Discord bots have become one of the essentials for any competent, organized army. Some armies have even gone far enough to create their own Discord bots for various functionalities – but are these bots really necessary?
Designed by Scorp
The Discord platform is quite large and complex to navigate if you think about it and bots make our lives much easier. They have become one of the most important aspects of any army. Bots provide a variety of services ranging from mass moderating or auto moderating chats to commands to just plain fun and games. However, some armies went ahead and developed their own bots, giving themselves the ability to use one bot to fulfill their specific needs.
The Army of Club Penguin launched its Clover Bot as a method to create an economy in their server. The bot hands out clovers to the event attendees, manages their clover balance and maintains a leaderboard as well. Moreover, the Clover Bot also assists the army in their battles, providing formation pics and standard tactics. Army Legend Shaboomboom is one of the primary creators of the bot. However, the Rebel Penguin Federation took a step further with their Rebel Bot. Apart from carrying out several economy functions, the Rebel Bot helps keep their chat alive by providing conversation topics. It can also play music in their voice channels, thus participating in their events in its own way. Some other features of the bot includes the shop system that many Rebels adore.
The Help Force has been home to two separate Discord bots in its five years of existence. Initially, the army served as the home of Pavle, a bot developed by Janez. Pavle’s functions ranged from serving as the center point of Help Force’s economy, promotions, and leaderboard. Moreover, it kept their spirits up with games like Rock Paper Scissors, Hunger Games sim, or randomly gifting a cookie to a lucky troop. This bot turned out to be quite unique, in that similar to army leaders, Pavle also retired from the army after faithfully serving it for around 3 years. The Help Force’s second bot is the currently active Acodo. Nightfury developed the bot to fill the gap left behind by Pavle. Acodo’s functions are similar to Pavle. However, Nightfury created the code for this bot from scratch to incorporate updates in Discord’s way of handling its bots, like slash commands.
Several armies have grown to adore their personalized bots over the years. Club Penguin Armies reached out to a few people to ask them how their custom bots impact their day-to-day army activities.
What is your bot’s name and what does it do for you?
Night, HF Bot Developer: The bot which i developed for Help Force is named Acodo, he is a sleeping koala who is the Supreme Commander of Help Force.
In terms of functionality, Acodo has many uses, out of which some are already developed and some are under development as we speak. Some of them are: dual leaderboards, which lets us know who our Gamer of the Week will be, along with the leader board with the players with the highest numbers of Sapphires. Hunger Games being a big part of Help Force, which initially died with the retirement of our beloved Ex Supreme Commander Pavle, is now being reintroduced with new things, keeping the beloved game alive in the army. One of the biggest functions of Acodo is economy. Acodo has many commands which lets the user (staff of the Help Force) control the economy of the server (sapphire system) however they want. With sapphires being an important economy system of the army, Acodo has special commands dedicated to these, which will be listed further. With Acodo being a discord bot being custom developed (by me, nightt216), we can do any functions required, whether they exist or not in the source code of Acodo, as they can be easily coded into him in the matter of days.
In terms of what Acodo does for me, Acodo is a trophy for me, which makes me proud of my hard work, which I never believed would come to life, all the pain of coding goes away as i see my work of art come to life and help others the way I wish I could help.
Calgo, ACP Leader: We actually use several custom bots in ACP not just one. Innovation has kinda been a core focus of mine since day 1 so we have never really strayed away from tryna push the boundaries of coming up with new ideas to automate processes in armies that can either be rather redundant or time consuming. I have quite a bit of experience in the Discord Bot community as I’ve worked for several high-profile bot devs such as Ticket Tool staff, Droplet staff, and ServerStats staff all of which have bots that are in at least a million plus servers. The one lesson I learned is realistically we want to innovate without hindering flexibility or stability. Despite my connections developing a bot completely from scratch was basically off the table as development time and costs would be too much and we didn’t want to utilize something that was rough around the edges. Also we wanted bots that we wouldn’t have to worry about much downtime or having to host as that adds extra uncertainties and variables into the mix which we didn’t want. Ultimately we want to build out infrastructure that future leaders can utilize far after I am gone and retired.
