Well. It's now a very open secret that list seats are OP, and it's better to run paper candidates and shadow write posts for them then just to do endorsements. As such, ALL PARTIES ARE RUNNING AT LEAST 32 CANDIDATES.

This is absolutely bonkers. And not in a good way. this doesn't indicate we have a very active sim. It indicates we have a sim with ~70 active members and 130 paper candidates from other sims bullied into running as papers in MHOC. This is frankly, unsustainable, and will result in us massively pissing off all the rest of the Model World/all our IRL friends/wherever the rest of you lot recruit your papers from.

And I do call them papers, even thought presumably most parties will be shadow-writing posts for their papers so that according to the calculator they are not officially papers. Regardless, they're not really active mhoc members outside of election campaigns. The worst part is that all the shadow-writing means party leadership/active members have to write about 20 posts each for all the papers to post. What was even the point of lowering the post limit?

If we are in agreement that this is unsustainable, annoying, and to the detriment of the sim in the long term, what is to be done? I see several options. Many of these have been discussed previously (and several rejected), yet I feel they are all worth another discussion now.

1. Nerf list seats. My preferred way of doing this is by reducing the number of list seats and/or increasing the number of FPTP seats (the former is preferable as we don't have to redraw constituency boundaries).

2. Lower the number of constituencies dramatically. This may seem to be the opposite of suggestion 1., however, it's possible if we had only, say, 25/30/35 constituencies, parties would have much less need to do so much pre-election recruiting. However, this new number of constituencies would need to be carefully selected as if it's too low it could potentially mean actual active members wouldn't be allowed to run. Also it's effort to redraw constituency boundaries.

3. Boost the power of endorsements. Endorsements are capped at (something like, I don't remember exactly) 50% of the endorsing parties base - this could be raised.

4. Ban shadow-writing. I know this is unpopular and hard to enforce, though actually the real reason this didn't happen was partly a big LPUK meta whip against the meta vote on it.

5. Redefine paper candidates (or make a new category of "paper-lite") for calculator purposes to include people who haven't been in MHOC very long, or who are not current active MHOCcers. This would need careful thought as to implementation as to not unfairly disadvantage genuine newer MHOCers who are not just Model World recruits for an election. It also risks simply pushing the problem back (e.g. if we made the rule "people who joined in the month before the election are punished" that just moved the recruitment drive one month earlier). I'm not a huge fan of this, and I consequently prefer...

6. Big election boost for all active MHOCcers. This is the more positive flip-slide of number 5. Rather than punishing newbies/MW recruits, we offer a sizeable personal mods bonus to people who are active MHOCcers and genuine contributors to the sim. There already exists some level of boost in the election for people such as party leaders. We could simply extend this to boosts for all active MHOCcers, and make the boosts bigger and more significant.

That's all that currently comes to mind. However, I welcome other solutions in the comments. I just don't think elections that are over half recruiting pseudo-papers from the model world/IRL and shadow-writing for them is fun. It annoys the model world, and shadow-writing also leads to burnout as party leadership have to write maybe 4 people's worth of posts, effectively undoing all of our hard work lowering the post limit by multiplying it by 4 again!