Firstly, noting, again and again, I'm not the same person as the other people from my region/who others are arguing against you. I might even agree with some of their viewpoints/reasons even if they reach the same conclusion. And my 'personal attack' on you re the motivations of you was first for two paragraphs giving context to people reading the thread, who mightn't have realised the timing of this thread.
Not sure how 'people already in power', 'evil userites' and 'existing factions' can't all be the same thing? If you want I can explicitly say, regions like TBH are some of the biggest regions on the raiding side. They are userites, and they're an existing faction. Not sure how any of that is hard to grasp.
And honestly, unless you're weak, most decent regions should have decent enough piler forces to hold it after a week. There would be a brief uptick in GP activity, probably for a month or so of conflict if that, then governments etc. formed and then go the way of Sinkers.
You mention Sinkers are doing pretty well, I don't agree. In fact, I've walled of text a lot about how they're actually a pretty terrible environment, with inactive RMBs, communities that either burn out/are inactive/toxic and often too much change for stability. Baseline activity for somewhere a new player comes into should be like most Feeders RMBs, or regions like
https://www.nationstates.net/region=com ... of_liberty and
https://www.nationstates.net/region=europe. Someone active at pretty much all hours. Notice commonwealth of liberty has only 200 nations, yet is better than most of the UCRs I looked through, showing population/WAs isn't a direct indicator of activity.
I guess I don't see it as a problem Feeders being bigger than Sinkers/UCRs, and honestly, I think it's better to grow them rather than shrink the only regions that are actually doing decent at present. Activity creates activity, it's not like nations/regions are a zero sum game.
Feeders have really been the only 5 regions that have been working consistently on their WAs and communities for a protracted period of time (5+ years). Sinkers are on and off, some UCRs might work on their communities consistently, but I can't think of a region that has been working as hard as Feeders on WAs for a similar period of time, while also consistently working on their community. Europeia did decent for a while, but they only put an emphasis on WA in the recent ish 3 years or so, and their community takes massive dives when pivotal members leave the region such as Mousebumples (and then other members stepping back with the dodgy stuff going on there).
Merit wise, we deserve larger numbers. The reason why there have been more people working harder to increase the numbers is likely due to the newer fresher people who are interested in helping their regions, but it doesn't get rid of the fact, all five to varying degrees have worked harder than other regions for a longer period of time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither were we. People seem to think that 'I tried for a year or two, I'm not bigger than a Feeder' when usually they've done less work, and over a far far far shorter time period.
There are two main different metrics I use, raw nations/WAs in the attempt to gain number of individual players and RMB posts/happenings/offsite activity both on their forums and chats/NS forum activity in the attempt to measure activity. A region doesn't need to have a lot of members/WAs to be active, nor does a lot of members/WAs equal activity (Sinkers).
I'm not sure how you personally measure success for a UCR, but yes, I agree, plenty of UCRs are successful, both with WAs and with community. They could be more successful without burnout/more persistent efforts over the long haul, but there are ones that are pretty successful.
With splitting up the delegates - I mentioned I didn't think it'd magic more votes, but was paraphrasing what they said. Shrinking the larger delegate votes with a formula has been fairly popular when mentioned across the various WA communities, individual players, and even some of the larger Feeders/UCRs have grudgingly accepted something needs to be done. Preserving larger delegates voices are larger, but not dramatically larger. Some still remember the days of where Europe and 10KI were the dominant WA voices, showing that it's not a GCR thing, and more a big region thing.
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Coming up with a formula for something like that, normal to 100 (or 101 votes including delegates personal one), then (total endoes - 100)^0.9? So 300 endoes would be 219, 120 would be 116, 1000 would be 557. Just playing around with the numbers.