The first main bot that we have been utilizing is our Mee6 custom bot which I paid for lifetime membership on it so that we never have to worry about limitations on utilizing the bot as well as paying monthly for a bot which most leaders don’t want to do. Our Mee6 bot is nicknamed after our well known mascot, ACP Bunny Duck since it is basically our most used bot and has a lot of our core commands and features implemented into it. Some of the features of this bot that we have set up includes all 35+ of our extensive formation commands that send a picture of the formation with bullet points on how to get in the form, a Big Word Bubble command that picks a random big word bubble from a list of 100 ACP related BWBS and sends it into chat, a battle tips command that sends tips on how to prepare before a battle as well as a movement tips command, and 79 other commands! We also utilized this bot to completely overhaul our sign-up-help channel and our self-roles channels with a completely new and modern look that is appealing to newer users. The bot also functions as our welcoming bot for our welcome channel and even puts out announcements when we upload a new battle video to our YouTube. The best feature by far that we have been testing out though is its automations plugin which allows you to automate bot actions in response to server events like messages, reactions, and role changes. So for example if a new recruit was to type in our sign-up-help channel saying keywords such as “help”, “activate”, or “username” it would automatically trigger a response from the bot to auto respond to that troop with a message saying: “Hi! Thank you for reaching out to us for assistance. A staff team member will be here to assist you in just a moment. Thank you for your patience!”
On top of that this same automation will also trigger another action which would be to ping our moderators in our staff chat notifying us that a new recruit needs assistance. Another example that we have been testing is that if a private who does not have a CPAB account activated joins our stage the bot will detect that and send them a guide on how to make an account and ping us to assist them.
The second main bot that we have been utilizing is our Bleed Bot which is a paid bot that you must buy to be able to use indefinitely. This bot is nicknamed after our great leader Koloway as a majority of our bots are nicknamed after ACP’s greatest leaders. This bots main functions include our autoresponders which respond with reactions, messages, or images when we say a key phrase. Right now we have over 350+ autoresponders and they aren’t just images either, we utilize many to auto respond with the actual CPAB emotes so when you say EL, it sends the emote in chat.
We also configured it so that combinations with CPAB emotes work as well so I can tell my troops to do ET/E8/EL and the bot will send the emotes and this works in any order or combination as we spent a lot of time adding every combo and order. The other main function of the Bleed bot that is our all time favorite is our jail that is setup through the bot so whenever someone is misbehaving we can run a jail command that strips them of all their perms so that they can only see and talk in a jail chat. We use this to resolve issues and calm down troops when they are misbehaving in chat. If you get jailed, our MEE6 bot generates a random score that you have to get on Snake to be released from jail. We also utilize this jail during war time as a substitute for banning enemies and instead we convert it into a prisoner of war channel where they can also only see our war propaganda channel as well. This chat tends to get extremely hectic during war time but is a lot of fun for both staff and the jailed people.
The third and last custom bot that we have recently started using in attempt to increase our turnout and efficiency for scheduling is our Sesh Bot which I had to shell out a lot of money to get full unrestricted access to use. This bot is nicknamed ACP Secretary and in my opinion this bot has the potential to completely shake up the community as we know it. This bot’s main feature is its event scheduling which allows you to announce your upcoming events through the bot which posts it in an embed with all the information streamlined with a button to confirm that you will be attending. What makes this bot so unique is that it allows you to add the event directly into your google calendar and ON TOP OF THAT the bot will DM you reminders before the event begins if you reacted. You can also configure how often the bot reminds you. This bot also allows us to hold polls within the server in the most modern way possible. Another niche feature that we utilize is an event checklist signup through the bot where every time we have an upcoming battle the bot will send out a checklist in staff announcements where staff can react based on what role or duty they want to help out on and it will assign them that specific duty.
Link, RPF Commander: Our bot’s name is Rebel Bot and she’s amazing. She does p much everything a Discord bot can do. We have custom currency through her, we can use her to promote people, play games and music, create giveaways, custom commands, typical moderating etc.
Does your bot offer anything that a typical Discord bot can’t?
Night: Personally, There is no real definition of a “typical Discord bot,” each bot is unique in its own way, unless the code has been Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V.
