Merchant Archive

Pex posted a request for suggestions on how events could be promoted in-game to which I replied:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Events&message.id=1846&highlight=#M1846

I think that this is an opportunity for Merchants to get some much needed real advertising capability. Most of the suggestions were PA or Player City oriented, or involved some method that would require a player to frequently go to some effort without reasonable hope they would find anything of interest.

Stripped of the event oriented retoric, my suggestion was this.

A REAL advertising capability has to be:

* Involuntary: We need to be able to advertise to someone who does not yet know he wants our product and to identify an event like a sale the player doesn't expect but might be of interest.

* Explanatory: There has to be room to include a significant amount of information, at least a few hundred characters on multiple lines in order to sell more complex products, or to sell to newbies.

* Graphics rich: This is an ad, and notepad style text is not really satisfactory. A minimum would be text coloring, but font selection and even some iconic graphics would help a lot.

The ONLY involuntary advertising right now visiblein cities is patrolling droid names. That is horribly limited in content, far worse than even a line of notepad text or an installation name.

The ONLY explanatory text is available in the description on bazaar postings and is very hard for the potentialparticipant to see (it requires complex prior knowledge of where to look and 30 seconds of waiting for screens to load). No coloring seems to work there, much less fonts or icons.

The ONLY colorable text is on a house or harvester name. These cannot be placed in high traffic areas, so the potential participant has to travel to see it. At least it is fairly involuntary if they are standing in the right place. They have very limited length, and are filtered by odd "obscenity" rules.

Signs appear as a catagory in the bazaar, and I don't know what other implementationis alreadydone. If they were droppable in the camp buildable area outside cities, and allowed a full line of colorable text as a name with a more complete description behind a "read" on the radial they would help a lot. Three or four placed near a city's main exitswould catch most of the city's visitors.

The next best suggestion I saw in response was a running reader board in starport waiting rooms. A newspaper wasn't too bad, if SOE would invest in some news content for it on a regular basis so it would be read by many.

Do you have any suggestions for him? Act quickly, he looks like he is going to close the post.

I agree with you on this. I would like better ways to advertise.

Awesome suggestions! More frequent uses of advertising skills would help provide value to the merchant class and incentive to keep it after putting vendors down.

Here are some related ideas for beefing up all of the non-Efficiency branches:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=18251