[Dr. McKay]

Originally Posted by Powerlord What other reasons? The game engine falls back to the contents of motd_text.txt if HTML MOTDs are disabled.

Various plugins rely on the MOTD being enabled. A couple that come to mind are the backpack viewer and SMDJ (which I really need to update...)

[Daniel.PinionGG]

Hi Everyone,

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic here, and I will attempt to address all the issues that have been raised. If anyone would like to contact me directly, I'm available at [email protected] and am happy to address and questions or concerns.

I've had the entire team at Pinion read this thread, and we're grateful for the thought, time and effort that has gone into many of these posts. We understand every community will need to make their own decisions, and some will stick with us and some will not. Either way, we understand and support whichever way you chose to go.

A few points I would like to address:

* We do not want admins forcing ads during game play, it's still only designed for end of round, end of map, when joining, etc.

* If your average completion rate is under 60% we will not be able to purchase your impressions. The simple reason for this is we are not able to sell them, and it's not a viable model long term to buy something you can not sell.

* We realize that 60 day payment terms are a hard change to adapt to, but in many cases Pinion does not get paid for 90+ days. We are still carrying as much of the weight of the working capital gap as we can.

* Again on payment terms, keep in mind that you will still get paid every 30 days, but payments will be one month behind. For example January impressions will be paid in April (60 days), but February impressions will be paid in May. So once you get through the initial strain of falling behind a month, you will be back to where you were.

* We understand that some players crash when seeing the MOTD, this is something we have been working with Valve on, and we will continue to address these issues as we are able. As the MOTD really isn't 'our' space it's difficult to trouble shoot when something goes wrong. If anyone can shine any light on this please reach out.

* Having the MOTD disabled never went towards your impression count. Impressions appearing in DFP and not Liverail were caused by flash issues, latency, and other reasons which resulted in us buying something we could not sell.

As I said, if anyone has any thoughts, questions or comments please do not hesitate to speak out in this public forum, or contact me directly.

Good Gaming,

Daniel

[Fearts]

Maybe instead of forcing us to force our players to watch a Ad we could give them the option to watch it on their own.

Allow the server owners to give the players the option to watch the ad to help the server. Instead of forcing us to make the first thing people see a Ad (which I think is the reason a lot of people never used Pinion), we could have a simple command like !pinion and it will bring up the Ad page and force people to watch 85% of the video. You could then add a 20 minute wait time until a player can reuse the !pinion command. This way you would get your completion rate and the players wouldn't feel forced into doing something. As well, server owners could use their own methods to advertise the command to their players in their own style.

Example:

With a !pinion command I could make a script that would log each time a player typed !pinion and watched the ad. I could use this information for a give away raffle. Like Top 10 supporters (people who typed !pinion and watched Ad the most) get added to a raffle.

Doing this would make Pinion more of a open source project, in that it has it's set rules (must watch for X seconds and can only get the Ad every X minutes) but allows server owners the freedom to advertise it with their own ideas.

While it's obvious this method wouldn't generate near as many impressions as before, it will give people a reason to keep your plugin on their servers.

[PresidentEvil]

make the ad video take up a section of the screen instead of the full screen

that way people dont feel like closing it as soon as they see it and can actually read the rest of the motd, like server rules and news

[ThatMatt]

Why not pay per view instead of per 1000 impressions? It seems like a fairer way instead of hoping 60% of your user base is going to watch it.

[Zephyrus]

Originally Posted by ThatMatt Why not pay per view instead of per 1000 impressions? It seems like a fairer way instead of hoping 60% of your user base is going to watch it.

having 1000 players who doesn't know anything about the product that was advertised is still not viable

[GIANT_CRAB]

Originally Posted by Daniel.PinionGG Hi Everyone, There has been a lot of discussion around this topic here, and I will attempt to address all the issues that have been raised. If anyone would like to contact me directly, I'm available at [email protected] and am happy to address and questions or concerns. I've had the entire team at Pinion read this thread, and we're grateful for the thought, time and effort that has gone into many of these posts. We understand every community will need to make their own decisions, and some will stick with us and some will not. Either way, we understand and support whichever way you chose to go. A few points I would like to address: * We do not want admins forcing ads during game play, it's still only designed for end of round, end of map, when joining, etc. * If your average completion rate is under 60% we will not be able to purchase your impressions. The simple reason for this is we are not able to sell them, and it's not a viable model long term to buy something you can not sell. * We realize that 60 day payment terms are a hard change to adapt to, but in many cases Pinion does not get paid for 90+ days. We are still carrying as much of the weight of the working capital gap as we can. * Again on payment terms, keep in mind that you will still get paid every 30 days, but payments will be one month behind. For example January impressions will be paid in April (60 days), but February impressions will be paid in May. So once you get through the initial strain of falling behind a month, you will be back to where you were. * We understand that some players crash when seeing the MOTD, this is something we have been working with Valve on, and we will continue to address these issues as we are able. As the MOTD really isn't 'our' space it's difficult to trouble shoot when something goes wrong. If anyone can shine any light on this please reach out. * Having the MOTD disabled never went towards your impression count. Impressions appearing in DFP and not Liverail were caused by flash issues, latency, and other reasons which resulted in us buying something we could not sell. As I said, if anyone has any thoughts, questions or comments please do not hesitate to speak out in this public forum, or contact me directly. Good Gaming, Daniel

Damn, I only talked to you once on the support ticket and you've got the whole team to look at this thread.
I applaud Pinion GG, I might reconsider the ads to support them.

[soja92]

Just had a client crash when loading the video in the motd.

Not sure if this is any help, but this is what windows gave me, ill play a few more maps with client logging on to see if I catch anything

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:    BEX
  Application Name:    hl2.exe
  Application Version:    0.0.0.0
  Application Timestamp:    50aaaa87
  Fault Module Name:    StackHash_2264
  Fault Module Version:    0.0.0.0
  Fault Module Timestamp:    00000000
  Exception Offset:    504f8ce4
  Exception Code:    c0000005
  Exception Data:    00000008
  OS Version:    6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
  Locale ID:    1033
  Additional Information 1:    2264
  Additional Information 2:    2264db07e74365624c50317d7b856ae9
  Additional Information 3:    875f
  Additional Information 4:    875fa2ef9d2bdca96466e8af55d1ae6e

[Horsedick]

They posted a new plugin version but I'm not sure where you assign advertising immunity and to which "Flag" per user? I've looked at the source and the config file but either I'm missing something or there isn't anything clearly there?

New plugin released Version 1.12.12 of the plugin is now available from the My Account tab of the control panel. This needs to be rolled out across all servers ASAP to make sure your community continues to get paid under the new billing structure. If you haven't already read the email explaining the changes, check your inbox. If you haven't gotten the email, contact us on [email protected] and we'll help you out. New Features Added advertisement immunity and related configuration settings Improved Left 4 Dead 1 / 2 support Added support for displaying advertisements after Left 4 Dead 1/ 2 map stage transitions Added minimum duration for viewing adverts Added 20 minutes ad-free policy Added ability to open Ads at round end / start Added an error message to alert users if sm_motdredirect_url has not been assigned a value. Added functionality to check for incompatible plugins and display a notice via the MOTD

Anyone have any idea how to set that?

[Fearts]

It is on line 633 and the default flag they set it to was:
ADMFLAG_RESERVATION