Continued from Part 1, where I try to define terms and set out the basics of how the system works.
There are not enough quality advertisers willing to use the offer wall system for it to be truly profitable. In order for it to work, you have to let less scrupulous folks in. The sort that will surreptitiously sign users up to cellphone subscriptions (that’s where the REAL money is to be made in this), “trial” offers where you end up paying vast amounts in postage and packing for your free samples, or who sell personal details to spammers and other unsavoury entities.
The content provider will have a disclaimer stating that the offers are nothing to do with them, and are the responsibility of the offer broker. Should you point out that one or more offers is fraudulent, the content provider will gasp and be very shocked, but of course it is not their fault at all. They may even take steps to remove the offending offer, but it will be back with a different name before too long. Content providers are trading on the trust you have in them. Most likely you would not normally click on the sort of sites that the offers lead to, but many people trust the game maker to have their best interests at heart.
If the content provider worked with advertisers directly, they would not be able to abdicate responsibility for the quality of offers. This is the real utility of offer brokers for the content providers. They allow content providers to deny responsibility for any harm that comes to the users that trusted them.
Incidentally, when the offer brokers themselves are confronted with evidence of wrongdoing, they also respond with denials, and point to grand sounding codes of conduct. They rarely actually enforce these codes, because that would eat into profits, in the same way that Facebook mostly turns a blind eye to breaches of its own code. As the different brokers all endlessly repackage eachother’s deals, it’s a long game of pass the buck if you want to find out who is responsible for publishing any given scam.
I think this is why Turbine turned away, at the last, from its own offer wall. It is possible that they genuinely did not realise the sort of scams they would be opening their customers up to, though if that is true then they really did not do their homework. More importantly, unlike most social gaming companies, Turbine actually has a good reputation, and they will have viewed damage to that as an unacceptable cost. Zynga’s reputation for ethical behaviour is already in the mud, so they don’t care. As Zynga and Facebook are both part owned by Moscow based Digital Sky Technologies, Zynga probably don’t have to worry too much about Facebook making too much of a fuss about their behaviour, bar the occasional wrist-slap for appearance’s sake. Unfortunately, Zynga’s success has lead to emulation by many other companies, with even Raph Koster’s Metaplace using the offer wall system for their Island Life Facebook game.
The other problem with dealing with low quality advertisers is that they not only want to exploit the user, but they also want to pay as little as possible to the content providers. This is one very common sort of scam:
All well and good. So you fill in all these details requested, and hit OK.
Oh dear! It turns out that they didn’t have a survey for you after all. What a terrible shame. I guess you won’t be getting any points, and your content provider that sent you here won’t be getting paid either. Now they have your email address, and a whole caboodle of useful demographic information, and it didn’t cost them a penny. They could have told you that the survey was closed before you filled all that in, or not had it on the offer wall in the first place, but that would rather defeat the object of getting some lovely personal data for free.
The uncompleteable offer is a common trick. In many, once you think you’ve completed everything you need to, you’re then passed to another survey or form to fill in, and this continues until you give up, having spread your details to any number of individual companies. For each of those subsites you complete, the advertiser is being paid for lead generation. There are suspicions that even though the user won’t get their game tokens, some money may also still be passed to the offer broker. Otherwise, you would think that the offer broker would be firmer about preventing the scam, as it would be eating into their own profits. Of course, when the offer broker is also the advertiser this ceases to matter.
As offers are aware of your geographical location I don’t tend to see a lot of the cellphone ones, which are mostly targeted at the US, else I’d have used one of them for my example.TechCrunch wrote the definitive article on how many of these scams work, and has been instrumental in the fightback against them.
I’ll end with the story that first got me interested in what these companies are doing. Gamers were being offered reward points for writing a letter to Congress opposing US healthcare reform. While not necessarily fraudulent with regards to the user getting his points, it did raise a lot of ethical questions. Business Insider broke the original story. It was a sufficiently big deal that it made television news:
The healthcare scandal is what caused Zynga to stop using offer walls. For a couple of months, until it had all blown over, then it was back to business as usual.
