Is Our Regions Thriving? A (Mostly) Unbiased & Accurate 12-Month Review

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

We are still seeing the deflation of the bubble we had earlier in 2013 and late in 2012 when massive voter registration drives were occurring where offsite people were coming in and registering. Atlasia was never meant to support over 200 voters, at least not as quickly as it happened.

While going through this deflation, we need to be careful about making a massive change like eliminating one or more regions before we see what the future holds. As someone who has played this game for 5 years, we go through periods of decline, but it is not permanent.

I am not going to say what we should do now. I think it's a work in progress and we need more data before I could ever endorse any type of plan to reduce regions. If we see a continued decline over the next few months and it's apparent there is no going back, maybe then we should consider it. Often times though, a motivated individual comes along that wants to save a region and is successful. Just look at yours truly back in 2008, when the South had 1 voter in their regional election, no legislature, nothing.... look at us now. I'm happy at what I did there and I'm glad the South wasn't eliminated. If it had been, I may have never existed! The horror!

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

I think the norm for these election is between 105-115. The days of 130+ voters is not sustainable. That will only occur when there is event like the voting drives we saw during the early year. Given the data we have, it's tough to say whether we need to cut out a region or regions or simply wait. I would err on the side of caution.

[Adam Griffin]

National Participation in Federal Elections, Voters (#)

National Participation in Federal Elections, Voters (%)

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Thanks Nix and Griffin.

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

While going through this deflation, we need to be careful about making a massive change like eliminating one or more regions before we see what the future holds. As someone who has played this game for 5 years, we go through periods of decline, but it is not permanent.

Proponents of regional consolidation have made the game's cycles of activity a lynchpin of their argument. The goal of establishing a three-region system is to create robust regions that remain interesting and competitive throughout even the lowest ebbs of these cycles. The five-region status quo fails to provide this to more than a fraction of Atlasians even during the best of times.

I realize that some people still question whether the dissolution of the RPP and the JCP in February 2012 was a good idea, but the last major change to the game lead to a year of swelling census rolls and increasing activity. With another election year only months away, we need to make the game as attractive as possible to prospective new players. Stagnant regions compromise our ability to do that. We can greet people with competitive elections, or we can greet them with elections that aren't contested or voting booths that fail to open. If you were a newly-registered Atlasian, which would make you more likely to participate?

That's certainly something to take into consideration for sure. If I knew that reducing regions to a lesser number would automatically create competitive elections, then I would be likely to support it. But if that's the argument behind the reduction, we would need to reduce it to 3 rather than 4 to make the largest pool of voters/candidates possible.