Quote from Becky Rose :

What we'd like to do is offer you great new features, but without money we cant do it, and we are fully aware that asking you for it is going to get us no where, but ...

If we can do all of this just for 0.25 seconds of your bandwidth whilst you connect to a server, is that okay with you guys?

Becky, Sam,

I'm sure you have great plans, and I'm grateful for all the wonderful things you have done so far. I also realise that running STCC/CTRA has cost you a lot of money, and that it will continue to be costly even with sponsoring.

Still, I'm against advertising. Not because of the bandwidth it costs; I have broadband, so I couldn't care less. But seeing ads does cost me money. Sponsors will only pay for the ads if they work. (OK, some sponsors may give money because they like your plans so much. But the average sponsor is well aware of the effectiveness of his ads.) Ads that work make sales rise, and the money from the sales came out of the pockets of the folks who watched the ads.

In short, the funds that you'd receive came from the visitors of your servers. But in an indirect way, and after the advertisement industry has gotten its share. You say you don't want to ask your visitors for money. But advertising also draws money from them -- without their consent, and (partly) outside their control.

With websites we've seen a technological arms race because of advertising. People who don't want to see ads invent ways to block them, and the folks who run the ads invent ways to circumvent the ad-blockers. Loads of effort has been spent in this war, in both camps. This may also happen in LFS.

Please consider this when you plan to cross the Rubicon.

I couldn'nt give a monkeys for non-intrusive billboard ads when I'm racing, all part of the trackside scenery - real or virtual, it makes no difference. If it helps creative people like the CTRA add really great extra functionality to the game experience with the revenue then good luck to them. As long as they are non-intrusive, for me that is the pivotal factor.

What about community advertising - keep it within LFS. Give the users the advertising space.

For example every 10,000 miles you do you get a space on a trackside billboard for a month. You could advertise your racing team (like the banners at the top of the forum), your company(if you've got one) or just yourself (your name and an artistic photo). The trackside images could be downloaded with skins (won't take up too much bandwidth). Then people could just show things like Cromo ads or whatever (well appropriate stuff!).

It makes it a LFS racer thing that would be just available to active racers, I don't quite know how it would work with offline stuff but surely for online it could just download the images from the master server each time you connect.

Just an idea to get users involved so they get to see what they want!

James :-)

Quote from al heeley :

As long as they are non-intrusive, for me that is the pivotal factor.

thats the whole crux of this
basically they are either nonintrusive and wont pay much (lfs billboards arent exactly f1 cars racing across the screen) or they have a very internetish in your face approach which will get them in the range where the admins will be able to afford more than caffeine pills to keep them awake during insim coding sessions from the ad money

at least thats my best guess at how marketing departments will approach a game like lfs

For what it's worth, I'm totally not against you guys wanting to improve the online experience of LFS in any way. I have no idea of the costs involved in maintaining a server day to day, and I'm also not the one thinking up grand ideas about how to take things to the next level, which of course requires practical approaches to the problems raised. I also don't really think that advertising is intrinsicly evil or anything- so I hope I'm not coming across as hysterical or paranoid, because all I wanted to do was raise some concerns which were specific to this thread.

Hope it works out for you guys, somehow...