The End of a Recruitment Era
Recruitment Upheaval As Dot's Recruitment Command is Removed
Written by Lime
There has recently been a big shakeup in the world of recruitment, with the extremely popular and widely used recruitment command on the bot, Dot, no longer available for use. Dot’s creator, Luca, also known as Refuge Isle announced the closure on the Calamity Refuge Forums on March 13 stating that “I no longer believe the command is good to have around.” The removal of Dot’s recruitment command is likely to have significant consequences for many smaller regions, as it was a free and easy way to provide a robust manual recruitment system that any region could use.
For much of NationStates history, larger regions have had access to well developed recruitment technology which has given them an advantage over other regions. Europiea benefited enormously from the API recruitment system developed by r3n alongside other API tools he pioneered. Smaller regions however, have rarely had access to such recruitment technology, until the release of Dot in 2021, which saw a significant levelling of the playing field. Luca allowed Dot to be freely used by anyone, which meant smaller regions could easily add Dot to their regional Discord servers and in just a few minutes they had access to a successful and efficient manual recruitment system. Dot was so widely used that Luca had to have it verified because Discord does not allow unverified bots to be in over 100 servers.
When discussing this public use of Dot, Chief Consul Emeritus of The League/Concord Quebecshire told the EBC “Dot was definitely the most widely used and brought more visibility to the concept, or at least made the idea of a manual recruitment bot way less exclusive.”
However, this widespread use of Dot did have some negative consequences. Due to the sheer number of regions using Dot, with over 300 Discord servers containing the bot, the effectiveness of manual recruitment fell for all using it. This decrease in effectiveness became so significant that recruitment using Dot ended up being less efficient than full manual recruitment, the complete opposite of a recruitment system’s intended outcome. This was given as one reason by Luca for their decision to shutter Dot’s recruitment command.
Another negative consequence of Dot’s widespread use for recruitment was that the many other features of Dot were often ignored or even unknown to most who only used Dot for recruitment purposes. Luca explained in their post that “Dot isn't really a recruitment bot, and that's not why Dot exists.” They highlighted that Dot now contains 61 commands and over 750KB of hand-written python code with just 2% of that code relating to the recruitment command. Yet roughly 34% of all commands used in a 30 day period is the recruitment command, and for many people “Dot is known for being the recruitment bot, and any other services Dot could provide will probably always be overshadowed by that.” This overshadowing of Dot’s many other purposes, some of which are described as “really impressive” by Europeian President UPC, was given as a key reason by Luca to remove the recruitment command who noted the overshadowing had demotivated them to further work on Dot.
While the shuttering of Dot’s recruitment command will not impact on Europeia, which has its own recruitment bot developed by UPC Darcness and Rand, it is likely to have a significant impact on the many smaller regions which relied upon the command. Considering the consequences of this development Quebecshire told us “I think the biggest impact of Dot is going to be felt by smaller regions. Large and well-connected regions can and will replace the role Dot had in their infrastructure, while smaller regions will be unable to. Dot did make manual recruitment less effective on an individual basis by making it easier, and that is arguably bad. But it's also irreversible. Shutting it down takes a diluted but still even playing field and just returns power to more select, gameplay oriented regions.” Although perhaps noting Luca’s dissatisfaction with the way Dot has been used, Quebecshire also remarked “I'm not a coder in the slightest, so it's not my place to complain about coders doing what they want with their stuff, especially a coder I don't get along with.”
Considering the potential future of recruitment in Nationstates, the EBC asked Minister of Outreach Sincluda if he believed Discord based bots would fully replace API scripts in the future. He told us “It's hard to say, given how many different NS communities there are. I strongly doubt API scripts will disappear entirely, but given how successful Discord bots seem to be (look at the numbers for the last term!) I wouldn't be surprised if they became the predominant method.”
While Europeia may be insulated from the impact of this decision, it is likely to be acutely felt by many smaller regions in the months and even years ahead. Dot’s democratising of the recruitment world appears now to be over, and instead NationStates is returning to a system where the larger regions hold a significant technological advantage.
