Any AUD owners do your own promotion?

Just wondering if there's many AUD holders that actively try to promote Arkadia Underground. Haven't seen anything really, so I'm curious. I joined a channel for AUD owners though it seemed to be inactive. Thought I'd make a thread to see what people say here.

 

In the past I did actually promote it, but I stopped doing due to the negativity I would get in return from them. The usual reasons "Don't hunt/mine on taxed lands", "UG is like FOMA but worse, so rather go to FOMA", "Noone to sell loot to on Arkadia so why bother going there at all". So instead of giving people like that food to spread negativity I decided to stop

PS: I do obviously tell people to go there still if they ask me and give them a pos incase needed for creatures

 

I have to 2nd what Wauspaus said. There's a portion of the population that frowns upon just about any mention of promoting AUD activity. Sadly, there's a good chance that talking about the UG in any positive light in chats will just cause people to get angry

As far as events and the like go, that kind of promotion is just not cost effective. There's no way for any single person to recoup any resources they'd put into an event due to the sheer number of deeds that need to be paid out. I guess people could try to crowdfound an event, but I can't imagine that'd do well.

 

I think personally, maybe a small area in the UG where people could make events for others would be great. Like the Event Area's on the surface. If there were more smaller creatures in the UG (like around Dromia) I wouldnt mind holding a Puny Bash there every now and again if they were to be put in an event area
Bigger creatures in that event area would be fine as well, its just a suggestion to get more player involvement as well in the UG

 

Hm I wonder why some people are against it. There's plenty of people that hunt on land areas already. I don't see how it's worse than FOMA, I mean you have a whole planet you can TP to at no cost. For FOMA you either need to pay the 7 PED fee to teleport to Caly or fly there. Plus there's not vehicles allowed in FOMA, so not as easy to escape mobs :biggrin2: And well the no one to sell loot to problem is something that we can fix by sparking up the trading activity on Arkadia.

Also people don't seem to have any problem with feeding CLD revenue, if the problem is that they don't like the idea of other Entropians getting money.

I think one thing that's needed for the underground is an auction. If people needs supplies they need to go back up Arkadia, provided they can't find anything in the booths. Same if they want to sell stuff, they need to go back up to Arkadia. A good way to kickstart the auction would would be to bulk purchase stuff under MU, then break it up and put it down there on the auction, still under MU, just increasing it enough to cover the auction fee. FOMA has an auction, so that is one area where it's better than than down there.

In addition, booth owners really need to price their stuff cheaper. From what I saw it seems most stuff down there is above MU. Someone was even selling sweat at 3 PED/k (30 PED for 10,000). Makes no sense to buy down there if the prices are higher. I think more need to be released, in the first area there there's only 4 out of 12 booths available. Need more than 4 in my opinion, two of the booth sections are completely empty. I'd say 1 or 2 on each of those.

Auction is more important though, do they plan putting an auction in? It already does show up in the list from auction terminals, so I'd think it would be relatively easy to set it up.

The only thing we could really do at the moment is hold events down there and other promotional things. I don't think you can't have cost effective promotion. Even if you don't directly profit from it, the idea is to grow the underground so in the future it will slowly get more activity, and AUD income will increase. 2 pec, 3 pec, 5 pec... etc. I'm entirely confident it can reach that stage.


First step, though, is to get more people to Arkadia. I'm already working on that bit

 

No need or benefit to enable auction there when the Ark auction is only a tp away.

 

There's definitely a benefit. An auction is the best and quickest way to kickstart more trading underground. Trading is the key to drawing in more hunters and miners. Who mainly buys and sells things from auction for the current markup? Hunters and miners. Requiring them to go above ground when they need something automatically means less activity. It's like linking people to another site in order to use your service properly; you're conversion rate will go down. In this case, it's AUD revenue that's down. It's necessary for the underground to either have its own auction, or have access to the Arkadia auction for free. People would stay there longer, which in turn equals more revenue.

Yes there's alternatives, but the auction solution is the simplest and quickest method. Remember this is about promoting the underground. Sending people above ground often to do simple tasks isn't considered promoting it (but rather promoting Arkadia above ground). The idea is just to make people stay longer, without harming the existing Arkadia economy.

 

I don't agree at all. In fact I think implementing a separate auction would be detrimental to Ark UG and to Arkadia as a whole.

Firstly the overall volume of auctioned items on Arkadia is not that high. Splitting that volume between two auctions produces a perception of less activity going on, which discourages visitors.

If you did have an auction enabled there, the majority of listed items would be mined loot as the area is set up to primarily attract miners. The main buyer of mined loot is crafters. I can tell you from personal experience that crafters are often encumbered while crafting and don't like to move around. And they will preferentially buy from their local auction as it is cheaper (no transport fee). So what would happen is that miners who listed their stuff on an Ark Underground auction would have more trouble selling. That's not desirable on a planet that is known for slow sales.

