◊ Boethius

I am excited to announce that Elitist Jerks has teamed up with JACT Media to help support the site. We've been testing out JACT's service and we want to let everyone know about it, so you can support our supporters. They are having us test them out and, in return, we will be running some exclusive raffles on Elitist Jerks.

You get what are deemed "BUX" for playing WoW. All you have to do is request an invite code on their site and then download the client. It's very small, has no spyware or viruses and no in-game ads, it just checks to see if you're playing WoW and, if you are, it dispenses BUX for every minute you play that you can redeem on their site for rewards.

Here's the blurb from their community manager:

 

Phillyt

Is there anything specifically we should fill out to let them know we are from the EJ forums?

 

• Vykromond

If you do their invite code request thing, there's a dialog box regarding referral.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

 

◊ Boethius

Either this, or don't worry about it.

 

Gearknight

What exactly is it? All this says is that it's not in-game ads, and it's not something you pay for. Is it out-of-game ads?

 

Malan

Thats what it seems like, you keep a little IM client up basically and launch your games through their client (?) so they can apparently track your game play. You have ads shown to you and they get to provide some gameplay stats or something, and give you some rewards for it.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

◊ Boethius

The only ads are in their online mall as far as I'm aware. And you don't have to launch the games through the client, merely run the client concurrently with the games you are playing. I tested it a couple of months ago (before I switched to my MacBook Pro) and didn't notice anything the least bit intrusive.

Malan, have you tried it or are you shooting from the hip?

 

• Daler

I tried this out last night. It's fairly unobtrusive, though I can't get the counter to disappear entirely during gameplay. No appreciable resource usage, so you shouldn't notice any abnormal resource lag. There are no adds while running Eamonn (the program in question). After about 4 hours of active gaming, I earned 360 "BUX".

All in all, I'd recommend it.

 

juno_ilix

Daler, you can turn off the in-game counter under Tools-->Preferences in Eamonn. (Also, the shortcut key - unless you've changed the default - is Alt-semicolon.) If the counter is covering some of your stats or menu bars in game, you should be able to change the position of the counter in the next release of Eamonn.

 

PSGarak

There seems to be prohibitively steep time->BUX and BUX->$US conversion ratios. At about a BUX per minute, and 9kBx for an optical mouse, for me the rewards honestly aren't worth knowing I played that much video games. I'm honestly not willing to do the conversion from minutes into days (and I have a degree in math, it takes concious effort not to).

It is cost- and hassle-free. There are no ads worth mentioning (banner ads on website are no longer worth mentioning nowadays). My only gripe with the program is that I wish it minimized to the system tray instead of just the taskbar. People more secure about themselves than I would have no problem with it. I realize that the prices are necessary for the business model to be viable, it's kinda of hard to get enough advertising revenue from an amount of advertising innocuous enough that people will put up with it and still stay afloat, much less hand out free stuff.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

attackfrog

I tried this a little while ago. Basically how (I think) it works is it monitors when you're playing WoW, or other video games, and for how long. The company then sells this information (in such a way that your name doesn't appear on it, I assume) to video game companies and advertisers and whoever wants that kind of information about their player base. You, in return for giving JACT this information about your playing habits, get points which you can spend on items in their online store.

I uninstalled it because I wasn't comfortable with people monitoring my playing habits, and because it didn't seem to work reliably: the program watches not only for WoW being open but for you pressing buttons and such, and it didn't recognize that I'd come back from afk even after I'd started pressing buttons again. This was probably just me, I don't know.

As for time played -> USD, I read an post on a different forum saying that in order to get enough BUX to buy a WoW game card over a two-month period (to pay for WoW with this service) you would have to play something like five hours every day.

ïт'ѕ иσт εαѕỵ вεïиġ ġяεεи.

 

PsiVen

The folks who play WoW 5 hours every day are probably more likely to need it, since they're obviously not spending much time at work

Really not a bad deal if you don't mind people taking notes on your gaming habits. I wonder how long this service could stay viable though, because it must be vulnerable to all sorts of "24/7 gaming" exploits. The "BUX" loss might not matter much but their customers wouldn't like skewed data.

 

Malan

I guess you could call it shooting from the hip, I went to the site and read about what it was and that was the impression I came away with. Their site is a little confusing as to what exactly their program does - it mentions on their FAQ that there are no "intrusive pop up ads" which I took to mean that there were ads of some sort, just not pop ups. I can't try it out since I'm on a mac.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Searix

I'd try it if more people were confident about what this thing does

 

• Vykromond

My experience with it:
1) You don't launch games through their client
2) There are no ads on the client or in game
3) There is no intrusion in game, I think there's an option to show how many bux or whatever you're earning but I immediately turned it off because fuck that

The "point" of the program for advertisers is I think something like what attackfrog said.

It's basically completely unobtrusive and nigh-completely-useless, since the BUX are worth about as much as an airline mile on a no-longer-running airline. Still, it doesn't use much in the way of system resources and there are no ads, so why the hell not.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

 

Broxx

I'll confirm as well to the people wanting to find something wrong with it. I installed it and pretty much forgot it existed and have 1100 BUX so far in two or so days. So I might be able to get something eventually without even noticing. There is no hit in my performance anywhere or nothing to be annoying.

