If Anet added in game ads, what would be the least annoying places to put them?

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I remember that Adventurequest and Dragonfable had something like this.  There was a completely walled off section of the game where you could go watch adds optionally, and they pay you in gold and gems to watch advertisements.  That's the only in-game add system that would be tolerable, because you're either paid to be there or you completely ignore it with no impact.

[Astralporing.1957]

Anywhere where i would never see them. And i do mean literally never.

[Yaki.9563]

The abbreviation for advertisement is ad, not add. 

[robertthebard.8150]

The website, where my adblocker can take care of it for me.  In game, nowhere.

I don't use adblockers because I hate content creators, I use adblockers because I hate that I can be forced to watch an ad about something that I either don't need, like feminine products, or that I disagree with, like political ads.

[Danikat.8537]

4 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I remember that Adventurequest and Dragonfable had something like this.  There was a completely walled off section of the game where you could go watch adds optionally, and they pay you in gold and gems to watch advertisements.  That's the only in-game add system that would be tolerable, because you're either paid to be there or you completely ignore it with no impact.

Just curious: did they do anything to stop people going afk there, or was it like Twitch give-aways where they're ok with artifically inflated numbers?

Because as a player the obvious way to use that system is to go there when you're done for the day (or park a character there to log into) and leave them standing there while you're not at the computer or doing other things, so you never have to actually watch the ads but rack up hours of rewards. Which would be a win for players and the game studio (who get to claim X number of people will watch your ads every hour) but might put off advertises if they found out...which could also be a win for players.

[Sunchaser.9854]

Ads pay like 1/10th of a cent per 30 minute video and usually only pay per click precisely because of afking. But for 10$ to get 10,000 views for a person who needs to sell a product. That can be wonderful.

 

Ballyboo in adventure quest was pretty much a button that told you "need easy extra gold or z tokens? Watch a ad at ballyboo's", it was limited to like 5x 30 second ads and gave like 1000 aq gold (3 fights worth), which probably would have paid for hosting a web game. 

 

Thing is, 3d game hosting sometimes usually more expensive I'm not sure if ads would even cover it. If ads pay like 0.1 cents per 30 seconds. Thats only 0.2 cents a minute, maybe 12 cents a hour. It might not even cover electricity costs, without clicks, just be a way to monetize a site to pay for web hosting. If it costs like 20$ to run a 4 man l4d2 server for 4 players in a month and you make them connect to maybe watch a hour of ads. You spent 20$ to make 0.12$. While pissing them off maybe. Probably not worth it for a paid mmorpg.

 

People will laud whales but if one person spends 3000$ on their own whim for mount collections. Chiding what they may scream back is a hobby as much as a 15,000-40,000$ car or boat might come back. Then they might call the staff of said games slave workers or test how much they can flame the workers as you're forced to tolerate financial choices. But a singular whale in those games can probably literally fund what 3000 players watching a hour of ads could..

But whales create warped game design very easily. They don't seem to want money to be difficult to spend, and they don't want a f2p player to make them feel like a newb even if they beat them either. So it's a easy trap to create a p2w warped game that warps the game it's more a show of wallet throwing than it is gameplay.

But I don't see why in earth they couldn't just list all mounts for sale anytime for someone to buy. Unless they have like some internal metrics that indicate drip feeding junk purchases makes internal sales higher. Which could easily swing 50 50 in either way honestly. 

(tl;dr: This post is just talking about a couple of whales dropping 8000$ on items just to have it 1 day sooner than whale2 who spent 3,000$ for the same items in our game. Vs making a player watch ads for 12 cents a hour. No (successful) game is gonna make a living solely off making people watch ads for 12 cents a hour.. 

Edited August 8, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Tukaram.8256]

The only acceptable place for ads is the rubbish bin.

However... if we *had* to have ads, I say put advertising logos on the bad guys.  I see an insurance company name on a boss... I am killing him ha ha 

[TexZero.7910]

In the trash can. That's where i'd put the ads and this idea.

[Sunchaser.9854]

I guess i got carried away, but a point was, someone spending 3000$ on cosmetics in a game because they could, offers the same revenue as making 30,000 people watch a hour of ads for 12 cents a hour... 

 

I don't advocate for p2w.. But when it comes to funding, which do you think is more lucrative?

1. Making 30,000 players spend 15$ on a expansion they can buy once, play forever.

2. Making 2-10 players watch 150 hours of ads in a row at 12 cents a hour.... While being review bombed to the Beyond and back. XD  

No one sane (should) watch 150 hours of ads over paying a 10$ bill unless they literally have no credit card/gift card access. 

Edited August 8, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Danikat.8537]

2 hours ago, Sunchaser.9854 said:

Ads pay like 1/10th of a cent per 30 minute video and usually only pay per click precisely because of afking. But for 10$ to get 10,000 views for a person who needs to sell a product. That can be wonderful.