I would be in favour of being able to easily list on Ark auction while underground but that's a game mechanics issue from the way MA has set up UG as a separate zone and I don't see them going to significant effort to change that given that people can already use a free TP to briefly go to an available auction.

 

Hey guys, you may not know but there IS an UG auction available from the crafting terminal. I don't think anyone other than me has listed anything on it. There's only one reason to use it (if you have more than 30 items you want to list) and nobody checks listings there. I think it's a stretch to say that making the UG Auction active would increase AUD returns.

Regarding UG vs FOMA, UG is superior to FOMA for a number of reasons: vehicles, much larger area, better MU. Regarding the 5% tax, that's not a real big issue as good miners know how to make that up in MU.

The main issues are that up and down swings are 6x bigger than above ground, and it takes a little more skill (and restraint, if using amps) to mine underground.

 

But the idea isn't to take away from Arkadia, I believe you misunderstood my point. You wouldn't be splitting the existing items between the Arkadia auction and the underground auction, but rather the increased activity would bring more to Arkadia and the Underground. If you check my original post I did say the first step is to get more people to Arkadia. The issue you're mentioning wouldn't apply if there was additional activity on Arkadia and the Underground area, since we wouldn't be taking anything away that's already there. It's about dividing additional future resources.

It's the same with the booths down there. Do you think having booths in the underground is detrimental to the planet? While at the moment I don't think all the booths should be released yet, in time when Arkadia is more active I'd like to see more open. Just like with the auction as you already know.

 

*goes to check* Huh, interesting, it seem there is haha. Well just replace whenever I said "auction" with "auction terminal"

Which I do think an auction terminal would be good... instead there seems to be 2 trade terminals (one of them not working).

Maybe it won't, but an auction does give people 1 more reason to go there. And the more people going there the better.

 

I understood your point. I don't agree that it would be beneficial. Indeed I argue that it would be detrimental.

 

At the end of the day, there are a lot of features that "might" help get more people to do stuff in the UG, however.... I still think that the Ark team will only see an increase in activity there if more people are willing to go there and explore, maybe even team hunt there. Events made by people for people, instead of waiting for the Ark Dev team to launch a smuggler/oratan event in it. That's why I would love some event area's down there. So people also have the oppertunity to throw in some initiative to boost activity down there.

The auction, I have to admit, didn't know it was there. I think it would be best to tie it into the normal Arkadia auction. Because it is literally a teleport away. Sounds like a waste of space to have a totally seperate auction for something which is a free teleport away.

 

I think you misunderstood me again... you said:

Which is not applicable to what I was saying. Like I said, I'm not talking about splitting the existing volume. I agree it wouldn't be good to take away from the Ark auction. Probably should have explained it better, my bad.

Apparently there is an auction already, and the planet hasn't come crashing down yet, so. Do you think it would be detrimental if more people put items up for sale? If so, why's that?

And what about booths... do you think those taking away from the above ground booths and shops?

 

Yeah I agree, some event areas would definitely be good. Although...

Implying that the Arkadia developers aren't people, eh?

 

I could have said players, but then again, they are players as well. You got the point of what I was saying

 

Yeah I was just messing with ya :biggrin2:

 

Oh boy. Let me be clear.
You say you want to have separate auction. I say that's a bad idea.

Last time I checked, even though there are auction terminals there, it was not actually possible to list an item in the ark UG auction zone. I want to keep it that way. I note Neil says he has used it which surprises me. I'll check that out next time I am on planet.

 

Well there is a separate auction, so. Where are the auction terminals at? I haven't seen any... Neil was saying you can access the auction through the crafting terminal.

I'm just curious why you think having an auction is bad for Arkadia. You didn't understand what I was saying the first time, because your original reasons don't apply to what I was saying. Since you say you understand me now, I'm curious why you think a more active auction would be detrimental to the planet?

I'm still curious about the booths too...

 

No auction terminal ? Good let's keep it that way.

My original reasons haven't changed.

It doesn't actually benefit UG for for auction listing to be split between two zones, whether at the current volume or at some future different volume. In fact it is detrimental to perception of the size of the arkadian economy and will discourage visitors worried about selling their loot.
Players will find it harder to sell if they list on an UG auction. I explained why earlier on.

So. Won't help. Will cause harm.

I'm not really fussed about shops and booths. The location of a shop can have a big impact on a shop's sales but doesn't significantly increase player activity (other than shopping activity) at that location. Having said that, I expect that the UG deeds would get income from shop sales tax so that would boost revenue a little bit. Relatively small compared to hunting and mining activity though and they aren't going to impact those activities.