Featured Deck Changes
TappedOut forum
Posted on July 20, 2012, 4:45 p.m. by yeaGO
Hey all,
I've got to make some changes to the Featured Decks section. The truth is there are too many decks being featured for that small space. What I want to do is open up the main banner ad space at the top of the page to featured decks! So the changes are:
1) More exposure for your deck as they will appear by themselves at the very top of any page on TappedOut, not just the front page.
2) Decks currently stay in the queue for 24 hours. In the future, they will show a certain amount of times and then cycle out.
3) Token prices will change to make it easier to determine how long your deck will stay up in a banner ad
4) I am considering removing the current Featured Decks rotating carousel on the front page. I don't think it will be needed and we could use the space for other stuff. PS: I will probably still leave the 'Featured' tab on the front page so you can find the list of all decks currently being featured.
Thoughts?
Sounds good to me. I stopped using the featured a while ago because there were too many of them.
July 20, 2012 4:58 p.m.
Yeah, they're just not that good anymore. I want to give people a fast track to exposure on the site and I just feel like the Feature Tokens don't do a whole lot.
July 20, 2012 5:13 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #5
I like it. I don't know if I agree with the "show X times" approach, though. I'm just wondering how often someone will load one page to get to another and not bother with the featured deck (say I go to someone's profile to click the link to his or her binder; the person whose deck was featured on that page effectively lost one of his or her deck appearances). I suppose it's ultimately no different than the old system apart from the fact that one person refreshing or clicking through pages could burn a lot of the appearances for featured decks with little or no return.
July 20, 2012 6:04 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #7
I do like the look. I would definitely advise switching back to time-based cycling instead of count-based cycling, though.
July 20, 2012 6:32 p.m.
honestly I think time-based would be a bad idea... that would punish people who featured their deck during weird hours, or give people too much advantage by posting at peak times.
I guess I could try and pace it so that it would take 24 hours to cycle through. But it would stop serving during some parts of the day.
July 20, 2012 6:34 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #9
Well, with a 24-hour cycle the time of cycling wouldn't really matter - you'd cover all the times of the day. The only variance would come from the day of the week. I think the count method would suffer more from this problem because high-activity times would really eat up their allotted exposures quickly.
The problem I noticed with the count method is that in the past hour, I've clicked my way through tens of pages without much pause (consider just going from the thread to preview to post screens).
Just things to think about.
July 20, 2012 7:55 p.m.
platinum_demon says... #10
Is it possible to track how long a page has been loaded? If so, you could give each deck a total loaded time limit. So, rather than times loaded it would be up based on time loaded.
July 20, 2012 8:31 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #11
Well, every solution has its own downsides. If you could track the time a deck is displayed for, people going AFK would royally screw some users out of their feature time (I always have Tappedout open on at least one tab).
July 20, 2012 8:53 p.m.
platinum_demon says... #12
Hmm... Check screen focus? I'm probably making this too complicated by now (also I'm not sure if the server can even do this- not exactly an HTML expert), but it would be awesome if you could track how long it was open in a window that actually had focus. :)
Then the only issue would people who legitimately went AFK, not just switched over to other tabs.
July 20, 2012 11:16 p.m.
What if you judge it by the number of page views that the deck itself gets barring yours? That would be pretty fair in my opinion.
July 21, 2012 1:18 a.m.
pheonix_222 says... #14
What about something more effectively sorting decks by format?
I know a lot of users mainly play a single format so streamlining their experience might help features really get exposure to users who will actually check the deck out.
It seems there's only 1-3 decks from an eternal format on the queue at anytime. Maybe separate non-eternal and eternal formats?
July 21, 2012 1:24 a.m.
pheonix_222 says... #15
And I think the number of page views that the deck itself gets is the most reasonable thing to determine how long a feature lasts. I mean, that's what a user is spending a token for is to get page views, right?
July 21, 2012 1:27 a.m.
Just saw the different feature deck visual and it seems fine to me. Is that ad it is going to be moving in on going to go somewhere else though?
July 21, 2012 4:25 p.m.
When the Featured Decks bit got shunted to the top bar by the logo the ad that was there was gone and I figured it would probably need to stay in some form or another. Just curious if the adspace it would be occupying would be put elsewhere. (Sorry, looking back at it I really did a number on making my sentence flow reasonably. :P )
July 21, 2012 4:49 p.m.
Jokernaught says... #21
I like the change. Any chance though that instead of just another featured below the featured (like it is right now), why not just pull from a random, site wide pool. Since the featured has a tab and is on top of every page.
July 22, 2012 12:18 p.m.
Feature below the feature? Featured has a tab and is on every page? I am so confused!!
July 22, 2012 12:34 p.m.
Jokernaught says... #23
Nevermind. I spoke without speaking. I realized about 10 minutes after I posted, What i said wasn't true anymore. and my statement obviously makes very little sense. No worries. Fohget Aboudit.
Just asking if there would be changes to the mainpage if the add space was going to be gone.
July 22, 2012 12:42 p.m.
Well I'm considering putting featured decks at the top Ad space too, as well as the main page. I think this will help increase exposure and give more eyeballs to each deck. There world still be normal ads sometimes.
July 22, 2012 1:35 p.m.
BrownDog5117 says... #25
How awesome would it be if you had a banner at the top of the screen that moved across the screen displaying the featured decks, like when Sportcenter's ESPN has the box scores on the bottom of the screen moving right to left.. in a continuous loop!
July 23, 2012 5:48 p.m.
what if you limited how many decks were in the queue at a time and then had a queue for the queue? So let's say there are 5 decks in the queue and I go to feature a deck, I have to wait until the first deck finishes it's 24 hours before mine goes on.
I also like the streamlining thing. I only pay attention to standard decks and maybe EDH.
July 24, 2012 11:57 p.m.
DeckBuilder345 says... #28
Let me say the new featured deck ad at the top as a banner looks awesome! I really like it.
August 1, 2012 12:16 p.m.
The decks pop up at the top and get a certain number of views and then stop showing. Its that way so everyone up there gets an equal shot at eyeballs and drawing interest, rather than being random.
Rhadamanthus says... #2
Word.
July 20, 2012 4:55 p.m.