can read about the WA on the FAQs page, but this guide is designed to explicitly point out the parts you can best manipulate.

This is a political game. The purpose of the WA is to emulate a stage for international and regional politics. Any player may join the WA, but they may only use one nation to do so - violation of this is a violation of site rules, called multiing. DO NOT multi. Moderation will cause you grief if you do it, and you won't be much use against the WA if you can't influence it. Generally you should not join the WA with your main nation. Instead, join the WA with a puppet nation so its policies cannot affect you.

Nations that are in the WA can do several things:

  1. They can vote on resolutions.

  2. They can endorse other WA members in the same region.

  3. If they have two or more endorsements, they can submit proposals to the WA.

  4. If they have the most endorsements in their region, they can be the WA Delegate for their region. (As you will see, this is very important to power within the WA)

WA Delegates also have additional powers:

  1. They get an additional vote for every endorsement they have.

  2. A number of them must approve submitted proposals before the proposal goes to the rest of the WA to vote.

  3. They often have access to regional controls.

In addition to its members, the WA is composed of two smaller bodies. First is the General Assembly(GA), and second is the Security Council(SC). The GA concerns itself with passing policies which affect WA member nations, the same way your daily issues do, and is fairly straightforward to understand. The SC focuses on recognizing nations who are especially good or bad, and plays a role in keeping regions secure from raiders.

Last of all is the General Secretariat - a small group of players whose role is to screen proposals submitted to the WA to make sure they adhere to the rules for proposals. If a proposal is ruled as illegal by the GS, it is held and prevented from reaching the floor of the WA. Legal proposals have three days to garner support from 6% of all delegates worldwide, or they will fail to reach "quorum" and not make it to the floor of the WA. Remember this, because later we will discuss how this fact enables us to royally screw with the power balance in the WA.




Now that you have a basic, very condensed, introduction to the WA, we can start talking about how you can actually attack it.

All methods for opposing the WA utilize the structure of the WA itself in order to facilitate the attack. Some methods are quite obvious, but other methods are not so obvious if you are not looking for them. The end goal of all attacks is the same: Prevent the World Assembly from passing new resolutions, thereby reducing it to an unusable box of code.


Voting
The most obvious action that can be taken in opposition to the WA is to simply vote in a way that will cause the most damage to it. Unfortunately, just one person by themselves is not going to be very effective at this, so a primary goal is to recruit many people to do this, rather than just a few.

Of course, you can be more efficient if you endorse an anti-WA delegate. WA delegates get an extra vote for every endorsement they have, so you effectively double your voting power simply by endorsing a delegate who is willing to vote correctly on proposals. If 100 nations all endorse one delegate, their combined voting power is 199 votes! As you will see, this idea of endorsing people to increase power is integral to leveraging the structure of the WA to our benefit.

For those who cannot dedicate time and effort to other methods of attack, this is a minimal way you can contribute to the fight. We encourage you to contribute as much as you can, but if this is all you can give, it is still appreciated.

Now I should stress exactly how it is that you should vote:

The end goal is to grind the gears of the WA to a halt. That means we generally want to stop the passage of new proposals as much as possible. There are exceptions to this, but for the most part you should be casting "nay" votes. The two exceptions are for GA repeals and SC liberations.

Repealing legislation could be seen as a good thing, since it does technically bring the WA closer to being obsolete. However, it is possible the reason for a repeal is simply to allow for another piece of legislation to replace it. In this case, a repeal may or may not be a good thing, because one of our goals is to prevent the passage of new resolutions as much as possible. Thus we must be strategic as we approach repeals.

Generally we are against legislation, but liberation proposals are pretty much the only redeeming power of the WA. Liberations are passed on regions to remove or prevent a password on the region. Raiders will often capture a region and place a password on it. With a liberation, the region in question has a much better chance of survival. Considering that these kinds of invasions are only made possible because of the existence of the WA, it is rather appropriate that the WA can curb that effect somewhat. However, this power can also be abused, so our position on a liberation proposal is not set in stone.


Military Tactics

To understand much of what I am talking about here, you are going to need a basic understanding of military gameplay. If this is your first time hearing about that term, you probably have some incorrect assumptions about what it means, so refer to some of the following sources for clarity. In this section I will be using the vocabulary of military gameplay, so familiarize yourself if needed:

In my opinion, military gameplay is the place where you can get the most bang for your buck fighting the WA. Most people assume that military gameplay can only be employed against regions, but there is no reason it cannot be used against delegates. As it turns out, the WA powers of WA delegates can be nullified through military actions.

