[WTP]~ A Reflection
Day 2,095, 19:16
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Published in USA 
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by
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by Hale26
This is a wall of text that's more for WTP and myself than anything. If you've got the endurance of an ox/librarian, feel free to attempt a read at this. I mean, I've pretty much got a short story here.
When I first started out as a newb in WTP, I honestly did not expect very much. All I thought I'd come into was managing a few Gdocs, getting CoSed, PMing people every now and then...the usual. I was a newb who loved making games that turned around a 20cc profit for the party, once a week. That's all the victory I wanted.
Neverless, here I am now. Today I step down from my 3rd WTP Party Presidential Term, as the 5th WTP PP in our history. Needless to say, I didn’t expect this. And in a way, wasn’t fully prepared for it, at first. I’ve learned a lot in these 3 terms about not only the party, but my development in this game as well.
While this will be one of my shorter articles, I’d like to elaborate on the happenings of my 3 terms as Party President. To go back approximately 3 months, I inherited the PPship after Mazzy Cat’s 3rd term. Those were harder terms, they were. We had limited staff, a smaller community and, arguably, more work. Or more work per person, it seemed.
Mazzy stayed around for the first few days of the Term but quickly went to Danemark after elections. WTP has always had a strong German influence, so Denmark seemed like a natural place to go after a tiring 3 terms. She, alongside Talos, provided great insight during my terms. Granted, the first few days she was gone I was half working on my main goal, and half freaking-outish. Which was all good fun, to be honest. I mean, it was less freaking out because of stress, and more because of being in such a familiar, yet different, position ingame.
Another key influence during term #1 was Emerick. For those of you who know him, he comes across as a trollish, idgaf person. Needless to say, I experienced this during term #1. I’m notoriously slow at work due to my work habits. Em noticed this early on, and would alwaysharras...eurm..., better word; Encourage, me to get projects done. It sucks that he wasn’t around for Terms #2 and 3 because he was honestly a great Leadership influence to have about.
Influences aside, Term Number one was easily my most fruitful and difficult term. Now, any of you who’ve worked with me know I’m god-awful at delegating work. I’m a workhorse by nature, so if something must be done, it gets done by myself. Despite this, in Term 1 I created the largest, most functional cabinet in our party’s history. I solidified the roles of most Departments, created the vast majority of our gdoc infrastructure and found great party workers to fill our numerous openings. WTP before this point had been held up on the shoulders of my excellent SHS workers (Noa, Concept, John, Tanishq) and trusted Leadership. Making this change to a more decentralized, Open Leadership greatly helped in the other terms.
Now, those are the successes of Term One. The downfall....elections, easily. See, beforehand I had to just run a few things with the Elections. I always had someone back-checking for me. This sorta died once I became PP. Needless to say, this lead to a few election mistakes. The first one occurred during our Party’s first Congress elections. During one of our safe, off-forum primaries, a candidate was missing. By pure accident, I had left Gervaz off the ballot. Given that we were so deep into elections, recalls were impossible. This was easily the worst of the two election failures in Term 1. Gervaz was one of my old SHS workers, someone who I call a friend and a bright face in Congress. I was more careful in future, in regards to candidates.
In regards to times, though? That was the second election mishap. During Term 1 we had a tight election race between Tenshibo and Paul Proteus. Whenever Paul would gain a vote, Ten gained one and vice versa. Needless to say, it look like I’d have to use the sacred “PP Ballot” to decide things. Which honestly, no one wanted.
Thankfully, that did not happen. I woke up on whatever-day-our-elections-ended, and saw that Ten was ahead a bit. That was nice to wake up to. That was, until, I got onto IRC. It turns out that, because that month had 31 days, our elections were on for more than 48 hours. I had not told the other parties that, so I pretty much got accused of vote rigging the second I got onto IRC. Long story short, I rediscovered a deep dislike for our opponents and a new found respect for communication/reviewing. Admittedly, this is where my dislike against the Federalist Party was strengthened. To this day I dislike that party, for both personal reasons and party reasons.
