Just when you thought "is he finally done with this blog?" I swoop back in with some weird slightly-news post.
W00t!
A quick note on that: I've made a lot of lofty goals in the past: I'll post one article every weekday! I won't disappear for months between posts! I'll wear pants today!
At this point, given how busy I've been with my actual paying job and so forth, I think it's time to lay out a new mission statement: I will make new posts when I'm willing an able. There may be gaps. It may be off topic. It may be inconsistent. But in the long run, this isn't go away. My incoherent babbling will go on for years to come. It just may not happen for some of the intervening months...
Anywho, time for a news!
A little while ago (I want to say within the last year), Marvel Puzzle Quest, D3's match 3 behemoth featuring everyone's favorite marvel characters, added a new feature called SHIELD Intercepts. It was the fairly traditional freemium game trope of giving you a bonus for watching an ad.
But it wasn't without its flaws. It was moderately random in its offering, so you never knew when it would come up. It offered fairly randomized rewards too (ranging from the hugely disappointing 500 iso-8 to the pants wetting 100 hero points. And it was always rather buggy, given that there would be months where I didn't get a single prompt for one of these ads.
I never really thought too much about it, I assumed it had something to do with my internet, or possibly just some app stability, but I finally sent in a request to the developers last week because I was able to watch the ads but the rewards weren't following.
Apparently my issues were not unique, because this week they discontinued the whole system.
That seems a bit rash to me, but I'm not a game developer (yet). I don't know how buggy the system was on the whole, but based on the friends and family that play the game, I think my issues were fairly uncommon for my peers. At any rate, watching ads with the promise of a reward without receiving it may be cause for some sort of legal (or moral) trouble, so maybe that was the last straw. Regardless, the developers shut it down because it was too buggy.
Will it come back? I don't know, and I haven't found anything online about a path forward. There are other possible ways to replace the system, but I for one think that the general idea was great. Giving players an option to watch an ad for in-game rewards is a great tool for developers in order to keep games free (while still keeping the studio in business). Especially when actually optional, having the ability to do this is great for everyone.
However, I would like a system where you could always go to a section of the app and watch a video for a reward. I would even accept slightly worse rewards than the intercepts if it was always available. Or make it so you have a set of 4 or 5 rewards that you could choose from. It could even rotate. Who knows?
The point is, I hope the development team brings it back. I don't really want to pay my own money to finance their game. But if I can watch a dozen ads to do my part to keep them in business, I will happily do that. So please, D3: bring back ads for rewards.
Let me know what you think about the whole thing in the comments.
Until next time,
Ryan
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