The game’s written by chinese gold farmers, with the in-game art stolen from Age of Empires, and the text stolen from Civilization. Go fig.
What’s a “gold farmer”?
Serious reply: if you’re getting that many ads for them, maybe you’ve got some malware.
Groups of people hired to monopolize various areas of the game’s “playing field” to make a lot of in-game gold coins. They tend to work in teams, running round the clock when possible, to try to scoop up valuable resources outside, or to go into dungeons and find good magic items, then sell those on the game auction house for gold coins. The gold coins are then sold, against the Terms of Service of the company running the game, for real life money to game players who want more game gold to spend. This involves spammers coming into the game on temporary accounts to spam the chat channels with “buy gold now, come to goldfarms-R-us.com” (hopefully not a real site) ads that scroll all your text off the screen with the sheer volume. They also send you private in-game messages to come buy gold.
Some also offer “powerleveling services” which means “I’m going to trust some total stranger with my account info, hoping they won’t strip my characters of all things of value in addition to taking my money, but intending for them to get my character lots of experience and hopefully along the way the GMs won’t notice something’s up and ban me.”
Interesting - yes, it seems I’m not getting the same number of ads on my home computer.
On my work computer, I get an Evony ad on every single Straight Dope page (SD helps me keep my finger on the pulse so it’s excusable for work), on dictionary.com, on yahoo, and six or seven other sites I often browse. At home I still see them but not in such profusion.
I’ll check it out. Thanks for the heads up.
I dunno–I suspect it has something do with the ad server tracking your site visit habits. If you play more online games on your work computer, the ad server may realize this and serve you this obnoxious ad correspondingly more. I’ve been seeing this ad a lot; in fact, my wife saw me playing a flash game last night, saw the ad, and said, “Is this a porn game?” This thread was very timely!
That very first one that starts their descent into sleaze is cute.
Well, I’ve never played an online game at work, but yes - it’s pretty embarrassing to have people come in while my computer is on, but I’m not at the desk, and glance at my monitor and the first thing they see is a skanky ho in the advert sidebar.
So now I’m Mr. Skanky ho seeker.
It pissed me off a bit when I got more or less the same comments from a secretary that you got from your wife.
By the way, the picture that I’m seeing is not one of the ones that was documented in the link
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001286.html
provided by Alka Seltzer.
The picture that keeps coming up on my computer is this one
It’s full of skank.
I was under the impression the term “skank” primarily reflected a lack of physical attractiveness, and I would have to say the ads I have seen don’t fit that parameter. Indeed, one might find any of them acceptable, assuming intellectual independence, self-actualization and empowerment.
(For an evolved man, those are the most crucial characteristics, followed closely by a jugilicious rack.)
Ludicrous? Even ads for actual porn usually show more than just breasts after all.
And it’s also ripped off, from a site that sells costumes.
What always annoyed me was how terrible the breasts were painted in this one: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/evony-ad-5.jpg WTF? It’s not hard to paint breasts and have them look decent, but those are seriously misshapen. +1 to the OP, the “Evony: BOOBS! boobsBOOBSboobsboobsBOOBSboobs” ads have been annoying me for some time.
I love the text on Gaudere’s link. “Play DISCREETELY”? Okay, a) I’m not ordering a dildo and b) that’s one too many "e"s in there. Notice that squiggly red underline? Yeah. Might want to spell check that one.
I finally took a leap & tried it. The ads are a lie. There are no boobs.
Well, I guess the players are boobs.
She looks like a transsexual.
I can only guess that they are trying to suggest that you can somehow play secretly and not be caught at work because you don’t have to install a game client or anything. All lies. Browser based games are just as easy to find on the network as locally installed game software is. On Monday I’m going to have my team fire up their sniffers and see how much of this is going on.
I know! She reminds me of a computer sales rep guy I used to know - if he’d grown his hair out, slapped on a few pounds of make up, and developed a big fat pair of boobs. When I look at that picture I can only hear that nasal monotone voice explaining to me about storage capacity and functionality. It’s… unsettling.
Well, after the tech bust and now this recession, a guy’s gotta put food on the table somehow, My Lord.
Ha, they really upped the ante on that last one.
“This medieval stuff just isn’t drawing anyone in, but people always like boobs!”
What are these “ads” you speak of, anyway?
Their ads are all over tvtropes.org, but I’ve only seen the type that’s in isamu’s link.
I have to admit to trying Evony, thinking it may be a decent free RPG (I also download just about ever one hour free trial from MSN games. Don’t judge me).
It’s not good. Not good at all. I gave it a couple of evenings, because it starts off where you can do a lot of city building at the beginning. It seemed OK…a little lame, but not too lame for a free game. After the first evening, anything I needed to build took hours unless I used an item. Of course, you have to pay for the items (you get some as in-game loot, but not many at all). Also, for every level of building that you make, you get the tiniest bit of in-game growth. There is no satisfaction at all, and it’s really not worth paying for.
The world chat screen features a lot of people asking where the queen is. The marketing works.