Next Event Announcement & Problems of the last Treasure Hunt Event

Next Event

The next event is planed to start between Thursday 6th March 2009 and Friday 13th March.

I’m planning to increase the winning pot for this event significantly! It should be around 150-200 PED!!!

Future Changes

Payout Penalties active

However, with the next event, there will also be a penalty for most hints given. So for every hint, there will usually be 25% penalty in the payout (100% on first Tip, 75% on second, 50% on third, 25% on forth).

But I’ll reserve the right to post some smaller hints, which won’t reduce the payout amount. So the sooner you find the treasure, the more you can win. The first big tip will take a few days to give the people enough time to find the treasure and win the full payout.

Advertising

For the next event I’m also planning to change the advertising platform and try it with Layer/Floating Ads. Google Adsense is very good in some cases and a good amount of traffic, however it relies actively on the content and the users who click on it to generate revenue. While Layer/Floating Ads only require to be shown for a few seconds (~5 seconds) every few hours.

Important thing: You’d need to keep the Layer open for at least 5 seconds before closing it, then it won’t be shown again for a while. If you close it in less than 5 seconds, it will appear again on the next page refresh.

Feel free to leave comments about the new advertising system and the planed winning pot.

But keep in mind: The advertisement will be necessary in order to fund the winning pots, so it’s also vital that people don’t use some fancy banner blockers which could block it, as it will reduce future winning pots or even lead that the events are completely canceled.

The problems

I’ve also encountered a few problems with my current event system. During the last 48 hours the “Treasure” was picked up by someone who wasn’t participating in the event (no submission was sent). Yesterday it happened very often between 16:00 and 03:00 MindArk time, i had to replace it 3 or 4 times.

To be honestly, that surprised me a bit, as i was thinking that the rate of “ninja” pickups would be much smaller. Well, on other side, in the day before it was only picked up once.

I’m not sure how much problems this could cause at a later point. I see that there could be a problem, if people are checking out a certain place after the object was “ninja looted” and don’t come back again.

The only thing i could recommend for now: Check the places more often than just once. I’ll try to regularly check it, but there are also times I’m sleeping or not at home

Maybe I underestimated the “ninja looting” rate, as i thought that there aren’t so many players running around (you usually don’t see many outside of PA and the big cities/meeting points). Or I was just unlucky to place the treasure in a place which is quite close to an teleporter not far way from the starter towns.

For the notes: It was in Billy’s Spaceship Yard in one of the broken Spaceships. The decision for this location was mainly due to it being an introduction event and newcomers should easily be able to access it without having first to run over to the other end of the world.

Future events may have the treasures placed much further away from the next teleporter or the starter areas of Port Atlantis, so the chances will probably be lower that people accidently “ninja loot” the treasure.

If you have any ideas how to improve this, so people don’t accidently loot the treasure, leave a comment please. Any ideas will be welcomed on how to improve the system!