Massive Incorporated Expands

[Aveena]

Originally Posted by Kerham

ontopic, is deffinitely a good move for MA. what remains to be verified is if this move will be benefic to players too. we shall see.

I also think it's a good move for MA, and thats why I'm certain that this will be good for all the players of Entropia too

But like you said... We shall see

[JackFree]

I think we should all keep a positive attitude until we see what the advertising system will bring. Lets give MA the benefit of the doubt and not start bashing this before it is implemented.

For me, it shows that MA are working on a way to generate more income for them, which means more money to develop PE further for us. It also means that we will benefit by have maybe more loot. Even if it only serves to generate more money for MA to keep improving PE, it is a good thing in my eyes.

Like Aveena said, we will have to wait and see. But please try to see the positive result this will have on our virtual universe, if it ends up creating more problems then you can complain, and I will join you.

Cheers

[Tigerman]

Ingame advertising for real world items has been the plan for PE ever since i started playing in BETA.
The "idea" back when i started playing was also that MA was gonna make enough money on interests, advertising and so on that ideally, nobody would have to deposit (yeah, rite). The reality was supposedly that the average player lost US $1 per hour of gameplay or something like that.
Some of us "veteran players" has wated for this ingame advertising ever since we started playing and have discussed numerous times what kind of formats wed like too see these adds in and such. And yes, one of the things that we did discuss was looting/buying items in PE that we received IRL...
Now, lets just hope we wont be getting messages like "Tigerman killed an atorx old alpha and found loot worth 361 PED - Sponsored by Marlboro"
Question is how the adds will be placed, what form it will have and so on. What can i say but "we live in an exciting time"

[Tigerman]

Originally Posted by Einstein

hmmm
If there are little people playing it also means the profits gets spread amongst smaller amounts of people

So 300 000$ for 150 000 players or 20 000$ for 10 000 players, the effect is the same, no?

Great news BTW, I'm looking forward to seeing it working ingame

Not really.. If MA want to use $15k of the income to hire more personell, improve the quality of PE or whatever that means we have $5k split on 10k people, which means $0,5 each, while if it was $300k and the same $15k to ma and rest spread on 150k users, there would be $285k to spread, meaning $1,9 each.. Big difference

[StrongMinded]

IMO, if having the adds changes average loot for all players then people will keep it, BUT if people still have crappy loots people will turn it off and then MA will notice that noone cares about the ad system and perhaps change it to not make the ATH´s even bigger but to spread the wealth a bit more...

The more happy people ingame, in forums the more people will join the game coz they actually have a chance to get something back... and less PE looks less casino.

Take a few 10k 20k, 30k HoFs and break em down in 1k piles and spread them ingame and im sure that the people trolling the other forums and make whine threads in here will be a bit happier.

I´m hoping that MA reads about people having crap loot in average and that they want to keep their customers happy coz thats what they are stating.

Let´s wait and see...

[wanda]

Originally Posted by Svetlana

*missing the forest for the trees*....

The way this will affect loots is rather insignificant imo.
The SIGNIFICANCE of this is much grander. This further solidifies PE as a 'virtual reality'. It's kind of like 'one small step for PE, one giant leap for online gaming'

Some points that strike me.

1. The way this will affect loot IS very significant.
MA are actually forcing ads upon their players by saying that you will get better loot if you leave them turned on. Everyone wants better loots, but why should you be blackmailed into accepting spam to get it?

Where is the guarantee to the players that they will all benefit from this virtual spam? With so many basic bugs in PE that have never been fixed, why should we take MA's word that they can even implement a system where people will get more money for leaving adverts turned on?
If they do manage to implement it, what guarantee do we have it will function correctly?

Thing is there will never be a way to prove its working properly or not, or even making a difference.

Turn Advert on and get a 1k hof, turn off ads and next hof is 500 - that doesnt mean anything. You could say you might have got 1k on the second hof with the ads on, but of course you will never know. You could just as easily say you might have got the 1k without an ad.

Web users hate adverting, search for ad blocker at google gives:

Results 1 - 10 of about 6,980,000 for ad blocker. (0.57 seconds)

2. I think the significance of this takes away from any storyline PE has.
The rpg element of PE is crap. We get occasional bits of a storyline through the cl relating to events that no one has witnessed concerning people we have never seen or even heard of.

The only solid storyline of PE is that it is a sci-fi based world that comes under attack from robots every now and again.
Seeing an 8 foot advert for burger king isn't very sci-fi to me.

MA should have polled its players before even considering this. Its the players that make PE and without them MA would disappear.
Deciding on it in secret and then adding the line "you will get better loot if you have ad's turned on" is deceptive at best.

[Digit]

Originally Posted by kygon

you can turn it off but you'll get less loot

If in theory there is more loot

[Molly]

Any service that charges for an ad-free version is therefore "forcing" people to watch ads. If you don't want to watch the ads, pay for the ad-free version by taking the cut in loot. As far as polling players goes, the overwhelming response here seems to be in favour, so I think I can guess which way a poll would go.

[bigdeal]

Still i wandering how the advertising will pop-up and where..........
i hardley see any city, exept for getting ammo and repair my stuff.
if the advertising is only in city's i won't see them alot....................
of do we get a advertising strip on top of the screen ???

btw, where is Marco's explanation.
i thought it was planning for today

greetings,

bigdeal

[MadMikeHoare]

+rep for wanda

Originally Posted by wanda

The only solid storyline of PE is that it is a sci-fi based world that comes under attack from robots every now and again.
Seeing an 8 foot advert for burger king isn't very sci-fi to me.

This story is not solid. All the hype about Prof. Barton is very thin and everything else is just a made up and would not keep anyone exited in a Sci-Fi book for more than the first two pages. So the whole story doesn't make much sense and whenever there is a Robo invasion this sounds more like a nice way of getting decay from the customers than the real chance of killing a few real strong robots. But it's called entertainement, so I guess this is part of the whole thing.

Originally Posted by wanda

MA should have polled its players before even considering this. Its the players that make PE and without them MA would disappear.
Deciding on it in secret and then adding the line "you will get better loot if you have ad's turned on" is deceptive at best.

The users/participants/believers/customers don't really care. The players usually complain about a few things that are on topic at a time, though after 2 weeks people forget and keep playing, keep depositing and only a very few "maybe" really think about quitting PE seriously. So I compare most of us players (I do not exclude myself) with sheeps that follow a wolf to the butchers table.

As proofed so many times we can not do anything if we want to stay in PE and be part of this "great virtual universe". This is no universe, it's a business. You say it's the players that make PE. So what? Some people leave, some new join. A smart company calculated this. MA makes managerial decisions by themself. Always did, and always will. Why would they listen to it's customers? Because they threat with leaving PE?

The fact people use this forum to complain is human nature. We need a place where we can complain and hope someone will hear us and things will change. They won't change. When it comes to money there is only a very few that really make the big deals. If many people leave, loot will decrease or, as now, new ways of making money will be implemented. But it's out choice, we can disable commercials and stick with the same poor loot or we accept the spam and "maybe" get some better loot. Someone called this blackmail, I agree to that 100%. But who am I? Just a guy, a small light in this "great, one of a kind, universe".

And nevertheless, we keep playing. Weird, isnt it?