Now, Term Two was very much less memorable compared to Term One. At least, until the end. Not wanting to make my ramblings too long, I’ll sum up the Term as~ Summer School. RL crushed my time during Term Two, so it’s hard to fully remember the massive things that got done. However, I can say that we begun Recruitment and Media reform during these Terms. While Media actually worked fairly well, Recruitment was a lesson. Granted, a lesson derived from a Trainwreck, but a lesson nonetheless. FPS, always sorely neglected, began to be used more this month as well. Activity was fairly decent too.
But the real, notable outcome of Term 2 was Congress. To set the scene, Congress was derelict as usual. This isn’t a bad thing, it being very common at that time. However, with revenues dropping dramatically, decisions had to be made. Yet....they simply weren’t.
Being Party President, I had access to the discussions. While I at first was simply going to encourage our members to participate more, the tone of the argument changed my mind. This month the budget had become about punishing the USAF for not hitting well, calling them out on their sh** and outright asking for them to be abolished or “reformed” beyond recongization. This was a hostile tone that was being accepted as reasonable by the party driving the discussions at that point, The Federalists. While our Congressmen and some others hapahazardly tried to call the Federalists out on those arguments, not much headway was being made. Thinking back to C4 during the OMS cut-off, and the AF split’s aftermath...I was annoyed, at least, by the disrepect being shown to USAF. Raging (or condoning rage) against people doesn’t solve anything, let alone doing that against people who hit for our team.
The tone of this argument set forth Congress talks with the AMP. Our goal was to keep USAF funding at a decent level, while rewarding the Fed’s for their hostility. USAF was genuinely on the upswing this month, FT doing better than before and AF recieving massive outside labor. Now was not the time to cut, let alone sh** all over MUs that fight for the eUSA.
Evry and I began to debate the issue of continuation with our Congressmen. The debates were honestly not very easy. Getting everyone together was hard enough, but agreeing? Plus, while this was going on, a Fed proposal for their form of budget was up. When I began PPing that day they needed one more approval to move onto a vote. Because of how Congress works, letting them get the first vote would’ve been awful. So we went to work to stop it by PMing two USWP Congressmen asking them to drop their support for the proposal while supporting the joint AMP-WTP-USWP proposal. At the end of the day, through long debate, our proposal went from 0 to 11 approvals in under 5 hours, with the Feds gaining no approvals during this time. That was one of the best Congress victories I’d ever seen.
To cut the story short, the WTP-AMP-USWP coalition managed to pass our budget, despite attempts by the Federalists to kill it by quorom and a “comprimise” budget. Which, sadly, was still unagreeable. Under guidance from the USWP, we also helped vote down a Federalist ammendment that called for timelines to be set on Budget Debate. This ammendment disagreed with WTP’s populist stance on long debate and USWP’s stances. This month really fostered ties between our three parties, which to this day, remain fairly good. I still regurally sex Evry, despite his/her complaints denials.
Finally, Term Three came about. My camapaign for this term involved various apologies, admittances and honesties. I’m happy I went about it like that. In Term three FTW was fixed and then reformed, following months of overspending and inactivity. We cut supplies to reasonable amounts and made our supply program benefit the nation through collaboration with the DoD Paper. Love ya, Samdoo.
We also did an entire overhaul of Recruitment, as mentioned last article. Three new spreadsheets were made, 5 staff hired, a new director found, and a system that targets both newbs and older players was put into place. I have faith that our 5 man Recruitment Team under Bacon Empire will bring this party to the spot it deserves.
On top of that, Forums got a nice boost of life this month, alongside IRC. For the first time in..well...forever, we had beaten the Federalists at IRCing. Our chan is currently the #1 Party Chan in the nation, which is where it will be staying under Talos’ guidance.
