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They'd probably scrub anything anti-corporate pretty quick though.
Pricing it is hard. Some of the things that get advertised often don't even break even, most of the time, and are just to sort of...literally keep yourself in people's heads, idk. i guess that's built into the cost analysis in balancing it.
I agree more IC ways to 'counter' ads would be really cool. SIC hacking in many flavors has come up dozens of times and would be insanely interesting, and afaik is somewhere on The List..... *daydreams*
Limiting the duration would go a long way towards mitigating the perceived abuse.
The downside to limited duration is that the admins would have to script some sort of auto-renew for ads that they want to be "permanent" or "long running".
Or maybe it could work like other systems in the game where a code is required for durations greater than X.
The city wants your flash and if you want to spend that flash putting drama on SIC, thats up to you. The city will then also get the Judges on you for threats and other such crimes if your ad is committing those crimes. Beware what you advertise!
From a cost perspective, it's probably fine but adjustments that would happen should probably be IC anyway and not raised by a game mechanic. I could see a nice mini-plot start over this, so I'd leave it alone and let the characters work it out.
If making them cost more cuts down on that, I'm all for it. Otherwise people just need to stop being silly.
Just because they don't matter to most of the city don't mean they don't matter to someone and that their situation doesn't matter to someone or a small group of people. Sic is full of shit thoughts and trolling. Those random ones don't seem any different. If you think they're unthemely send an xhelp like Dreamer said. And I'm not opposed to introducing a monitoring system like Reefer suggested that might offer a chance to find out who's posting them to the people that want to know. Through some work and RP, of course.
Slander and disinformation and humiliation, the ominous feeling when you see an ad about yourself and...genuinely have no idea who or why it's running. These are very themely and good things.
Upping the cost by like 2 or 3 factors won't really change anything. Upping it by 10x means no one runs ads anymore ever, including people legit just trying to advertise a service, except very occasionally for a corp event where the corp pays.
IIRC the current cost is basically zero. It should at least be expensive enough that a poor immy running crates isn't walking around with enough pocket change to beam his ads to the entire city indefinitely.
