Upgrade Now Button

It was explained in the OP.

Continued thought: Ads work well when the viewer has some level of control over when they have to sit through them.
Continued thought #2: they work even better if their timing coincides with a moment involving a heightened sense of reward. ...it just can't be a patronizing reward though. For instance; receiving a medal for doing "chores" with an engineer's repair tool = poor candidate

If you want to have a moderation discussion drop me a PM. I'm absolutely happy to explain what we do.

Will pop up ads be controlled by the show/don't show notification setting?

oh the irony

Thing is, I don't care. There should be no popups during game play, for members or non members. I have never had a sale go by I was not aware of, and everyone is already aware they can subscribe. Further, clearly this dev team or advertising team or whoever is responsible cannot handle the temptation to use and over use such an obnoxious in game advertising method, so the coders should remove it.

And when I say no game interupting pop ups I mean non at all, not just a few per session. That is still not acceptable.

Could you please make note to the marketing / dev team, that the placement of the UPGRADE NOW button is a bit too intrusive?

Having it in the place of integral gameplay buttons such as DEPLOY and SPAWN is very jarring, and will undoubtedly cause countless misclicks. I imagine that was the marketing teams intention, to keep getting the membership offer screen popping up on screen.

Making it a gaudy burning orange color also encourages players to accidentally hit that button instead of Deploy/Spawn when in a rush.

You made it clear that removing the UPGRADE NOW button is "not the direction the game is headed", though It would be much appreciated, if the button was relegated onscreen somewhere that is more out of the way of regularly used game buttons.

Hmm, I think I agree with that actually (in reference to popups during gameplay). I'd much rather prefer it to be a notification you can dismiss by pressing K and then clicking dismiss. They can send notifications in that way as many times as they like, but at least I've got the option of dismissing it AFTER I've finished my battle. The above though I think only applies to sale notifications.

In response to membership notifications, I believe non-members should get the notification pop-ups on screen. I don't think it should be frequent, as in 2 hours per notification is reasonable as you're playing the game for a prolonged period of time and thus the game thinks membership might benefit you.

I don't think it's something the developers wanted to put in, this seems to be coming from above but they gotta take their orders! End of the day though everybody is aware that subscriptions are declining for various reasons, not just for Planetside 2 but for all of SOEs games (thus the shutdowns of various f2p games).

If advertisements for non-members is what it takes to keep Planetside 2 afloat, I will bite that bullet.

It is okay to tell people that there is a sale on. ONCE. Right after login, the first time they die or when they spawn at the warpgate. Or during loading screens when you can't do a thing anyway.

But NOT during the game, preferably when you are flying or running around in a biolab where's enemies behind every corner. People are getting killed by this popup ads and they are getting REALLY pissed off about it.
This will not lead to more people getting memberships, it will enforce active members to cancel their memberships.

Also people will get the reflex to just hit "n" if they are getting any popup, declining friendship invitations and squad invites which will make the game worse for everybody.

While I'm sure that's true it's the devs and the community managers who interface with the players, so they're the ones who are going to get beat up until something is done. And let's face it, people are going to play the game less rather than deal with this if they don't take it out.

How are people going to play less? They're launching on the PS4!

I don't think much will be done, adverts are here to stay but the way in which they're delivered will probably change.

I don't mind the Upgrade Now button much, it's not exactly subtle but it doesn't affect gameplay. But sale\membership nag popups do not belong in a FPS game where they appear in the middle of a fight. I can understand having them on the death screen and possibly on the map before respawning but never onscreen during an actual battle, they annoy people more than they encourage them to spend money. This sort of thing might be acceptable in the mobile F2P space but it's rarely seen in more serious PC F2P titles and for a good reason.

Upgrade now button needs to go away......its friggin HUGE and obnoxious. I have misclicked it a few times already.....its very annoying.

This. Polish up a little bit before you start pushing for member signups.

Because it makes the game annoying to play and looks unprofessional.

There should be a "don't ask again" or at least a "don't show again for the next 7 days" button. The pop-ups have not been too bad for me because I play on 1920x1080 and it occupies a small portion of my screen. But still, no distractions would be better than occasional distractions.

@RadarX

Well as i stated before on the other thread, while i understand all this ads on a "free to play" case, i have invested in this game, not as a subscriber, i differ from that business model (i work and i travel a lot), and im sure ive spent enough to be qualified as a client, but i think the people that have at least paid 15$ (nearly 100 in my case) should have the option of having the ads gone (i mean the"upgrade" ones, the sale ones i guess they are ok) and SPECIALLY the ones in form of notifications, those were a terrible idea!

It makes it annoying to play for non-members & members right now for these reasons:

- Members are getting notifications which they won't do, as RadarX has already said in this thread. Likely a bug.
- It looks unprofessional because the graphics are disproportionate to the menus but once that's fixed, it'll look a bit cleaner.
- Members are getting sale notifications as pop ups when they should really be the type of notification you notice by pressing K & going to your notifications.

Other than that, if you're playing a game enough to be properly annoyed by notifications telling you to upgrade to a membership, shouldn't that be a hint enough that it'd actually benefit you given the amount of hours you're sinking into it?

In regards to people that have bought SC and contributed to the game though, that's hard to argue for. You could buy 500SC and never buy again, but SOE would likely not be able to distinguish the amount, only the fact you've either bought or you haven't. Plus it's not a sustainable amount of money for them, which is what they want more than micro-transactions.

RadarX did not say members won't get notifications, he said they won't get them as often. I know personally I'm not going to quit, I'm already too deep. But any time I see a game, either on my phone, PC, whatever, that pops up in game ads, that's it, I quit. So if I was a new player I'd try it out, get nagged, and uninstall.

I should note I'm not talking about the upgrade buttons in the menu. That's life in games these days, you expect ads in the menus.

That's awkward.