It’s possible that content providers may not get off completely scot free though. Zynga have been named in a class action lawsuit for facilitating the mobile scam:
Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has filed a landmark lawsuit against Zynga and Facebook arising from advertising scams and unauthorized charges imposed on users of Zynga games within the Facebook social network. The suit seeks compensation and injunctive relief for all users of Zynga games that have been victimized by unauthorized charges in connection with their use of Zynga games. Zynga’s most popular games on Facebook include:
* Mafia Wars
* Zynga Poker
* FarmVille
* YoVille
Users of these social games may have been charged without their consent for “special offers” that result in unauthorized bank, credit card, or phone charges, sometimes through the use of phone text messages and auto-recurring SMS subscriptions. Many of these companies and advertisers making “special offers” then make it very difficult — or impossible — for users to get their money refunded.
What applies to Zynga in that lawsuit applies just as thoroughly to any of the smaller content providers who used the same system. If the lawsuit is successful in stripping companies of their fraudulently gained profits, it could have massive ramifications for the entire social gaming industry.
You know, if any gaming companies who did care about their customers and reputations really wanted to, I’m fairly sure they could join together and form their own little offer wall agency that really did only accept offers that play fair with users. It’s odd that nobody is doing that. Until they do, any game that uses offer walls will continue to stand on a foundation made of spam and fraud.
Update: This confused the heck out of a non-MMO playing friend of mine. Sometimes I forget such people still exist. My lovely drawing was a reference to World of Warcraft’s new 25 dollar Celestial Steed which is making the MMO news at the moment.
My views on this sort of thing are pretty well known (hint: I dislike them profoundly), and I’ll resist repeating them again, today at any rate, especially as I don’t actually play WoW these days.
What the arrival of the $25 mount says to me is that Blizzard have decided that WoW’s best days are behind it, and are moving on to milking their players for all they can, until their next MMO is released.
I’ve been working on this for a while, but recent developments have somewhat increased the urgency for me to actually get around to finishing this. While I’m sorting out the juicier bits, lets make sure we’re on the same page regarding terms, and what offer walls are.
Offer Walls, or “Advertising Payment Gateways” are most commonly associated with social games on platforms such as Facebook. For the game makers it is a great way to get some cash out of users who recoil from the idea of spending real world money. This is a typical example, from the Facebook game “Island Life”.
Island Life's Offer Wall, powered by Super Rewards
Social Games are where this system began, but it has been slowly working its way into other sorts of online games. While I’ve been working on this, DDO has announced, and implemented the very same day, exactly such an offer wall for Dungeons and Dragons Online, cleverly called “The Offer Wall”. In an almost parallel announcement, Nexon, the makers of such games as Maple Story, have also started using the same Offer Wall system, Super Rewards.
There are essentially four parties involved in what happens.
The Offer Brokers
Middlemen standing between the content providers who need to monetise their content, and the folks who want something out of you. They have API which you can easily plug in to your existing website or game with a minimum of fuss. Super Rewards and Offerpal are two of the biggest. It’s a rapidly shifting industry, as the smaller players are being taken over and absorbed by the larger.
The API creates an offer wall, as seen above, on the content providers site. It’s simply a list of offers and associated point reward, clicking on which will send you to a page of the advertiser’s choosing.
The Content Provider
The Content Providers are the folks who make the game or website that needs to be monetised. So far as Offer Wall usage in gaming is concerned, the content provider typically creates (or already has) their own currency, be it godfather dollars, gold coins, or Turbine points. This currency is used for buying items, cosmetic alterations, or advantages within the game. They then set an exchange rate with the offer broker, so the API knows how many points to offer for any given deal.
The Advertiser
Meanwhile, at the other end of the business, you have the advertisers. (That title is overly kind to a lot of them, but we’ll go with “advertisers” for them in general terms.) They create the sites you clickthrough to, set the conditions under which they’ll pay, and decide how much they’re willing to offer when those conditions are met. Typically, they either want the user to give them money, or to give them something they can sell, such as personal data.
The advertiser is not necessarily who you think it is. You may end up at something that looks like it belongs to an energy or car company. They’ll be the ones paying the advertiser for a lead once you fill the form in, but they are not the ones who submitted the offer to the offer broker. In many cases the offer is a package of such sites, with each one popping up after you finish the previous, and all needing completion for the user to qualify for points, resulting in several payments to the advertiser.
The User.
That’s you and me, clicking on neat sounding offers to get points to spend in our games.
