Evaluating Recruitment

[Cormac A Stark]

So it's been about ten months since the new telegram system was rolled out and auto-scripts were made legal again, and about five months since telegram stamps went on sale. What have been the results for recruitment in that time?

Here's how I see it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

• Most of the Top 50 most populous regions before the new TG system was introduced are still in the Top 50 most populous regions, albeit with somewhat reduced populations, with very few new additions.
• Nations are getting inundated with recruitment telegrams upon founding and refounding, so many that the standard telegram inbox can't accommodate them, leaving newly created and refounded nations with immediately full inboxes and making recruiters waste time and/or money (unless using a script, more on that in a minute).
• New or rebuilding regions pretty much have no choice but to purchase stamps to even begin to compete with already established regions. Because of the rate limits imposed on auto-scripts, they don't even begin to compete with stamps. New players, or old players wanting to form new regions or rebuild old ones, are too demoralized to manually recruit and probably couldn't compete anyway.
• I haven't seen too many new regions, if any, making a mark on Gameplay lately. That's my area of the game. People from other areas: Are you seeing new regions making a mark on your side of the game, or is it just the same old, same old?

Am I wrong here in my assessment? Am I just missing new and rebuilding regions that are having success under this new recruitment system?

And if I'm not wrong in my assessment, is this really the game that admins want to provide? If it isn't, what do admins intend to do about the recruitment system and the massive spam it's causing for newly created and refounded nations, and the massive disadvantage it's causing for new regions and particularly for those who don't purchase stamps? We were told when this was introduced that admins didn't want to make this game pay-to-play. Tell me how it currently isn't.

I also wouldn't mind hearing how much money has been made since stamps went on sale and what's happening with that money, but I won't hold my breath.

[Venico]

Sent Telegrams: 407
Successful Telegrams: 1 (0.24%)

This is what happens when a nation's inbox is filled with 15 telegrams the second it exists. This is also avoiding full inboxes (that being another issue to tackle also).

[Shizensky]

Am I wrong here in my assessment? Am I just missing new and rebuilding regions that are having success under this new recruitment system?

And if I'm not wrong in my assessment, is this really the game that admins want to provide? If it isn't, what do admins intend to do about the recruitment system and the massive spam it's causing for newly created and refounded nations, and the massive disadvantage it's causing for new regions and particularly for those who don't purchase stamps? We were told when this was introduced that admins didn't want to make this game pay-to-play. Tell me how it currently isn't.

I also wouldn't mind hearing how much money has been made since stamps went on sale and what's happening with that money, but I won't hold my breath.

I think we've been moderately successful in our rebuild attempt, but we've only be able to do it with stamps. It's also taken a lot of work to continuously improve our telegrams through the use of surveys in order to best determine which parts of recruiting TGs new nations respond to the best.

We've had some campaigns with success rates almost as high as 4%, while using those same tactics with a recruiting tool yielded closer to 0.5%. I'm not even going to bother with organizing a manual recruiting campaign.

The only benefit I've been able to see is that automation frees up manpower from the recruiting and allows us to focus on retention efforts. I do agree that this has made the recruiting game pay-to-play, and has limited the experience for a majority of the game's players.

[Tim-Opolis]

Yeah

If I recall, Admin kept arguing (regarding stamps) that recruitment would not become P2P. I just spent a month running Spiritus on an API Recruiter and we've done nothing but lose nations every update. We went back to stamps today, and we're at our first profit @update in ages. It's ridiculous to try to deny that this has broken the Gameplay Dynamic of building a region. It's nearly impossible to found a region without using Stamps now, and without a Community to potentially crowd-fund the stamps, it's expecting 30$+ a month to recruit for your region. Considering that most online game memberships are only about 15$/mo, this is absolutely ridiculous.

Telegram Stamps have done nothing but break the system of recruitment within Nationstates, making it impossible for new regions to rise up without a large cash sum involved, and causing larger and more established regions to have to sell their figurative souls away to the Stamps system if they want to remain competitive in any way (for recruitment).

Frankly, stamps have turned trying to grow a region from something I found fun into something I now detest. Thanks.

[Shizensky]

<snip> it's expecting 30$+ a month to recruit for your region. <snip>

$1 a day sounds about right for me as well.

[Cormac A Stark]

<snip> it's expecting 30$+ a month to recruit for your region. <snip>

$1 a day sounds about right for me as well.