It was also during this month that we held some nice side-games and contests, the most notable of the side-things being our VC reff. During this term, WTP solidly voted in favor of a condeming Voter Club usage. This statement was passed by a super majority, with the party giving me over 90% support to carry out an anti-VC mandate. Also, I lold a little today when I saw this~
http://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/4371638
On the last day of my term, the VC Director gets Perma-Banned. Gotta admit, I'm good
I hope the Talos’ administration will be holding firm to our anti-VC stance, and continue the semi-daily harassment of Oblige about Votes bought. I must say, I was quite proud at how little he had bought early into the term. Thanks Oblige.
Speaking of Oblige, the final highlight of this term was WTP electing its first POTUS. Oblige won handily against NewAzazel, who was also a great candidate. While the victory came at the cost of a few hours of sleep (And many more, since Oblige isn’t a one term kind of Whale), it was fully worth it. Oblige will continue to do great.
Above all else, what I learned during my tenure as WTP PP is that You people cannot be stopped.
When we first started out less than a year ago, we had grandiose visions. We vowed to be the opposition, the new voice and to stand to our platform. Our platform of fair debate, equal opportunity, strong communication and populism still stays strong within WTP. Our activity, our ingenuity and our vision remain unquestioned.
Simply put,
You are the future.
Do not kid yourselves, WTP. You have shown time and time again to be the party this country not only needs, but deserves. Through our community, our drive and our persistence, we pave the way for a newer, more properous America. We are not rash, we are not bully pulpits and we cannot be silenced.
Our party still has much work to do before we truly become the driving force behind this nation. Under the Leadership of Talostastic, WTP will take eAmerica by storm. You lot are too talented, too driven and too well thought to do anything less. As I said many days ago,
"WTP is much more than a hunk of 40 gold occupied by 356 people.
We are not just a 5th party, a shout feed or a place where ATOers graciously visit every few days.
We are the ill defined future,
A shadow of what lies yet to come,
A social experiment."
And above all else,
The Opposition.
Thanks for your service, your friendship and your faith,
~Hale26
Your Loyal Gecko
When I first started out as a newb in WTP, I honestly did not expect very much. All I thought I'd come into was managing a few Gdocs, getting CoSed, PMing people every now and then...the usual. I was a newb who loved making games that turned around a 20cc profit for the party, once a week. That's all the victory I wanted.
Neverless, here I am now. Today I step down from my 3rd WTP Party Presidential Term, as the 5th WTP PP in our history. Needless to say, I didn’t expect this. And in a way, wasn’t fully prepared for it, at first. I’ve learned a lot in these 3 terms about not only the party, but my development in this game as well.
While this will be one of my shorter articles, I’d like to elaborate on the happenings of my 3 terms as Party President. To go back approximately 3 months, I inherited the PPship after Mazzy Cat’s 3rd term. Those were harder terms, they were. We had limited staff, a smaller community and, arguably, more work. Or more work per person, it seemed.
Mazzy stayed around for the first few days of the Term but quickly went to Danemark after elections. WTP has always had a strong German influence, so Denmark seemed like a natural place to go after a tiring 3 terms. She, alongside Talos, provided great insight during my terms. Granted, the first few days she was gone I was half working on my main goal, and half freaking-outish. Which was all good fun, to be honest. I mean, it was less freaking out because of stress, and more because of being in such a familiar, yet different, position ingame.
Another key influence during term #1 was Emerick. For those of you who know him, he comes across as a trollish, idgaf person. Needless to say, I experienced this during term #1. I’m notoriously slow at work due to my work habits. Em noticed this early on, and would always
Influences aside, Term Number one was easily my most fruitful and difficult term. Now, any of you who’ve worked with me know I’m god-awful at delegating work. I’m a workhorse by nature, so if something must be done, it gets done by myself. Despite this, in Term 1 I created the largest, most functional cabinet in our party’s history. I solidified the roles of most Departments, created the vast majority of our gdoc infrastructure and found great party workers to fill our numerous openings. WTP before this point had been held up on the shoulders of my excellent SHS workers (Noa, Concept, John, Tanishq) and trusted Leadership. Making this change to a more decentralized, Open Leadership greatly helped in the other terms.