So, in theory at least, the offer broker takes all these deals, from myriad sources, and makes them appear on the content providers site for the user to view. The user clicks an offer, and does whatever the offer requires them to do. This triggers a payment to the offer broker from the advertiser, and then passes some of that along to the content provider, who then gives the user the promised amount of game currency.
Where it gets complicated.
That all seems fairly simple, thus far. Where it gets complicated is that the offer brokers are also advertisers. They use eachother’s systems to funnel their own advertiser customers, to increase their reach onto websites that the offer broker does not have a direct link to.
So advertiser A might send their offer to broker B. Broker B puts that offer on the offer walls they directly control, but also creates an encapsulating offer which they place with broker C. Broker C might even do the same, sending it all to Broker D, with it finally ending up on Content Provider E’s website. Of course, Broker B’s offer to Broker C is conditional on Advertiser A’s conditions being met, and so on. Should the User click through and satisfy Advertiser A’s conditions, A pays B the agreed sum. B takes their slice, and passes the rest to C, who does the same. Eventually the Content Provider gets their share.
That’s alright, so far as it goes, but the problem is that it makes it very hard to figure out exactly who is responsible for what. Anyone who has taken the time to look at the offers on different offer brokers walls will have noticed that they’re pretty much identical.
You might ask, “But Ark, couldn’t the content provider make a lot more money if they cut out the middlemen, and worked directly with advertisers?”
Theoretically yes, but the overheads from running it yourself may or may not exceed the expected gains from dealing with advertisers directly. That is the usual reason you will receive, and it is certainly a fair one. After all, they’re gaming companies, not advertising agencies. But there is another reason, which I believe is central to the profitability of the enterprise, and without which the whole thing falls apart.
Imagine my surprise when leafing through this month’s bank statement, I saw that I was still being billed.
In fact, I was billed twice. On the 5th of March they initially billed me 30 dollars. Then they billed me another 15 dollars, just for fun. Then they refunded the thirty dollars. Of course, they didn’t refund the international transaction fees I paid on any of them. Given that my account was still active when I logged in today to cancel AGAIN, they will have billed me for April too.
This is ironic timing, considering Mythic’s billing woes this week. At least I didn’t get billed for a thousand bucks. Probably.
I want my money back. I am entirely certain that I cancelled my subscription to STO, and have obviously not logged in since my free month was due to lapse. I would write a ticket to their billing department, but “create new ticket” button on their website does not appear to actually work with any browser at my disposal. I’m not going to do it from ingame, as that would give them ammunition to say that I had been playing.
The events of this week are a lesson to us all. Watch your bank statement carefully, as I doubt I am the only one affected by Cryptic’s carelessness with OUR money. What’s worse is the thought that they might have considered my subscription to be a vote of approval for their game.
Just in the interests of reducing FUD, I checked the records and without mentioning any specifics there has been no billing error. All is well in the state of Denmark.
– Coderanger, 4th of April.
Which I take to mean that he’s saying that the people complaining are making it up. Because it couldn’t possibly be their pathetic excuse for an account website. Apparently I need to start taking screenshots when I cancel games. Either STO reactivated my account, or it never registered my cancellation properly in the first place. Neither are unacceptable to me. I am very angry.
In a shock announcement, Mattel, the makers of Scrabble, have decided that proper nouns should be allowed. This change is being brought in to make the game more accessible for younger players, letting them use the names of their favourite television characters and celebrities.
I don’t know about you, but when I was young, I did know some words that were not proper nouns, and I suspect young people today do also. Mattel is treating them as if they are celebrity-obsessed halfwits. Maybe research has determined that they indeed are, but that was where Scrabble could be a useful educational experience.
Up until now, all you needed to deal with any quibbles was a decent sized dictionary. Now you’ll also going to need the TV guide, and a subscription to “Hello!” magazine.
This is the sort of thing that makes me despair. D&D has already been reduced to a glorified boardgame by its miserable 4th edition. MMOs are each more dumbed down than the last. Scrabble, I thought I could count on you.
Respeccing to carpenter went without a hitch. You become a level 9 artisan, ready to pick your first specialisation of scholar, outfitter, or craftsman. Some relatively painless levelling later, and Maltheas became a level 20 carpenter.