~$1 a day.
~$30 a month.
~$360 a year.

#TheRecruitmentIsTooDamnHigh

[Wintermoot]

In fairness, Wintreath has recruited exclusively on stamps since its founding and we've become a top 25 region, so it's still is possible to build up a region post-stamps if you have the money for it. I just tend to doubt that there's many that want to on a permanent basis, and for good reason. Recruiting via stamps costs about $30/month, and as more regions use them even that seems to be bringing diminishing returns. On our latest recruitment message, half of the nations we're sending them to aren't even receiving them because either their inbox is full or they've blocked recruitment telegrams. An additional 413 messages are in the queue. Some have been sitting there for over 10 hours. I wonder if we get to a point where a large UCR simply becomes inviable. It seems we're moving in that direction already.

When I became President of Spiritus back in May, one of the first things I did was go about creating a recruitment team to manually recruit. Even with a team we couldn't recruit 24/7, but we had great success over the summer, bringing in hundreds of new nations. Then stamps were released and immediately the recruitment rate plummeted to the point where I felt I had no choice but to disband our manual recruitment team. They use the same queue, and how can anyone ask members of the community to spend hours of their time manually recruiting for maybe a new nation or two? It's such a shame too, because manual recruiting is such a tedious, menial task to start with. Anyone that's willing to volunteer their free time doing it must really love their region, and it seems to me that those are the regions that can best serve new players and get them involved in the game.

Which leads me to my next issue...I honestly feel like we're doing a disservice to new players by flooding them with telegrams before they even know anything about the game. When I was a new player just a year ago, I only got three recruitment messages total, and they were all from established regions that could best help them get into the game. Now they're certain to get at least 19, counting the "welcome" message from the GCR they're founded in. I'm sure it's overwhelming to take in, and I wonder how many players just get frustrated and leave? I've had a few new players that were very upset that they were being spammed so much and replied back to our telegram stating as much in not-so-nice terms. How many more are getting lost in all the regions that are advertising to them and just giving up? In this case, I don't believe that more is better.

I can't think of anyone that's well-served with the current system other than those that get to collect the money from stamps. But what can regions do? Stamps are almost a requirement at this point if you want to maintain a large region. The other methods of recruitment simply have no chance of keeping pace.

[Venico]

Cormac, Koth, and myself were looking at splitting the 30 dollars 3 ways, but even then. I love this game, I truly do. But I cannot afford 120 dollars a year for a game without graphics and is best described as masochistic. I have little reason to try to start my own region (for a lucky 10 dollars compared to most people's 30) or I can stay in a GCR and play for free. This has become a pay to play scenario when it comes to UCRs.

[Gest]

I'm willing to pay 30 a month but you've got to do something about 80 regions getting to send 500 telegrams by just checking a button with Afforess' thingy.

The number of regions with money and ability to run full time scripts without Afforess is probably 30ish. It's not a great number but it's better than bleeping 80 regions.

[Venico]

The thing is Gest those only get sent to 1 out of every 6 nations (ish, this is just my own calculations). Stamps have a much higher rate than that and screw it up just as much.

[Unibot III]

$ 360/year to run a major UCR is either going to perpetuate the status quo for a long... long time or complete upset the status quo eventually (when these regions exhaust their financial resources).That's a high enough price tag for me to make that claim, I believe.

I'm of the belief that the world of scripts with less rate limitations and more focus on limiting the stream of recruitment scripted letters to each individual nation is the direction that the game should go. Scripts have had the benefit of alleviating regions from manual recruitment (which distracted regions from the more important and fun things to do with a region), but I think stamps upset this order (albeit an order that needed to be contained because the recruitment was out of control without adjustments).

[Venico]

I'm of a mindset to go back to manual recruiting >.> The one's who put in the effort to build the region get the nations.

[Italian Frogs]

I'm of a mindset to go back to manual recruiting >.> The one's who put in the effort to build the region get the nations.

Except that it is an open secret that people will write scripts designed specifically to look like manual recruiting so they don't have to actually do it, whether this takes the form of either an outright fabrication or a tool that purports to simply make the manual recruiting easier doesn't really matter.

If people are going to use scripts anyway, it doesn't make sense to penalize people for following unenforceable rules.

Unibot has the right idea, but I think ADMIN/MODS should also have the power to vet or veto certain regions from recruiting.

