Assembly Hall

I was chatting in the mining channel today and some folks were saying they played eve because they weren't so hot at the basics of economics, and eve being based on economics was a good and fun way to learn and get a better handle on the subject.

Being an individual who enjoys marketing and advertisement, my immediate though was, "How is there no marketing or advertising skill/branch in Eve?"

With that, I would suggest that a skill/branch be looked in to for those who enjoy Marketing and Advertising. This would of course tie in with the trade skills.

Allow these skills to tie in to the billboards which aren't really used to an extensive point currently. Depending on the skill level would effect the size/time allotted per ad/ etc. This would be awesome for folks who run salvage companies or hauling companies off my head, though this could easily be taken much further. It'd promote more in game interaction instead of using the forums as much as they do currently and bring more attention to flying in game. A salvage/wrecker company that invested in the skills would be able to promote their company and mission junkies who are too lazy to salvage could see the service when going through to their next mission hub and spark to the idea of using such a service, where they might have never had the idea.

This is only the tip of what I had thought of and would like to create a discussion on it where it could be fleshed out more if the initial concept was something worth going further with.

The entire 'spamming' of things is exactly what brought me to this idea. As for the billboards not being used, again another reason i came up with the idea as a starting point on using existing game content and making it more than just scenery.

As for marketing being like it is in the real world, I don't know how much marketing experience you've had, but while knowing people certainly helps, it never beats a good sale and display. :)

I think that for items the market already does a pretty good job of bringing together people that have something to offer with those that want something. For services however, there are much less effective ways to bring those people together in-game. People have to get active on forums, or already know the right people.

What is needed is something like yellow pages, where you can find everything from freighter services to mercenaries.

As for ads, I'm not a big fan. Just annoying visual pollution like in RL. And if we go down that route we'll soon also have "pay Aurum to remove Ads".

I understand what you are saying. The point is, if you really want to make the billboards effective at informing people about offers, they'd have to be much more prominent than currently, which IMO is not so good of a solution. I agree that you shouldn't need to go to the forums to find offers, therefor I proposed yellow pages.

Aurum for ad-free-ness was a sarcastic comment on where things would progress to if the marketing and pro aurum crowd would have their way.

While I believe your idea has merit, I think you're going about it in the wrong way. Thinking about the 'yellow pages' idea that a previous poster had said, I think this might pay off for the 'services' department.

What I envision is something similar to the Contracts system or the Corp or Agent Finders. People could pay a given amount to have their service (whether forum signatures, hauling, or other services) listed on the search option.

I think this would be both non-invasive (unlike the billboard idea) and profitable. Other than this, I support this idea.

I see where you're going with this, and I support it.

Would be nice if it was a corporate skill, honestly. You could give your corporation advertisement a % chance to be displayed, with corresponding skills to affect the area of influence.

My own thoughts:

A skill to determine % of appearance.
A skill to determine area of influence (HQ system, 1 jump within HQ system, 5 jumps within HQ system, entire HQ system region, etc)
A skill to determine the cost of displaying the advertisement.

The billboard advertisement should also differ from the regular corp adverts we have already. Something which can be noticed and read in less than 15 seconds.


Not only does this seem cool, it also shows you who runs the local area. If you're seeing a corporation's billboard advert every 5 minutes or every other gate, you start to get a feeling of who actually lives there and operates there. Will also give corps a reason to use the HQ except for "fake bases of operations", which is what most people use them for now.