 

Putts

I started using the service about a year and a half ago, and I must say that it's totally legit. Unfortunately, I reformatted my computer a while back and never got around to reinstalling the program. From what I remember, when you create you account, you get to choose from their massive list of possible games for them to monitor on your machine (You can choose up to 10 games to monitor), and the client simply runs in the background, checking to see if you are running one of the games in question, and that you are actively using your keyboard/mouse.

Rewards are decent for the time invested that they require. I think that I was able to order a Nintendo DS game and a Wii Classic Controller for free after about 6 months on the service, so no, you're not going to earn free games overnight, but if you're going to be gaming anyway, you might as well get something free out of it. Shipping times were fairly decent too, from what I remember, about 2-3 weeks. I've never had an issue with ads, spyware, or spam email as a result of this service, either.

All in all, I'd recommend the service, unless you're extremely concerned about privacy, in which case there's nothing else I can say to convince you to try it out.

 

swills

I'd just like to echo the above comments. In installed this three days ago, am a fairly moderate WoW player and accumulated 850 BUX since then. There are no in game ads whatsoever - the only time you see anything advertised is when you go to their website to check your balance or 'buy' stuff. You can set the software to run on startup and as far as I can tell, it still monitors WoW then without appearing on your task bar or anything. I just have an "Eamonn.exe" process running in the background that picks up when I'm playing. No performance impact at all.

As a couple of examples, there's an "Ideazon Reaper Gaming Mouse" (probably rubbish? No idea) on their front page for 16,000 points. Most decent XBOX 360 games are 35,000-50,000. All shipping etc is included.

So you don't earn anything quickly for sure but if you don't care about them monitoring how much you play then it is basically free stuff (eventually) for doing nothing.

 

Dynalisia

Basically a 4-5 hours a day gamer sells them his player data for 50 bucks every 6 months. For those of us that aren't fussed about this kind of thing, it's pretty much 'free stuff'. It's obvious that some companies would be very interested in this data and JACT probably got the idea that instead of doing all kinds of cumbersome traditional market research, many players would actually be quite willing to sell them their data for a small sam, because they don't really care about it anyway. So their business is in essence based on making it as easy as possible for us to sell them our player data.

I'll probably give this a spin.

 

juno_ilix

That's a preference setting available under Edit-> Preferences--> Taskbar.

JACT does aggregate game play data to provide reports to industry, and we also sell banner advertisements etc on JACT (as some of you mentioned). Additionally, we allow relevant companies to pay for product placement in the mall to get exposure for their products. The thought there is that it gives smaller niche companies a bit more leverage to get right to the eyes of their target market.

Regarding the BUX accrual rate, a good way to maximize BUX earning potential is to play on the C:SS game server. (Hoping to expand to new competitive opportunities with time.) You can rack up BUX very quickly if you're any good. Also, we do large raffles from time to time, and raffle tickets are only 100 BUX (just over an hour of gameplay). In July we raffled off an XBOX 360 Elite and another larger item will be unveiled at the end of this month.

 

Amenemope

I'm generally wary of any system that compensates you in redeemable points as opposed to just giving you money for services rendered. However, I figured I'd give this one a shot due to the fact that it's passive and I already spend more time than I'd like to admit logged in to WoW. Here's my impressions:

1. The client is unobtrusive. It uses very little system resources and doesn't affect gameplay at all. There is an annoying "bux" counter that does not update very regularly and appears whenever you launch a supported game. Alt+; makes it go away. You are not required to launch the game through the client, but it must be running in the background in order to get credit for time played. There is an option to minimize it to the system tray. The Jact privacy policy is pretty clear, they collect and distribute non-personal demographic information about you and your gameplay habits. If you don't have a problem with Warden, you won't have a problem with the Jact client, Eamonn.

2. Bux are earned at a rate of ~75 per hour when I play WoW. I got about 70 when I played Half Life 2. This is either a problem with my method of testing or it is working as intended. Perhaps information regarding older games is slightly less valuable to advertisers. I found that on average, 10 bux is equivalent to 1 cent. 7.5 cents an hour is better than my previous rate of 0 cents an hour.

3. The Jact mall has no search feature that I could find. Nevertheless, items were categorized properly and it's easy to find what you're looking for. Noticeably absent are WoW game cards.

This program won't finance your early retirement, but if you're spending time gaming anyways, might as well get some cash for it. It's easy to set up and you'll eventually be able to pick up some cool stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise spent money on.

 

Mernie

I'm planning on giving this a try, but I'm assuming one would have to register while on the computer they game with. I went to their site and did some reading, but did not find mention of this. Correct me if I'm wrong, or let me know if I'm right?

 

juno_ilix

Altogether I think we've awarded around 50MM BUX.
There was a release when we hit 45MM: JACT Article on Yahoo! finance

edit:// Mernie, you can log in on any computer that has the client downloaded.

 

Oscarvil

Is there any support for gamers not in the US? It doesn't look like there is.

 

• Neto-

Sounds like no thus far.