Shifting Sands An Updated Outlook on Nationstates Recruitment and Asperta

Written by Westinor
Edited by UPC, Kasaria, and Vorhollah

Two months ago, the popular Discord bot Dot had its manual recruitment functions removed by its creator Luca, shuttering recruitment programs in several dozen regions both large and small across Nationstates. This change was expected to have a marked effect on the manual recruitment scene, with it having been concentrated for so long as a result of such an easily accessible and widely-used tool. Larger regions with proficient coders have managed to fill the gap with their own tools, with notable replacements including a a plugin/cog for recruitment by 9003, which is in use in regions like the West Pacific and the Wellspring via the bot Red, and Europeia’s own Asperta, which has recently seen upgrades in its recruitment functionality by our president, UPC.

One specific development that is likely to have ramifications for Europeia and wider gameplay is Asperta’s cross-regional capabilities. The recruitment bot is now able to function for several regions at once, as Dot was able to, potentially allowing for other regions to harness its capabilities as well. To test these capabilities, UPC announced that Europeia had entered into a sharing agreement with the League and Concord, a regional community known for its proficient recruitment culture, allowing them to test the bot’s functionality in their own two regions.

The new feature allowing Asperta to function in multiple regions at once is particularly useful for the League and Concord, which functions as two separate regions with two distinct recruitment efforts at once. Chief Consul Quebecshire noted that over the initial three days of testing, 3,433 recruitment telegrams split nearly evenly between the League and Concord were sent, showcasing Asperta’s potential for multi-regional recruitment. “UPC’s tool, Asperta, has been met with strong reviews from our testing team, it’s unanimously liked and broadly preferred to what we previously used,” remarked Quebecshire. “It’s more collaborative, operating off of a queue system and allowing multiple people to recruit for either region at the same time. This means people won’t miss out when they’re willing to recruit because someone else is on it, and queue backlog can be tackled by multiple recruiters during high-volume parts of the day.”

Indeed, Asperta has several distinct features from Dot that change the nature of manual recruitment in participating regions. Dot only allowed one recruiter to access manual recruitment at a time per region, sending that recruiter auto-generated lists of nations to send recruitment telegrams to at regular intervals. Asperta allows multiple recruiters to recruit at once from a set queue for a given region, and features a report system that counts the telegrams users have sent from any given range of time, a clear divergence from Dot, which didn’t count the actual telegrams sent at the end of each session.

“Previously, we’d have to count hours to score recruitment statistics.” noted Quebecshire. “Initially I was skeptical about transitioning from a system that counted time recruiting to one counting telegrams wanting to reward effort, but since multiple people can recruit at once I think this maintains fairness and ensures everyone can compete for recruitment prizes and help the region still.”

Asperta’s continued development is bound to have repercussions for Europeia’s standing in a wider regional context. Its transferability to other regions means Europeia now holds an important infrastructural tool for any developing or established community seeking to upgrade their internal outreach systems, making it an important asset for interregional relations. As Quebecshire puts it, “There’s still some things that can be added, which is the whole point of testing and evaluation, but what UPC has created here seems to be a fantastic addition to our infrastructure and one we’re looking forward to putting to good use alongside the other facets of our recruitment system.”

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