Advertisements UI & Full rework of the system

[Entity]

Short description: A browser-based system for advertisements.

Detailed description: Create a small database that is accessible in-game. /ad will bring up the regular ads, /cad and /bad will bring up the company and business ads respectively. You can switch between the three tabs while the UI is open - the commands will simply bring up the respective tab.

 

How will it work? You will still be able to normally write your advert, either after writing /ad, /bad or /cad or right inside of the UI. Anyone will be able to post an /ad at all times and without having to wait at all. Upon doing so, the ad is added to the top of the list.

 

How will this apply to donators? The system will switch to a bump-based one. Non-donators will be able to bump their advert every 20 minutes. Donators will be able to do it every 15, 5 and 3 minutes respectively - the same thing we have right now. Since this won't clutter the chat, the bumps can only have a one minute cool-down, giving people time to read the adverts while also accommodating for the large amount of adverts.

 

A queue system? We don't want the first-to-write issue to turn into a first-to-press the button issue. Pressing the bump button will add your ad to a queue. Your advert will be bumped to the top when its turn comes. I didn't look into the following but it could be considered - non-donators will have a higher priority in the queue, thus countering the fact that donators can bump their topics more times and giving them a perk while also maintaining a healthy balance.

 

The queue will be too full. No, it won't! When one of the people who posted an advert changes crashes, leaves the server or changes characters, the advert will be removed.

 

A search function could be easily incorporated, thus giving us the ability to look for specific adverts - say that I want to buy a Huntley. I will specifically look for adverts selling a Huntley or vehicle dealerships rather than going through everything.

 

What if I want to post a different advert? Simply write it after /ad, /cad or /bad. It will replace the previous one with the new one.

 

Extra functionality? Being browser-based, the adverts will be accessible while you are offline as well via the same website loaded into a normal browser.

 

Commands to add: Changing the functionality of /ad, /bad and /cad.

Items to add: N/A.

How would your suggestion improve the server?

 

1. More immersion. Moving the adverts out of the chat will obviously make everything more immersive. If someone wants to look through them, they can choose to do so. You won't have to keep them enabled just in case that someone posts something you're interested in.

 

2. Ease of use and quality of life. You won't have to warm up your fingers and be ready for another round of spamming the chat ever again.

 

3. Extra-functionality. As described above, being able to search through ads and access them off-line.

 

4. Most importantly, it will accommodate for the continuous and rapid expansion of the player-base. Reaching a much higher number of players will make posting an advert so tedious that it won't be feasible anymore. While this system was fine for most servers, GTA World outgrew any other English GTA 5 or SA-MP role-playing server. This is a problem that no one had to face before and I'm personally glad that we are facing it.

 

Additional information: There are and have been plenty of suggestions on how to improve the current advertisement system. From what I've seen, this hasn't been suggested before. I personally believe that this is going to be the only feasible way of submitting and displaying in-game advertisements moving forward. Why?

 

The server's player base is expanding continuously. We've come from 200-300 players online at peak times to 1050. It's safe and realistic to say that in time, sooner or later, we can expect that number to grow to 2000, 3000 or even more. It's just a matter of time. Fighting to be the first person to write /ad once the cooldown expires becomes harder and harder and it will eventually become impossible - when 300 people will do the command at the same time, the "winner" will be decided by milliseconds.

 

This won't be a quick or easy project but it is something that should 100% be looked into. We will definitely reach the point when this will be more of a serious issue than a simple inconvenience and it's better to be prepared than to have to improvised. Hope you enjoyed the read!

[Tennplugg]

Actually sounds really good. 

[knppel]

What it still fails to take in account is that it deprives ads of their intended invasive character.

 

 I get that people receive this as interruption of their chat but it's intended design:

Same as irl , you see ads every where you go every way you look. They do not just appear when you're looking them up to inform yourself on the current best offers on this and that.

 

For any sort of public event, public announcements or ads are crucial to inform the target audience of it, even when they're not actively scouting ads (even the Rolling Stones irl put posters all over and air promo videos and tvcommercials for their tours to bring 100,000 people together, it's not like everyone was sitting here waiting all day for concert announcements to spend their money on. Just to name a prominent irl example).

[Towbie]

10 minutes ago, knppel said:

What it still fails to take in account is that it deprives ads of their intended invasive character.

 

 I get that people receive this as interruption of their chat but it's intended design:

Same as irl , you see ads every where you go every way you look. They do not just appear when you're looking them up to inform yourself on the current best offers on this and that.

 

For any sort of public event, public announcements or ads are crucial to inform the target audience of it, even when they're not actively scouting ads (even the Rolling Stones irl put posters all over and air promo videos and tvcommercials for their tours to bring 100,000 people together, it's not like everyone was sitting here waiting all day for concert announcements to spend their money on. Just to name a prominent irl example).

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense what you're saying here, it isn't intended design. It's a system that's dated and has been used all the way back since the beginning of SA:MP. It's the easiest way of doing it since it's just another chat system.

It is an interruption, especially when just standing around or sitting inside a place with a lot of people, just to be swarmed in /bad's and /cad's about a mechanic shop or another night club opening up at the other end of the city.