In a context where you are frequently trying to prevent proposals from being passed by the WA, there are two immediate effects you can produce by temporarily changing a region's WA delegate:

  1. You cause them to lose their extra votes on a proposal.

  2. You can make their approval of a proposal to evaporate.

Essentially, if we've decided we don't want a proposal to pass, we can temporarily remove a bunch of delegates supporting it. But the effectiveness of the strategy depends on if the proposal has made it to the floor or not. It is really difficult to bump a delegate with lots of endorsements, and endorsements directly translate to votes. However, all delegates have an equal ability to approve proposals to get them to the floor of the WA, and most delegates have very few endorsements. So although it is theoretically possible to reduce votes on the floor of the WA, military action is most effective before the proposal reaches the floor.

Proposals need approvals from 6% of all WA delegates to reach quorum, which means that on the next update they will go to the floor of the WA for everyone to vote on. If they don't get the necessary approvals within 3 days, then they fail to reach quorum, and do not go to the floor. Our strategy is to remove delegates supporting proposals we are against, thus preventing those proposals from ever reaching quorum.

The reason this strategy has so much potential power is primarilybecause of switching, where updaters can hit multiple regions per update. A relatively small army can make a significant impact. And unlike raiders, we aren't trying to capture the region. We just want to bump the current delegate in the target region, so it is usually acceptable to push a random WA nation to replace the delegate.

It turns out that a group of 6-10 players using this strategy have the power to regularly prevent proposals from reaching the floor of the WA, and a group larger than 10 players could swing a close vote. If you participate in update operations, you can make an enormous difference in the fight against the WA.


Political Strategies
It's nice we have a quick way to power over the WA, but there are other things we can do to be effective. This is an assortment of strategies we can use to make all our other efforts more significant.

Holding the Queue
This strategy goes along with the military strategy above, and is somewhat theoretical. We will be testing its validity as circumstances permit.

Some proposals are destined to fail when they reach the floor of the WA. But once they've reached the floor, other proposals have to wait four whole days for their turn to go to the floor. This theoretically gives us more time to target the queued proposal and decrease its approval count so it fails quorum. If this turns out to work, then it would make sense for us to push these kinds of proposals to the floor of the WA and exploit the extra time we are given.

Filler Delegates
Proposals need to obtain approvals from 6% of all WA delegates within 3 days to get to the floor of the WA. Since we are against the passage of most proposals, it might sometimes make sense for us to artificially increase the number of WA delegates, but without increasing the number of delegates who approve proposals.

Due to the number of people who have to get involved to make this work, this is more a strategy for later on, when we are a larger region. However, for those of you who want adventure or can't really get be involved any other way, we can start building up filler delegates now. You will go to a small region without a delegate and you will seek either to become the delegate of said region, or you will endorse someone else who will become the delegate. Stay in touch with us so we can direct your efforts in a productive way.

Influencing Powerful Delegates
Some delegates have an ENORMOUS amount of endorsements. The have a lot of power concentrated into a small space, and thus can have a huge influence on the floor of the WA. If we can influence how they vote, that is in many ways better than our other strategies. If possible, it would be good if we can get anti-WA people into position as the WA delegate.

Keep in mind, our goal is only very rarely going to be to raid a region and keep it. If we can obtain an extremely powerful WA delegate position legitimately, then we can hold on to that position for much, much longer, and with significantly fewer resources than otherwise. Getting anti-WA players into such a position is not necessarily good or bad for these regions, and in fact, it turns out that what is good for these regions is good for us: our anti-WA delegate friend should do everything he can to benefit the host region, since that is what will keep him in power longer and what will maximize his endorsement count.


Campaigning
Now of course we are recruiting more people to our cause, but the fact is we cannot truly recruit enough people to our cause to win outright. We must also play the political game of persuading WA member nations - and especially delegates - to vote appropriately on as many proposals as possible. You must learn about the rules of writing a proposal and how to make effective arguments against them. Pay close attention to the discussions going on behind the scenes, and join in supporting campaigns that further our cause. This is very general, I know, but it should be clear that the goal is to persuade as many people as possible to vote such that the WA loses power.




Besides being fun, there are moral arguments to be made why we should do this to the WA. For starters, there is the sovereignty argument - why should you cede leadership of your nation to the whims of everyone else? It is idiotic that so many people feel comfortable allowing others to dictate how their nation runs. It seems the only reason to join the WA is if you agree with the majority view within the WA and want to tell other people how to run their nation.

Second of all, without the WA, raiding would not be possible. Raiding has caused harm to so many regions, and the WA is the vehicle that makes it possible. For founderless regions, this is particularly dangerous. We support the actions of defenders insofar as they protect regions from the invasions made possible by the WA.

Third, the WA can easily be viewed as a representation of real-world corruption, globalism, fascism, and a variety of totalitarian political systems. Personally, my reason for opposing the WA is because it is basically the UN, and I dislike the UN. Whatever your political background, if you are against tyranny of the majority, the WA is a good symbol for what you are opposed to, and tearing down its power can be your sweet victory.

Whatever your reason for opposing the WA, we are in this together. We can make ripples throughout the world with our actions, and bring the corrupt organization to its knees. Good luck in this conquest!

Galiantus iv

Edited:

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