ADs

Xith

So, ADs are great for detailing services and other arrangements for complicated trades, and for listing your stuff, but the sucky thing is having to advertise all the time and not necessarily being able to bring your ad to the attention of people that are in different timezones than you. Same with advertising your shop to those timezones.

I had the idea of a regularly schedule ad placement that occurs on the server's schedule.

Term:

5000 gold for 6 months

10000 gold for 1 year

+10k for each year after in the term

Frequency (x Number of years):

Every 3 Achaean days - free

Every Achaean day - 5000

Every half-day - 10000

To buy advertising that runs every Achaean day for 3 years would be 45,000. Rough figures, but whatever works.

So these would occur without further player action, either by Market or a separate (Ads): channel that could be turned on or off.

(Market): A market denizen says, "Get fashionable while shopping for your refills, inks, and minerals at Domestic Diva in Hashan! SW 4 W from Crossroads."

(Ads): ***** Get fashionable while shopping for your refills, inks, and minerals at Domestic Diva in Hashan! SW 4 W from Crossroads *****

Hasar

Read the title as AIDS.

Was disappointed.

Trevize

I prefer the ad system how it is, but would prefer it expanded and become to 'norm' for searching. Here's a counter-proposal.

Give ads categories based on skill: concoctions, alchemy, forging, tailoring, jewellery, heraldry, mark, misc, etc. Allow a maximum of one IG year prepay on ads, existing ads can be extended. People can view ads only for specific categories. Allow ad creators to disclude orgs or only show to certain orgs.

AD 15 CATEGORIES ALCHEMY FORGING

AD 15 NOT MHALDOR TARGOSSAS

AD 15 ONLY ASHTAN ELEUSIS

Then users can check ads like so:

ADS ALCHEMY

ADS FORGING

End result is permanent ads up until the person who put them up is gone for a year, and targetted ads so there's much less searching.

Jules

For some reason the player base is very against any manner of tinkering with ads/market to address the time zone issue (which wouldn't be a problem if everyone checked ads as compulsively as I do, but even those against making a change will generally admit that people tend to forget that ads exists).  I think this is a great idea for uniting buyers and sellers - especially for niche market items.  Good luck.  

Trevize

Let me say - regardless of the specific improvement, I'd like to see ads fleshed out more. I love the concept, don't like the current implementation. I feel that they have more potential than the current state.

Katzchen

All this would make me do is turn the market channel off to avoid more/repetitive spam... not sure if that's just me, but probably not the ideal if it would be a common thing.

Trevize

Katzchen said:

All this would make me do is turn the market channel off to avoid more/repetitive spam... not sure if that's just me, but probably not the ideal if it would be a common thing.

That was my initial thought - but if it was a config option or a separate channel, I don't see a problem - the question in that situation would be 'how much would it be used?'

Jules

The beauty of market channel is that you can turn it off, sure, but the moment you want to buy something, or are even curious what's being sold, it's the only place you can go.  The dragon parts are completely irrelevant chaff to me, but I sift through them if I'm curious what else might be up for sale  

Xith

Yeah that's why I thought probably it should be a separate channel. But then again these people are paying to reach an audience. And a wall of 5 shop ads once every hour isn't really that much different than currently. So if implemented I suppose it would only make sense to put it where everything else is seen.

Katzchen

Xith said:

Yeah that's why I thought probably it should be a separate channel. But then again these people are paying to reach an audience. And a wall of 5 shop ads once every hour isn't really that much different than currently. So if implemented I suppose it would only make sense to put it where everything else is seen.

5, sure. But 40? -shrug- no way of knowing how many would use something like this.

Cooper

Pay a house or city member to advertise for you.

Xith

Cooper said:

Pay a house or city member to advertise for you.

Okay.

Kyrra

It's not a bad idea @Xith, in regards to what Cooper just suggested. When I still lived in Cyrene, part of the perks of working for the Trade Ministry in a different timezone was that I could advertise on their behalf at different peak hours. Granted that I didn't get paid for it, I didn't mind it. I had an alias that I hit once or twice a month, it did the job.

There's really no reason why you can't pay someone to advertise for you. That seemed like a legit response which you just blew off because it doesn't support the OP.

Xith

The OP exists because I'm fully aware of hiring other advertisers but believe that sort of burden could be handled by an alias-free system that is also a nice gold sink. Not to mention people that a) don't have friends or b) have unreliable friends.

Now if one reliable player who was on 24/7 and sold themselves as an advertiser on the basis that they had a reflex system that could guarantee the interval of your ad and would never be interrupted by things such as combat or soulrips, that'd be magic. But you wouldn't be guaranteed when or if they were actually doing things so that's why I've never considered doing that.

Kyrra

Just seems like something else to lag the server and people can manually check ads if they care.

I'm not for or against it either way, I just don't see it as a necessity. I do get really bad lag bursts on the new days and a gold sink firing every hour would add to that, no?

Trevize

Kyrra said:

Just seems like something else to lag the server and people can manually check ads if they care. I'm not for or against it either way, I just don't see it as a necessity. I do get really bad lag bursts on the new days and a gold sink firing every hour would add to that, no?

Well, there are a ton of different 'ticks' and a lot happens quite often, but they're spread out. The problems in that regard seem to be the ticks where a -lot- happens at once, in most cases. Like turn of the day. So I don't see this as causing a source of lag.

My real problem with the OP is that it's essentially spam or useless. If it's effective, everyone will do it. If it's not, it's a waste of time. I don't see a happy medium happening with that suggestion.

Jules

I can't understand how this would be worse than the current dragon kidney market :P

EDIT:  which I really don't mind, even though I'm not "in the market" - although it sometimes chops off things I might be interested in when I look at the history, overall it helps keep market fresh and vital.

Xith

Trevize said:

Kyrra said:

Just seems like something else to lag the server and people can manually check ads if they care. I'm not for or against it either way, I just don't see it as a necessity. I do get really bad lag bursts on the new days and a gold sink firing every hour would add to that, no?

Well, there are a ton of different 'ticks' and a lot happens quite often, but they're spread out. The problems in that regard seem to be the ticks where a -lot- happens at once, in most cases. Like turn of the day. So I don't see this as causing a source of lag.

My real problem with the OP is that it's essentially spam or useless. If it's effective, everyone will do it. If it's not, it's a waste of time. I don't see a happy medium happening with that suggestion.

Dunno, the half-day price was 10k per year and that's the spammiest it'll get. People with shops could conceivably all do that but it's still quite a fee depending on what you sell.