Now, those are the successes of Term One. The downfall....elections, easily. See, beforehand I had to just run a few things with the Elections. I always had someone back-checking for me. This sorta died once I became PP. Needless to say, this lead to a few election mistakes. The first one occurred during our Party’s first Congress elections. During one of our safe, off-forum primaries, a candidate was missing. By pure accident, I had left Gervaz off the ballot. Given that we were so deep into elections, recalls were impossible. This was easily the worst of the two election failures in Term 1. Gervaz was one of my old SHS workers, someone who I call a friend and a bright face in Congress. I was more careful in future, in regards to candidates.
In regards to times, though? That was the second election mishap. During Term 1 we had a tight election race between Tenshibo and Paul Proteus. Whenever Paul would gain a vote, Ten gained one and vice versa. Needless to say, it look like I’d have to use the sacred “PP Ballot” to decide things. Which honestly, no one wanted.
Thankfully, that did not happen. I woke up on whatever-day-our-elections-ended, and saw that Ten was ahead a bit. That was nice to wake up to. That was, until, I got onto IRC. It turns out that, because that month had 31 days, our elections were on for more than 48 hours. I had not told the other parties that, so I pretty much got accused of vote rigging the second I got onto IRC. Long story short, I rediscovered a deep dislike for our opponents and a new found respect for communication/reviewing. Admittedly, this is where my dislike against the Federalist Party was strengthened. To this day I dislike that party, for both personal reasons and party reasons.
Now, Term Two was very much less memorable compared to Term One. At least, until the end. Not wanting to make my ramblings too long, I’ll sum up the Term as~ Summer School. RL crushed my time during Term Two, so it’s hard to fully remember the massive things that got done. However, I can say that we begun Recruitment and Media reform during these Terms. While Media actually worked fairly well, Recruitment was a lesson. Granted, a lesson derived from a Trainwreck, but a lesson nonetheless. FPS, always sorely neglected, began to be used more this month as well. Activity was fairly decent too.
But the real, notable outcome of Term 2 was Congress. To set the scene, Congress was derelict as usual. This isn’t a bad thing, it being very common at that time. However, with revenues dropping dramatically, decisions had to be made. Yet....they simply weren’t.
Being Party President, I had access to the discussions. While I at first was simply going to encourage our members to participate more, the tone of the argument changed my mind. This month the budget had become about punishing the USAF for not hitting well, calling them out on their sh** and outright asking for them to be abolished or “reformed” beyond recongization. This was a hostile tone that was being accepted as reasonable by the party driving the discussions at that point, The Federalists. While our Congressmen and some others hapahazardly tried to call the Federalists out on those arguments, not much headway was being made. Thinking back to C4 during the OMS cut-off, and the AF split’s aftermath...I was annoyed, at least, by the disrepect being shown to USAF. Raging (or condoning rage) against people doesn’t solve anything, let alone doing that against people who hit for our team.
The tone of this argument set forth Congress talks with the AMP. Our goal was to keep USAF funding at a decent level, while rewarding the Fed’s for their hostility. USAF was genuinely on the upswing this month, FT doing better than before and AF recieving massive outside labor. Now was not the time to cut, let alone sh** all over MUs that fight for the eUSA.
Evry and I began to debate the issue of continuation with our Congressmen. The debates were honestly not very easy. Getting everyone together was hard enough, but agreeing? Plus, while this was going on, a Fed proposal for their form of budget was up. When I began PPing that day they needed one more approval to move onto a vote. Because of how Congress works, letting them get the first vote would’ve been awful. So we went to work to stop it by PMing two USWP Congressmen asking them to drop their support for the proposal while supporting the joint AMP-WTP-USWP proposal. At the end of the day, through long debate, our proposal went from 0 to 11 approvals in under 5 hours, with the Feds gaining no approvals during this time. That was one of the best Congress victories I’d ever seen.