I think along the lines of limiting how many telegrams actually reach user inboxes, ADMIN has to create a form for regions to fill out and get approved by before they can recruit, otherwise they incur some kind of punishment. This would happen regardless of the type of recruitment, as I have established it is impossible to really tell how someone is recruiting.

If you want the right to fill an inbox with your recruitment telegrams, you should have to have a plan or description regarding your region and how it will be a community of benefit to prospective recruits. Otherwise the low barrier of entry to scripts will allow anyone and everyone equal recruiting power with no regard for quality of the actual regions in question.

Once approved, it should also have to be re-approved every six months or something to ensure continued activity on the part of the region's management.

[Venico]

It wasn't unenforceable. O.o It worked fine and when I'd create a nation it would get 3-4 telegrams in a minute.I actually had the ability to read who was soliciting me without having to take an hour out of my day. I don't know how the admins and mods enforced the rule but they did.

[Italian Frogs]

Sorry to burst your bubble but those days are over.

The ubiquity of scripts has changed things, and more people will modify them to imitate manual recruitment if they have to, whereas only a tiny minority did that in the olden days that you speak of, only because very few people actually knew about automation and scripts.

[SFBA wabbitslayah]

Sorry to burst your bubble but those days are over.

The ubiquity of scripts has changed things, and more people will modify them to imitate manual recruitment if they have to, whereas only a tiny minority did that in the olden days that you speak of, only because very few people actually knew about automation and scripts.

How long have you been playing this game?

[Venico]

The olden day was less than a year ago xD And I'd like to hear from the mods and admins about the enforceability of that. Seeing how good they are at enforcing the WA membership, I have confidence in this also.

*edit* Also to say that automation and scripts were unheard of is ludicrous. xD Log in scripts for nations were extremely common and basically anywhere that one legally could use a script and it was useful, they used one.

[Italian Frogs]

The olden day was less than a year ago xD And I'd like to hear from the mods and admins about the enforceability of that. Seeing how good they are at enforcing the WA membership, I have confidence in this also.

lol

Enforcement of WA membership rules has always been best done by players, not the ADMIN scanner which GPers learned to evade years ago.

Anyone who has ever been involved in recruiting, manual or otherwise, knows that people are always trying to create shortcuts and make it easier on themselves. It is this impulse that leads to scripts in the first place. Making it a contest of who can best tiptoe the legality line is not the right solution.

Vet the recruitment at the outset, or better yet ban recruitment telegrams altogether and make a recruitment page just like the WA or help page, where approved regions have adverts in some kind of attractive, rotating interface where they can include pictures, etc.... like a rotating list of regional factbooks.

Manual recruiting sucks and is a waste of people's time.

Edit to the other guy: Too long

[Cormac A Stark]

I'm willing to pay 30 a month but you've got to do something about 80 regions getting to send 500 telegrams by just checking a button with Afforess' thingy.

The number of regions with money and ability to run full time scripts without Afforess is probably 30ish. It's not a great number but it's better than bleeping 80 regions.

The problem is if they eliminate scripts but retain stamps, recruitment truly will become completely pay-to-play (although in practicality, it already is). This isn't how the game should work, and the point Wintermoot raised about regions that have the ability to pay $30 a month not necessarily being the regions best prepared to integrate new players into this game is a very valid one.

The suggestion by Italian Frogs to eliminate recruitment TGs altogether is absurd. No UCRs will grow at all, ever, without recruitment TGs. We would be playing a game in nine GCRs.

Personally, while I'm interested to see Unibot flesh out his ideas above, I currently agree with Venico that we should return to manual recruitment. Yes, there were semi-automated scripts even under manual recruitment but under that system you still had to have people physically sitting at their computer putting in the time. The regions willing to put in time and effort are probably those best equipped to integrate new players into the game and are indisputably the regions most deserving of high populations, not whoever can and will throw down $30 a month.

As a note, this doesn't necessitate complete elimination of stamps. They have been useful for WA campaigning and other TG uses and I'm not advocating their elimination, only elimination of their use for recruitment.

[Italian Frogs]

</snip>

Did Helen Keller draw your flag?

Edit: I suggested a page dedicated to recruitment instead. Clearly you have comprehension problems, your flag is an eyesore and you can't even read.

[Cormac A Stark]

</snip>

Did Helen Keller draw your flag?