 

Ballyboo in adventure quest was pretty much a button that told you "need easy extra gold or z tokens? Watch a ad at ballyboo's", it was limited to like 5x 30 second ads and gave like 1000 aq gold (3 fights worth), which probably would have paid for hosting a web game. 

 

Thing is, 3d game hosting sometimes usually more expensive I'm not sure if ads would even cover it. If ads pay like 0.1 cents per 30 seconds. Thats only 0.2 cents a minute, maybe 12 cents a hour. It might not even cover electricity costs, without clicks, just be a way to monetize a site to pay for web hosting. If it costs like 20$ to run a 4 man l4d2 server for 4 players in a month and you make them connect to maybe watch a hour of ads. You spent 20$ to make 0.12$. While pissing them off maybe. Probably not worth it for a paid mmorpg.

 

People will laud whales but if one person spends 3000$ on their own whim for mount collections. Chiding what they may scream back is a hobby as much as a 15,000-40,000$ car or boat might come back. Then they might call the staff of said games slave workers or test how much they can flame the workers as you're forced to tolerate financial choices. But a singular whale in those games can probably literally fund what 3000 players watching a hour of ads could..

But whales create warped game design very easily. They don't seem to want money to be difficult to spend, and they don't want a f2p player to make them feel like a newb even if they beat them either. So it's a easy trap to create a p2w warped game that warps the game it's more a show of wallet throwing than it is gameplay.

But I don't see why in earth they couldn't just list all mounts for sale anytime for someone to buy. Unless they have like some internal metrics that indicate drip feeding junk purchases makes internal sales higher. Which could easily swing 50 50 in either way honestly. 

(tl;dr: This post is just talking about a couple of whales dropping 8000$ on items just to have it 1 day sooner than whale2 who spent 3,000$ for the same items in our game. Vs making a player watch ads for 12 cents a hour. No (successful) game is gonna make a living solely off making people watch ads for 12 cents a hour.. 

I know the numbers in this post are random, but I got curious, so I checked. Players couldn't spend $3,000 on mounts if they wanted to, because all the mounts in the gem store cost 66,000 gems, or $825. (And they couldn't spend that all in one go because the mounts aren't all on sale at the same time.)

$2940 would get you all the mounts, outfits, armour pieces and stand-alone weapons that have ever been in the gem store (assuming you bought them all at full price).

I'd love to know what players do spend (and I know Anet would never tell us) but I doubt anyone's spending thousands of dollars on this game on a regular basis because they'd very quickly run out of things to buy.

There's black lion keys of course, but even then there's only 2-3 unique items in each chest and it normally takes at least a month for the chests to be updated.

[Sunchaser.9854]

Oh i forgot, but yeah fair enough to miss. The 3k USD and 8k USD numbers are just for a fairly small (10k-27k users playing anytime) gacha egg opener game i used to mod for a couple of whales, like top 2 or so. I don't know the personal gw2 numbers but yeah i was always surprised to see even our small game pull in a couple people spending that much.

But it's pretty well  monetized. I was one of the volunteer discord admins who worked on the game to make sure that cross trading / (Players selling our items on ebay whether via hacks or other means etc), were caught up on. 
Our platform took a 75% cut of all profits, so the devs had to pay 5 people on a system where we needed to make 60,000$ to pay one mcwage (1000 hrs at 15$ a hr), at 75% tax. 

I think even with the whales, all our top 50-100 customers were like summed up to like 30k. Which was good if it wasn't taxed to 7.5k, half a mcWage for 5-15 people. (Modelers, translators, coders, localization, Testers, Admins/staff teams, etc. ) 

Anyways yeah, kinda off the point but pretty much. I don't personally like the whale model. But when it comes to having a person watch a literal 150 hours of ads or spending 15$ on a purchase. I think it's pretty realistic that more money could be lost turning away players than ads would recover.

Ads mostly only work for youtubers since scale of numbers. When watching a ad is 1 tenth of a cent for 30 sec of your time, it's a pretty kitten poor 12 cents a hour.  When 1000 people give you 1/10th of a cent, that's a dollar. When 1 million people do it, that's 1000$. Gw2 might not even have 300k people playing it monthly or not. I'm not sure. 

I know Wow's sub numbers used to be like 10M a month WOTLK/Peak to 1M WoD. Then they stopped releasing. If gw2 has as many players playing it as 10-30% of wow, that might be like 100k-300k monthly players or more, (or drastically less). who knows. If you made everyone watch a ad, and got say, 300$ a month, BUT 3 players in 300,000 (A VERY LIGHT NUMBER), say, quit and didn't spend 100$ on expansions after ads..

tl;dr You could easily end up losing money overall likely. So it might not even make logical sense from a $ monetization standpoint either. but who knows? 

