As I keep picking away at new UI work, I've been wondering if ads are the best way to generate revenue. They are annoying and they can interrupt your experience.

Would having a background bitcoin miner in the app using a minimal amount of processing power on your device to generate bitcoins for the game be better than ads?

Ideally, we just offer a premium account that allows users to avoid all of that but for free accounts, I'm curious what the thoughts are on that topic.

Thanks!
Pang

What's the point in putting that much into it unless you're actually gonna try and market the game?

like tpb did?

Though 2 of the 3 computers I use for this game are already too slow for the game(yes they dont run smothly when 3 or more browser windows are open and mIRC is running) I would have to have the premium option. As long as the premium option exists and is affordable I would be fine with it.

Edit: What about mobile devices?

On a deeper level Im against any change that would favor activity over skill, and this is a change that would incentivise developers to take the game even more in that direction than it already is(to make us stay logged in and mine for you), thus further excluding anyone with a busy life from EE.

New work isn't just for all of you, it's to attract new folks + bring back former players :)



Yes, exactly! But calling it out as something we're doing rather than just turning it on as a background thing on top of ads (which is what I understand tpb did)



Mobile devices are a key driver of what we're doing. Both a better mobile web experience and mobile apps. It's a pet project so it's going really slow but it's not just a reskin of what we're doing now. It's a drastically improved experience on all platforms and gets us into app stores and onto Facebook etc.

I expect changes to the game that would focus on activity/consumability would be on solo servers or other servers. Any discussions I've been part of don't plan to change the nature of the Alliance server or FFA style games other than hopefully creating a larger audience for this sort of "end game" style content (clans, long term netting, big wars, etc). Obviously we'll look at ways to improve engagement and the overall game for clans/warring/netting etc along with any other work.

Id pay for a premium. Can you carry over my plat account from swirve? ;)

Hopefully this works out and you are able to have a big enough audience for Limited Server(access granted along with a small fee for eliminating ads)

lol@dissident

our plats were for lifetime of earth2025 and that ended years ago (and mehul used those monies to buy his coffeeshop).


drunck: that would need way bigger playerbase to make limited feasible otherwise it'd be team with (possibly) bigger tags and p2p.

Yea, qz and I are yet to get our coffee shops so it'll be a new system :p

But outside of premium, which we would presumably offer, I'd love to hear thoughts on ads vs background mining while playing. :)

as long as it doesn't hog much resources.

Have you done the math? I think this could be a great idea, but I don't know that we have enough players which could generate equivalent revenue. I've done a fair bit of crypto mining so I know it takes a lot of processing power to generate much. I'd be worried that in order to do that, you'd have to slow down things a fair bit. If not, great! Have you guys tracked how much processing power the current ads use?

It should also be off the table for mobile, I feel like a phone would be slowed down too much even with a small bit of javascript running. My phone is already slow enough to load EE.

This all said, I would gladly pay a couple bucks a month to support the site and avoid this.

Seems a bit late to get into the game with no enough users here. For it to work, you'd need to find a way to expand the gamebase to at least several times the size, no?

I'm not good with running background processes, doesn't matter who they're for.

I'm not a big fan of lending my cpu/gpu for free. I would require a % of the proceeds.

lol, first of all, mining bitcoin with cpu isnt worth a damn. second of all, they were mining monero. third of all, just get a javascript blocker and no mining will happen, and forth of all, in this game you dont stay on the pages long enough for critical mining to happen.

This type of thing is only good for media sites where you idle on pages for periods of time.