Edit: I suggested a page dedicated to recruitment instead. Clearly you have comprehension problems, your flag is an eyesore and you can't even read.

Are you Frak?

In any event, your page for recruitment will be useless as most nations a) probably won't even know where to find it, b) may not go there anyway. Most new players don't have much incentive to join a region when they start playing the game; they are attracted there by the telegrams they receive. Even then, most aren't attracted to new regions which is why all the GCRs are so well populated. Expecting new players to find regions on their own initiative ignores the reality of this game.

[Italian Frogs]

Did Helen Keller draw your flag?

Edit: I suggested a page dedicated to recruitment instead. Clearly you have comprehension problems, your flag is an eyesore and you can't even read.

Are you Frak?

In any event, your page for recruitment will be useless as most nations a) probably won't even know where to find it, b) may not go there anyway. Most new players don't have much incentive to join a region when they start playing the game; they are attracted there by the telegrams they receive. Even then, most aren't attracted to new regions which is why all the GCRs are so well populated. Expecting new players to find regions on their own initiative ignores the reality of this game.

You would obviously incorporate it into the welcome telegram, and the sidebar. If they can't find it then there is no hope for them, but I like your presupposition that most new players are incapable and uninterested. Maybe most nations don't move because they are puppets, or because the recruitment-by-telegram system is broken.

And they would have more time to find the page and figure things out when they aren't getting spammed by any recruitment telegrams.

Getting on the recruitment page would require ADMIN approval, so no garbage regions. And no one has to waste their time manually recruiting (or pretending to). The page would incorporate elements and bb code more expansive than telegrams, so regions can convey more information to prospective members in a more attractive and innovative fashion. You could also employ various methods to sort them on the page beyond the default, iterative rotation, such as region type (using tags), and "most joined" sorted by today, this week, or this month to reward successful regions and provide information.

All and all it would be an alternative to the telegram method and many of its problems, rather than your uninspired idea to revert back to the tedium, boredom, cheating, and time-wasting numbness that is manual recruiting.

Edit: You wouldn't even have to make a new page, just redesign page=change_region, most of which could be improved and simply repeats the world page in an unhelpful way.

[Venico]

Yes because having admins decide which regions are good and which are bad is a great idea. Would GGR get to post there? Would a new region no one's heard of get to post there? No that is beyond silly and putting too much power onto the admin's judgement.

[Cormac A Stark]

Your idea has the admins deciding which regions are "garbage regions," and you're basing all of your arguments on assumptions and assertions without any evidence. You're assuming players will check a recruitment page; meanwhile, we already know for sure that UCRs can grow through recruitment telegrams. You're asserting that cheating happened under manual recruitment previously and that it will be more frequent if we revert to manual recruitment, yet you've provided no evidence at all that it ever happened previously aside from your assertion.

TL;DR: You're not making reasonable arguments here, you're advocating a system that we don't know will work based on flaws you haven't at all demonstrated were in the system that has already proven to work.

[Italian Frogs]

Right, letting anyone spam new nations as long as they are willing to sink away hours of their time is a much better solution.

Edit: If you really have any interest in this game at all, why wouldn't you click a link that is included in the welcome message and is on the sidebar? That is like saying it is foolish to assume someone will ever visit the WA page, or the forum page. Saying things like that makes me understand how you could think that flag is a good idea.

If you think ADMIN picking who gets to be on the page is too much (even though you were just complaining about quality control and otherwise incompetent regions being able to recruit, but w/e) you could have anyone submit an entry to the page but only "ADMIN picks" rotated into the main iterative display showcased on the page, and other regions could be accessed via a link on the bottom.

I don't think it is too much to ask that regions that want to recruit get admin approval and have some kind of regional plan for growth/identity/culture w/e if they want to get the right to solicit new players. Shit recruitment hurts the community at large by driving away potential new players, so it should be regulated.

Yes because having admins decide which regions are good and which are bad is a great idea. Would GGR get to post there? Would a new region no one's heard of get to post there? No that is beyond silly and putting too much power onto the admin's judgement.

So.... you are saying you don't like this plan because the Nazis might get left out? Nazi recruitment is one of worst parts of NS with their RMB spam, but you want to make sure they get the right to continue that kind of behavior?

Any other brilliant concerns you want to share with us on behalf of your Nazi friends?