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Dispatch → Bulletin → Policy

by Andusre. . 1,089 reads.

WA Updates


Important Documents

Overview

Our Values & Alignment | Reports | Education Hub | Our Members

WA Updates | Tagging & Chasing | Occupations & Liberations | Quorum Raiding | Jargon Index

The Times of WA Updates

Each day, two WA updates take place. These are called the Major and Minor WA updates.

The Minor update takes place at 9am on the West coast of the USA, Midday on the East coast of the USA, 5pm in Britain, 6pm in Central Europe, etc.. The Minor update lasts for approximately 60 minutes.

The Major update takes place 12 hours later, at 9pm on the West coast of the USA, Midnight on the East coast of the USA, 5am in Britain, 6am in Central Europe, etc.. The Major update lasts for approximately 90 minutes.

These times may occasionally be off by one hour due to different parts of the world moving in and out of Daylight Savings Times across the year.

How WA Updates Work - Times

The mechanics of WA updates often confuses new nations.
This section will shed some more light into how WA updates work and how R/D players use its features & mechanics.

A "list" of sorts of all regions is maintained by the site. At each WA update, the game goes down this list one-by-one. Each region (and, importantly, the nations which reside within them too) gets "updated" at a certain time depending on where on that list they are. The further down the list, the later the region is updated. Thaecia, for example, is relatively close to the top of this list and is updated around 13 minutes into the Minor update and 17 minutes into the Major update.

When a nation is updated, a number of things occur. The two things which are significant for R/D are the verification of endorsements & changes to a nation's Influence statistic.

Endorsement Verification

When a nation gets updated, if it is in the WA, its endorsements will be verified. An endorsement is valid if both nations (the endorser and the endorsed) are in the WA and if both nations reside in the same region.

Let's say I have two endorsements: one endorsement is from a fellow Thaecian nation; the other from a nation who endorsed me, but then moved to a different region minutes later. At the WA update, I will have one valid endorsement. The endorsement from the fellow Thaecian will remain; the endorsement from the nation which moved away will be discarded. This is why you may sometimes see the following displayed below a nation's endorsement list:

"WA update pending: Nation has [X] verified endorsements."

Delegacy Transitions

You may know already that the nation who has the most endorsements becomes a region's WA delegate. Since endorsements are only verified at WA updates, WA delegacies only change hands at WA updates. It is therefore possible & indeed quite common that regions' WA delegates are not the nations with the most endorsements (albeit very briefly).

Influence

Another thing which changes as a nation is updated is Influence. Influence is tied to the number of endorsements a nation has (which explains why it only changes at WA updates, considering what was mentioned above) and the more endorsements a nation has, the more Influence it gains at each update.

Influence is a critically important statistic in R/D gameplay because it determines what can and cannot be done with the Border Control authority. A regional officer (RO) with Border Control authority (referred to as a BC RO) must have sufficient influence to apply a regional password, to eject a nation, to ban & eject a nation, etc.. BC ROs must have more influence than the nations they are ejecting or banning & ejecting, which becomes critically important in occupations & liberations.

Jump Points

Jump points (JPs) are regions where puppets used for R/D are stored. Puppets are stored in these regions because the regions are very far down the list mentioned above and as a result, they update very late into the WA updates. Examples of JPs include Regions Assembly, Artificial Solar System, Crystal Falls, Devide By Zero, Shinka and Frozen Circle.

Regions Assembly and Ailoare are Thaecia's jump points.

Spyglass Sheets

Players planning operations will almost always need to generate something called a Spyglass sheet. A Spyglass sheet can be generated by various tools & scripts, but the sheet itself is a huge spreadsheet containing every region in the order they update in. Spyglass sheets also contain pieces of information like how many nations reside within a region, how many endorsements the region's delegate has (if it has one at all), a copy of the region's World Factbook Entry and embassies, and most importantly, an estimation of when each region will update at the Major & Minor updates.

GCR Breaks, Chicken Overlords & Puppet Dumps

The WA update progresses at a fairly steady pace and it updates nations at a relatively stable and predictable rate. As a result, larger regions with more nations take longer to finish updating than smaller regions. Sometimes, the large regions like Chicken Overlords and the Game-Created Regions (GCRs) like The North Pacific, The East Pacific, Balder, Osiris, The Rejected Realms, etc., can cause a pause in the WA update for several minutes at a time.

Variance

The WA update experiences variance across the 60-90 minutes. Variance randomly speeds up and slows down the WA update in bursts of a few seconds each and it exists to make the WA update more unpredictable. It can have quite a large impact on the success of an operation as almost all of R/D relies on precise and reasonably predictable timing.

Andusre

Edited:

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