Partnered: JACT Offers Rewards for Members

♦ Boethius · 08/20/08, 3:39 PM

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:

Originally Posted by juno_ilix

JACT is a beta service for PC gamers who want to get something extra out of their time spent gaming. As a JACT gamer, when you play WoW (or any of our 300+ supported PC games) you will accumulate JACT BUX that you can spend in the JACT Mall on games, music, media and more, similar to credit card rewards for gamers. JACT was created by gamers, for gamers, so we designed JACT around what we'd want: no annoying pop-up ads interrupting your game and no monthly fee to join. We're sponsored by vendors who want you, the gamer, to see their products while you browse our mall.

Currently, JACT is still in beta (and ONLY in the US for now), but we're adding new features all the time, like competition mode on our CS:S game server for bonus BUX, and rewards for referring friends.

Want to sign up?

Want more info?

Play WoW with Purpose...Get JACT.

juno_ilix
JACT Community Mgr.
JACT

Phillyt · 08/20/08, 5:06 PM

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

• Vykromond · 08/20/08, 5:18 PM

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

♦ Boethius · 08/20/08, 5:21 PM

Originally Posted by Vykromond

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

Either this, or don't worry about it.

Gearknight · 08/22/08, 12:19 PM

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 · 08/22/08, 12:21 PM

Originally Posted by 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?

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.

♦ Boethius · 08/22/08, 1:01 PM

Originally Posted by 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?

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 · 08/22/08, 1:08 PM

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 · 08/22/08, 3:51 PM

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 · 08/23/08, 4:27 PM

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.

attackfrog · 08/23/08, 4:47 PM

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.

PsiVen · 08/23/08, 6:33 PM

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 · 08/23/08, 6:35 PM

Originally Posted by Boethius

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

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.

Searix · 08/23/08, 10:22 PM

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

• Vykromond · 08/23/08, 10:47 PM

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.