Advertising in game

[Caliber]

Now when PE moving towards player controlled and own properties as land, shopkeepers with house or boot, hangars etc, it’s time to do something for the owners to advertise their services. Right now, owners has to advertise on webpages and buyers looking for information trough websites as EF and similar webpage’s. I think there is one very important feature that’s missing in PE today, and it’s some kind of advertisement board.

A very simple idea is to make an “auction like feature” where people can put in an advertisement. It can be in form of writing, and a few categories (land, shops, space etc) where the owner of a property can advertise.
For the consumer, it’s easy to check out different advertisement and then visit the object (land, shopkeeper, and hangar). As an example, a land owner can describe the area of mobs and ore, and maybe put how much tax there is on the area. An owner of a shopkeeper can describe what the shopkeeper selling, if it’s mostly ore or enmatter, clothes, furniture’s etc. A hangar owner can give information who to contact for travels, when and where and prices etc.

As with everything else in PE, when you advertise you pay a fee per day or something like that.

The lack of advertisement make things more difficult, both for the owner of a property, as it is for the consumer to find his way around. It’s also very time consuming to look for information about different objects.
It’s the same thing in real life where you wan t to expose a product or a service, you have to advertise. It’s very important for those who invested often huge sums of peds in different properties that hey have a reasonable chance to advertise in game.

 

[Wolf Grey]

A great idea!

However there would need to be some restrictions that would render the advertising on a "Bulletin Board"-kind of thing into a mere auction without the possiblity to buy right now:

MA most likely cannot control the use of foul language on such board. Filters would catch many but not all foul words used and there are words and abbreviations to get around the inserted filters.

Therefore advertising in a similar environment as the in-game auction would need to be set up like the existing auction with standard descriptions, main- and sub categories and standard price indexing.

And free-text field would be almost impossible to handle without a dedicated moderator like on this and other forums - which in turn would require for MA to move existing human resources from support or developent or hire extra capacity. This is a possiblity in the future, however not likely to be of top priority atm with game functionalities still in need of improvement.

To sum up: property and shop owners need a place to advertise and this is a good proposition to start with.

Today I see several newbie participants earning a few bucks by doing in-game advertising for shopkeeprs, landareas, hangars, etc. This is actually not a bad system atm, since hiring newbies as "runner" for hunters was eliminated some time ago.