To cut the story short, the WTP-AMP-USWP coalition managed to pass our budget, despite attempts by the Federalists to kill it by quorom and a “comprimise” budget. Which, sadly, was still unagreeable. Under guidance from the USWP, we also helped vote down a Federalist ammendment that called for timelines to be set on Budget Debate. This ammendment disagreed with WTP’s populist stance on long debate and USWP’s stances. This month really fostered ties between our three parties, which to this day, remain fairly good. I still regurally sex Evry, despite his/her complaints denials.
Finally, Term Three came about. My camapaign for this term involved various apologies, admittances and honesties. I’m happy I went about it like that. In Term three FTW was fixed and then reformed, following months of overspending and inactivity. We cut supplies to reasonable amounts and made our supply program benefit the nation through collaboration with the DoD Paper. Love ya, Samdoo.
We also did an entire overhaul of Recruitment, as mentioned last article. Three new spreadsheets were made, 5 staff hired, a new director found, and a system that targets both newbs and older players was put into place. I have faith that our 5 man Recruitment Team under Bacon Empire will bring this party to the spot it deserves.
On top of that, Forums got a nice boost of life this month, alongside IRC. For the first time in..well...forever, we had beaten the Federalists at IRCing. Our chan is currently the #1 Party Chan in the nation, which is where it will be staying under Talos’ guidance.
It was also during this month that we held some nice side-games and contests, the most notable of the side-things being our VC reff. During this term, WTP solidly voted in favor of a condeming Voter Club usage. This statement was passed by a super majority, with the party giving me over 90% support to carry out an anti-VC mandate. Also, I lold a little today when I saw this~
http://www.erepublik.com/en/citizen/profile/4371638
On the last day of my term, the VC Director gets Perma-Banned. Gotta admit, I'm good
😉
I hope the Talos’ administration will be holding firm to our anti-VC stance, and continue the semi-daily harassment of Oblige about Votes bought. I must say, I was quite proud at how little he had bought early into the term. Thanks Oblige.
Speaking of Oblige, the final highlight of this term was WTP electing its first POTUS. Oblige won handily against NewAzazel, who was also a great candidate. While the victory came at the cost of a few hours of sleep (And many more, since Oblige isn’t a one term kind of Whale), it was fully worth it. Oblige will continue to do great.
Above all else, what I learned during my tenure as WTP PP is that You people cannot be stopped.
When we first started out less than a year ago, we had grandiose visions. We vowed to be the opposition, the new voice and to stand to our platform. Our platform of fair debate, equal opportunity, strong communication and populism still stays strong within WTP. Our activity, our ingenuity and our vision remain unquestioned.
Simply put,
You are the future.
Do not kid yourselves, WTP. You have shown time and time again to be the party this country not only needs, but deserves. Through our community, our drive and our persistence, we pave the way for a newer, more properous America. We are not rash, we are not bully pulpits and we cannot be silenced.
Our party still has much work to do before we truly become the driving force behind this nation. Under the Leadership of Talostastic, WTP will take eAmerica by storm. You lot are too talented, too driven and too well thought to do anything less. As I said many days ago,
"WTP is much more than a hunk of 40 gold occupied by 356 people.
We are not just a 5th party, a shout feed or a place where ATOers graciously visit every few days.
We are the ill defined future,
A shadow of what lies yet to come,
A social experiment."
And above all else,
The Opposition.
Thanks for your service, your friendship and your faith,
~Hale26
Your Loyal Gecko
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Comments
First reserved for the Future
INSURGIO~
Picking up my reservation.
~INSURGIO
la única forma de ganarme es borrar el artículo y publicarlo de nuevo xD
O>
V For WTP' Future Success!!
That was beautiful ^_~
INSURGIO~
Thanks for a great 3 terms!
dat ending... i almost came...
That was an amazing article, Hale. I was only around and actively paying attention for about half of your being PP, but honestly you were a big reason as to why I continued playing. You're a great leader, fam. Thank you for being a dope PP.
On the OMS point, it was not that OMS was cut that stung, hard budget decisions are regrettable but understandable, it was the derisive dismissal of an MU's contributions to their country that makes you look a little closer at who these people deciding our fate are and what they're about.
Apparently I already voted this article.