The fundamental principles behind the approval system would not change: approvals would still need to be made by the WA Delegate, and a region must still have a WA Delegate in order to approve resolutions, to prevent puppet regions abusing the system.
The reason behind my thread advocating for this change was demonstrated by my recent proposal, "Condemn The World Assembly Elite", which failed to reach quorum after a series of raids.
The proposal reached 71 approvals, one short of quorum at the time, shortly before the major update of 10/04/2020, as shown here:
On each of the next four updates, members of raiding organisations from four feeder regions: The Pacific, The North Pacific, The West Pacific, and the East Pacific; Balder, and The Black Hawks participated in raids against smaller regions who had approved the proposal. The only motive behind these raids was to remove the WA Delegate, and hence remove their approval of this resolution. Under the current system, the Delegate's approval is removed when the WA Delegate of a given region changes, and is not automatically re-approved if this nation regains the Delegacy.
This series of screenshots shows the number of approvals decreasing after each of the four updates:
For full details, my forum post regarding these raids is here:
viewtopic.php?p=36954898#p36954898
Overall, a total of 85 WA Delegates approved the proposal throughout the 3 days it spent in the proposal queue, however, it was ultimately removed at the end of this time with about 35 approvals. Approximately 45 small regions were raided a total of 70 times (some were raided two or three times each) in coordinated attacks by the six regions mentioned above.
The rationale behind this change is simple: the quorum system is designed to limit the influence of large regions, and their WA Delegates, by giving all regions, through their WA Delegate, an equal say on which proposals reach quorum and are thus voted on in the World Assembly. Quorum raiding fundamentally adds another layer of bias towards large regions and their WA Delegates, as large regions can simply raid smaller regions to remove their approval. Note that the CCD was never raided to remove me as Delegate, despite me being the author, because of the large gap (~50 endorsements) between myself and the next nation. Large regions are effectively impossible to raid, and thus their approvals cannot be removed in this way.
This mechanic also allows raiders to greatly influence matters of the World Assembly, which should not be the case given the "The World Assembly is the world's governing body."
One could make the argument "but the new WA Delegate can simply reapprove the proposal". This is technically true, but in practice does not work for a variety of reasons: many Delegates are not active enough to constantly reapprove proposals, the new Delegate may not be familiar with the approval process, and the returning Delegate (at the next update) may not even be aware their vote had been reset.
Finally, the "Proposals" page could also be updated to show approval by region rather than approving Delegate, or perhaps a switch to toggle between approval by WA Delegate/region.
Cheers,
ShrewLlamaLand
Edit: I'd add that the WA Delegate approvals don't necessarily need to be changed so that they're tied to the region, although that would make the biggest difference.
If their approval was simply saved so that if a nation regains the WA Delegacy at the next update they'd automatically re-approve, that'd probably solve 80% of the problem.