The Shady Swashbuckler did indeed change which “Shadows of the Betrayed†reward he offered, and the legendary Sculpting Hammer of Twiddy Bobbick now rests in Maltheas’ backpack. As Fiddy Bobbick was also a keen tinkerer and famed explorer, he has always been a source of inspiration to Maltheas, so it seems appropriate that our Ratonga friend now wields his favourite tool. Maltheas can’t actually use it yet, of course.
I's gots a hammer! Now I's needings the bell!
It occurred to me that if I was feeling particularly keen, I could have respecced and quickly levelled for each of the professions, getting myself a complete set. Obviously not too useful for wielding, but they do also convert into very nice looking furniture items, and are steeped in Everquest lore. I’m going to resist the temptation, mostly because I’m a bit crafted out right now.
Anyhows, thats all done. Now begins the slow slog back up to 90. I think I’ll wait until I have some crafting vitality for that!
Today, after five long years, Maltheas became a level 90 Weaponsmith. It was a fine moment of celebration, as he reached the very peak of the profession he chose, so long ago, back in Temple Street.
So this evening he will be respecing to Carpenter, beginning again as a newbie crafter.
There are a number of reasons for doing this:
1. Primarily, there doesn’t seem to be much point in actually being a weaponsmith these days. Back in the day, you could make a good living from making fine weapons to order, but in recent years it has become very rare that Maltheas, or anyone else, actually wants anything he can make, apart from for the “Proof is in the Pudding” quest. The best craftable weapons in the game are general recipes, rather than weaponsmith ones, which he can just as easily make as a carpenter. Until recently, weaponsmiths did also have access to some special adornment recipes, but they have been moved to the new adorner craft.
In addition, the recent stat changes have lead to an awful lot of completely useless stats on crafted weapons, and they lack the ability modifiers many looted items have acquired. Anyhows, as Maltheas levels at Extreme Quester speeds, he has plenty of time to find the best equipment, and that is not usually crafted.
2. As a templar, he can only use crushing weapons. The reward for weaponsmiths for the “Shadows of the Betrayed” quest is piercing. Now, I know that it is supposed to just be ornamental, and I shouldn’t worry about it, but look at its stats.
It has over double the DPS of the awesome weapon Maltheas is already using. To a low level adventure who is also a high level crafter, the Ethernaut craft-weapons are like lightsabers. I am hoping that once Maltheas respecs to Carpenter, the Shady Swashbuckler, who sells rewards from quests you have completed, will offer him the carpenter’s hammer version. This is not really why I decided to respec, but it did get me thinking about it, questioning why I was a weaponsmith, and influence which craft I chose to change to.
3, Carpenters have all the fun! They, and Provisioners, are the only professions that do not have to compete with item drops or quest rewards to any significant extent, and game balance is mostly irrelevant to furniture, so they will never end up in the situation of not having anything worth selling or getting nerfed. Admittedly, this fact has lead to there being a whole lot of carpenters, but even so, I’m looking forward to decorating the house with all the things Maltheas will make as he levels. Even if he never sells anything, at least he can actually use the stuff he levels up on to good purpose, which has not been the case with weaponsmith.
4. Quests. Mmmm, quests. He’s completed all the weaponsmith and outfitter specific quests. Becoming a carpenter will open up the carpenter and craftsman specific quests. Having said that, respeccing tradeskill is not something I plan on making a habit of, and the intent is that Maltheas will remain as a Carpenter for the foreseeable future. While the quests are nice, I am not sufficiently hardcore a crafter to be hugely looking forward to levelling him again.
5. To stop him singing this at me.
If Maltheas had a hammer.
Respeccing Maltheas’ tradeskill obviously has a few downsides. He will not be able to use his Earing of the Solstice, or his Jin’Tu’s gift until he has gotten back up to level 80. That will probably take a rather long time at the rate I work. He’ll lose all his weaponsmith-specific recipes of course, but that is a loss I can stand.
He gets to keep his tinker skills, or else I wouldn’t be considering this at all. He also will keep his harvesting skills, and any non-weaponsmith recipes, such as the Far Seas ones. To that end, before the respec, he’ll be trying to max his harvesting skills out. It should be done tonight, so I’ll let you know how things turn out.
