The East PacificBoard

Incumbent delegate Prydania chose not to stand due to RL commitments, so it was a race between various other notable members of the region for the delegacy. Former Minister of World Assembly Affairs and Minister of Foreign Affairs Kranostav ran a campaign that promised making improvements to the North Pacific Army, more work in the World Assembly to increase TNP's power, and reaching out to UCRs, alongside a sizable amount of domestic policies. Meanwhile former Foreign Affairs Minister Praeceps's campaign focused on administration and culture, with a promise to open up applications to become a minister to the public. Also running was Pigeonstan, former Speaker Gorundu and famous card collector 9003.

The results were fairly close, as Kranostav pulled out an early lead in the first preference votes, but picked up few second and third preference votes, meaning that the race came down between them and Praeceps for the victory. Kranostav just about held on and officially became delegate-elect of The North Pacific while the transfer between delegates happens. In the race for Vice-Delegate, only two candidates stood, Dreadton and Bobberino. Dreadton received over 72% of the votes, winning the race for Vice-Delegate. Three candidates stood for Speaker, Comfed, Lady Raven Wing and Madjack, who won with a commanding 74% of the vote.

There is not much unusual about this election, as the policies proposed by the candidates are standard for GCRs and TNP in particular, yet this is an
interesting time at the moment, as TNP's power and influence grows in the WA. Whether this growth will continue, or will the power of large UCRs overpower this influence, is something that no-one can predict.🟥

Possibly the most obvious reason would be that it is a new jump point, which is a region where raiders move from into regions being raided, and are used because they update later than all other regions. However, this is quickly disproved as the region's regional officers are not from military regions, such as Thalassia and Refugia. Also, the region updates much earlier than required for a jump point. Another possibility is card farming, but we would probably see much more issue-answering and inter-regional co-operation for card farming is rare.

I think one of the most likely possibilities is N-day. We are already seeing inter-regional alliances being created for N-day, and co-operation between these regions is probably only possible under those circumstances, but we would probably be seeing embassies being created with the involved regions. Also the name is very unusual for an N-day faction. One may suspect the regions are simply trying to hide this information, but this might not be true. There is little need to hide information about N-day factions until N-day itself arrives, by when plans are usually kept secret, aside from the fact that some cannot access means to communicate such as discord, but that is a different matter.

I still see very few reasons why this region has been created aside from N-day or possibly card farming. If this becomes an N-day faction, then it is more proof of what this year's N-day is already shaping up to be. Big inter-regional factions with mass puppet armies. However there are still mysteries, such as why such fundamentally different regions are co-operating, or why embassies haven't been created and why the name is so weird. We will no doubt know soon🟥

Let's take a look at a relatively large defender region, Order of the Gray Wardens. The region has 222 nations at the time of writing. TGW has a purely onsite defender role, known as the Guardians. By looking at the data from these operations, we find that in the past 2 and a half months, 20 nations have taken part in operations. In terms of the wardens, who are the offsite-based defenders, numbers are harder to come by without combing through loads of forum posts. But what we do know, is that these players are not going to be the other 200 nations in the region. A realistic estimate would be about 15-40 nations. Now some puppets are in the region some of the time, but the vast majority are either inactive or simply answering issues.

Now let's look at RP. The Western Isles is a region that is mainly focused on RP, although there is a relatively sizable focus on regional politics. By looking at the region's actively updated map, and using the raw feature and google chrome's find feature, we find that there are 52 nations involved. This is just over a quarter of the region's 192 nations. A safe assumption when including puppets and politics-focused nations would still mean that less than half of the region is involved in regional activities.

To conclude, there is no simple way to work out how many nations are actively involved in regions, because of puppets and some information that isn't available. But I'd say from pure experience of regions that less than half of the nations in a region are involved in activities beyond occasional RMB posts. One possible way to work this out could be election turnouts, but this relies on citizenship, which can sometimes complicate matters. NS was designed to be a game played for a very short time, that's why only 30 issues were originally made, and why RMB posts originally disappeared after only 10 posts. We, the NS community made it into what it is today, through roleplay, politics and R/D. No wonder some new players aren't involved in their regions, or only answer issues. Issues appear as a notification, something that makes the player want to answer them. 'Military gameplay' can sometimes confuse new players, and new players don't always understand RP. Does this matter? Probably not; there's no problem with players just answering issues, although they might go inactive quicker🟥