A separate menu would be much more logical, perhaps one accessible through the phone. If you want to make physical ads you can use /cim or /createscene.

[Sixty]

Love the effort, but no matter what is said here queues don't work. They've been tried. High population servers will lead to increased waiting times, even with your suggestion of the ad being removed if people leave or crash. Even if there's only 20 people in queue out of the peak time of 800+, you're still waiting an hour for your ad to post (with still using the global 3 minute ad cooldown). Imagine if 100 people were queued? 200? It would be a constant "bump" battle to keep their ad at the top. It's basically the same as spamming the same ad but now with bumps. Nervous has previously said that queues will not work and I tend to agree. I do like the idea of the UI based advertisement system. Move it away from the chat into something that can be accessed on the in-game phone or something similar.

Edited April 12, 2021 by Sixty

[Speedy.]

Yes please. Been waiting for something like this. Implement, +1.

[Juicebox.]

I think ad's should stay in the chatbox and that a queue system simply won't work for the server size, but i think an option to see ad's via a UI would be awesome because what if you miss an ad and you really wanted to get back to it? You could in the UI menu the past couple of ad's 

[Yoak]

If this is done correctly this could completely wipe the forum advert section. Would love that. +1

[knppel]

48 minutes ago, Towbie said:

If you want to make physical ads you can use /cim or /createscene.

Technically not, the tooltip says one must not advertise with /cim.

 

1 hour ago, Yoak said:

If this is done correctly this could completely wipe the forum advert section. Would love that. +1

This is the real tricky deal. I'd love such a system, don't get me wrong, it'd beat the chat-ads we have by miles, also allowing more rp around advertising, but to fully execute it we'd need to have all the things used irl to -> advertise, dynamically available ingame to be applied from player side.

We'd need billboards, posters, radio jingles playing in shops and public venues, pop ups on phone and ic computers to further spam people while answering mail, tv screens with commercials, an option to watch them closely, newspapers with included ads.....

 

People who do not use it (typically due to their trade being illegal or discreet or both ic) tend to oversee what /ad and /cad all reflect ic and how mandatory it is for public businesses to also slam their ads into the faces of people who'd not on their own look them up.

[Entity]

2 hours ago, Sixty said:

Love the effort, but no matter what is said here queues don't work. They've been tried. High population servers will lead to increased waiting times, even with your suggestion of the ad being removed if people leave or crash. Even if there's only 20 people in queue out of the peak time of 800+, you're still waiting an hour for your ad to post (with still using the global 3 minute ad cooldown). Imagine if 100 people were queued? 200? It would be a constant "bump" battle to keep their ad at the top. It's basically the same as spamming the same ad but now with bumps. Nervous has previously said that queues will not work and I tend to agree. I do like the idea of the UI based advertisement system. Move it away from the chat into something that can be accessed on the in-game phone or something similar.

I have suggested a solution to that, though. Since the ads were to be moved out of the chat, meaning that they would stop spamming people, they would be able to be bumped every minute instead of every three minutes. If, say, we had 180 people in the queue, for the sake of round numbers, they'd be spread around the three queues, so we'd have 60 per queue. Out of these sixty, twenty will definitely crash, change characters or leave so we're left with forty. Yes, it might take forty minutes to post an advertisement.

 

However, there's a catch. Normally, posting an advertisement means that your text will pop up on everyone's screen for a few seconds until the other chats cause it to get lost in between. It's also highly likely to miss ads unless specifically looking for them due to the spam, as well as the interference of the other two channels. This way, even if the waiting times will be longer, your advert will still be displayed. If someone wants to, they will see it before it is bumped too. It will permanently be there until you leave or take it down. The only thing that will happen in forty minutes is that the advert will be at the top of the list. People will still be able to see or search for your advertisement in said queue, both in-game and in their browsers.

 

Queues would not work in the same way they were implemented on LS-RP, I agree. That system was very primitive and it is a recipe for failure, especially when talking about such a large player base. This is, however, a much different approach in which a variant of a queue will definitely work.

 

5 hours ago, knppel said:

What it still fails to take in account is that it deprives ads of their intended invasive character.

 

 I get that people receive this as interruption of their chat but it's intended design:

Same as irl , you see ads every where you go every way you look. They do not just appear when you're looking them up to inform yourself on the current best offers on this and that.

 

For any sort of public event, public announcements or ads are crucial to inform the target audience of it, even when they're not actively scouting ads (even the Rolling Stones irl put posters all over and air promo videos and tvcommercials for their tours to bring 100,000 people together, it's not like everyone was sitting here waiting all day for concert announcements to spend their money on. Just to name a prominent irl example).

 

The problem is that adverts should not be invasive and it should not be intended design. They're not invasive right now either - lots of people simply toggle adverts altogether. They're extremely disturbing when trying to role-play and they do ruin the immersion in lots of situations.

 

The system is extremely similar to what we have right now. There really is no use to have to fight with 200 people on who types /ad the fastest. Neither system is perfect but I believe this to be much more useful in the long term than the current one. We have to see the large picture - while adverts might be an inconvenience now, they will become a bigger and bigger problem as the player base grows. This solution will still work much better than the alternative.