There are many special features which lie among many bots, let it be economy system or echo / speak command, But Acodo is a bot, which consists of All the features hardcoded from scratch, which will be helpful for us, Acodo has the features of many famous bots, including Mee6 and CarlBot, with all those features coexisting within a single trustworthy bot.
If we start talking about functions which are found in Acodo and not in a “typical Discord bot,” these can be classified into a few parts.
1) General & Games Commands: Acodo has commands which are considered fun / general, which includes the developed and being developed games, Hunger Games, Rock Paper Scissors Demotion and Card Jitsu, along with some lighthearted commands such as /bald (calling someone bald, just for the heck of it), /cookie (our own cookie donator! unless the rats have stolen the goods), /speak (a command, giving Acodo his own personality, in any way we want!), are just a few commands which can be considered in this category.
2) Economy Commands: Acodo has special economy commands which I believe I’ve myself seen rarely these days.
Acodo has the ability to send two different leaderboard, which help in different aspects of the army, giving our staff some rest. There also are commands to manually edit those leaderboards, without affecting each other, which cam be used to counter and remove any errors (if any).
Acodo also has the ability to give sapphires to troops who react to a certain message, making event rewards very easy along with logging the addition of sapphires in the same chat, letting us know if we missed someone. With this unique economy system, Acodo also has a shop, where we offer different things, varying from a custom role to Discord Nitro!
This shop also offers custom roles, which can only be acquired by buying them, making role collecting an interesting and fun.3) Staff Commands: I will not disclose much but Acodo has been specially modified in a way such that it makes it easy to use by our new coming staff, along with some oldies who are still getting used to on how to use Acodo.
Calgo: A lot of free bots can give you some functionality or a glimmer of some features but if you truly want the most flexibility and stability you will want a bot that you own that isn’t locked behind a subscription service. Ultimately I have yet to find bots that can even perform half the tasks that our three bots do and even if they can they are sub par in some aspect. Keep in mind all three of these bots had a lot of setup time and heavy testing put into them to get them to where they are today functioning in our server, you can’t just expect them to do what you want right out of the box. A lot of features you have to unlock by testing and seeing what works best for your army. I believe that no other army has come close to what we have been doing with our bots these days.
Link: To be completely honest at this point there’s so many different bots that I can’t think of specific things. The main thing that comes to mind is being able to create repeat messages and also easily manage people’s ranks
How necessary would you say your bot is for day-to-day army activities?
Night: Acodo is very crucial for day to day army activities, Acodo is a bot which handles one economy system (sapphire system), on which all of our troop promotions are based on, Acodo has special commands which are crucial for economy and event organisation & rewarding, which are used on a daily basis.
Acodo handles our Gamer of the Week Winner, By the usage of one of our two leaderboards, in the similar fashion, Acodo has a store specifically for Sapphires, as mentioned above, which helps in our users to use their well earned Sapphires, this keeps user interactions high in the server
Acodo is also crucial for a break, which is required on a daily basis, Games which are coded in Acodo acts like a great stress buster, as well as helping you connect with new people in the server.
Calgo: I think they have all in some way become extremely integral to ACP’s community and even our staff structure whether it be the fun features through it or even the staff tools that aid us. Ultimately though if one bot was to fail we always have backups in place just in case. For example if the Sesh Scheduling bot was to fail we have Event Announcement templates setup through our MEE6 bot as well so if one system does fail we will never stop serving our community.
Link: Very necessary. Rebel bot is pretty much most discord bots combined into one and we rely on her for a lot of our moderation and in server currency. Ofc we have back ups so if she were to go offline we’d be able to manage but she’s a pretty important part. Big shoutout to F6 for coding her and continuing to add featured and implementing things to help the server, he’s done an amazing job with her
Night, Calgo, and Link each have a lot to say about custom bots role in their respective armies. It seems that custom bots are definitely more helpful than a typical Discord bot. Developers tailor such bots to not only accommodate an army’s needs, but to provide more than that. Definitely, army specific bots elevate our community into the modern ages, while adding a more fun vibe to our army.
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Mchappy is interning at Club Penguin Armies as the Chief Executive Producer. Max held him at gunpoint to finish his biography.