Edited August 8, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[SoulGuardian.6203]

You just gotta laugh at this really.

How can you be mad at something like this?

 

Add this thread to the monthly fee ones and make it "the comedy corner" in the forums.

 

 

[JayHog.3280]

If you asked me where would ads BE god, it's either while browsing the gem store casually or maybe one ad a day after at least one story instance done. You finish the instance and then an ad plays. But this would only happen once a day, so constantly playing the game would not make it annoying.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

7 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Just curious: did they do anything to stop people going afk there, or was it like Twitch give-aways where they're ok with artifically inflated numbers?

Because as a player the obvious way to use that system is to go there when you're done for the day (or park a character there to log into) and leave them standing there while you're not at the computer or doing other things, so you never have to actually watch the ads but rack up hours of rewards. Which would be a win for players and the game studio (who get to claim X number of people will watch your ads every hour) but might put off advertises if they found out...which could also be a win for players.

It was a window, mostly.  You had to click a button to see an ad, then click a button to claim the reward, then click the button to see another add.  There was a daily limit on how many times you would get rewarded for watching adds.

[Mrs Lana.2506]

3 hours ago, SoulGuardian.6203 said:

How can you be mad at something like this?

Because the devs may see these people advocating for bad practices to be put into their game and actually do it, thinking they'll be in the right.

The worst part is, if it did happen there'd be a bunch of fanboys defending the decision as always.

[DexterousGecko.6328]

in-game? None, I would uninstall quietly and not come back. Anything in-game that takes me out of the game immediately kills the experience for me.

[Sunchaser.9854]

But they need that 1/10 of a cent ad revenue more than they need one player spending 15$ literally being worth 15000 of them. 

We gotta lose 3000 new players x 15$ cheapest xpac= 45000$ to make uh 40000 pissed off players x 0.1 cent ad = 40$ people. 

Think. Just think, you can annoy 1000x the people for 1/100th the revenue people!!! What's the point of bad business decisions if you don't get to make them? 😂

Edited August 8, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[KerryTT.4792]

Hmmm... as part of any boss battle? Tequatl lands, rolls around a bit, unfolds a screen and add plays. Then the battle begins. Maybe make seeing adds optional, but those who accept them get a stack of Fury.  Those who don't see Drooburt sitting in a field of flowers. Could get fancy, in Dragonstorm Ryland and Braham could promote competing products.

[Gibson.4036]

When ArenaNet doesn't put out new content, we get threads like this.

[SoulGuardian.6203]

4 hours ago, Miss Lana.5276 said:

Because the devs may see these people advocating for bad practices to be put into their game and actually do it, thinking they'll be in the right.

The worst part is, if it did happen there'd be a bunch of fanboys defending the decision as always.

ANet wouldn’t.. would they?

I mean, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

But then again... it does makes you wonder why so many of these type of comical threads recently.

Don't know if it's troll month, or they just testing us.

😞

 

[Sunchaser.9854]

Anet needs to release their anniversary sale asap, with good stuff and living world and character slots on sale. The last years on the wiki it went by sale like Aug 7th sometimes, so it'd be a good distraction to have some good sales going on they could make money instead of pissing off everyone with ads a palooza haha. XD 

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

I feel like if I'm paying for a game that is supported by expansions and microtransactions, in game ads should never be shown to me.

 

Ads are for supporting content that is offered free. The moment you sell me a product, I do not expect nor do I approve of being shown ads that arent specifically for your product, and even for the ones that are I expect them to be exceedingly rare. 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1) No.
2) No.
3) No.
4) PvP lobby loading screen. Nobody would see it there anyway.

[Ledi.9742]

they should change the skyboxes to ads

[Donari.5237]

There is no acceptable ad placement in this game, for all the reasons many others have posted.

But since you asked:  A tiny button in a spot extremely hard to accidentally clicked that opens an ad panel which can be instantly exited via the Escape key if somehow it does get clicked.  Zero rewards for opening and running an ad.  In other words the ad can only be seen by someone that affirmatively wants to view an ad for some unfathomable reason.

In my time-filler mobile app games there are options to watch ads (once you've paid for the game to remove involuntary ads) which then give you game boosts or currency.  You only watch them if you want those things to facilitate your pixel pushing.  That is what I am suggesting here, but going further and saying no rewards.  No incentives.  Definitely no requirements.  Yes, I know no advertiser will accept their ads being utterly ignorable.  Then they can make award winning ones like the Superbowl ads.  Make them something people want to watch for their content.  Until then. a big fat NOPE to destroying game flow and immersion.  I use ad blockers for good reasons.