"Ad Space for Rent" Contest Winners

It's been a long time coming, but we're finally ready to announce the winners of the "Ad Space for Rent" contest! We had a lot of good entries and it took some time to review them all and come up with the ones we thought were the most creative and fit the world of the Matrix the best. But now we've got all the i's dotted and t's crossed, so we can reveal the winners of the 2006 "Ad Space for Rent" Contest.

Product

David Boni - Highway Crossing Frog 2

Company

Tom Murphy - Aithir Wireless Networks

Club/Venue

George Henrie Montinola - Deus Lounge

Clothing

Joseph LaLand - Area K: Dress Efficiently

Control

Jesse Buddington - Alone

Recruitment

Joshua Inglima - Realitril

Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry and congratulations to the winners! You'll be able to see the ads in the near future inside The Matrix Online.

That's the Good News...

...now for the bad news. During the time we worked on this, we were also figuring out what we could do to stop showing so many open billboards in game. We came up with a solution for that, but learned that we can't serve any advertisements to players outside of North America.

As it turns out, the issue doesn't have to do with where we want to serve ads to, but that to serve them at all to locations outside North America would require knowing player IP addresses. While we have that information internally, we would have to pass that information to an outside company in this case--which we won't do.

So, we go back to the drawing board. While we still can't show ads to non-North American locations, we'd prefer not having a bunch of empty billboards filling the city. We're not sure what we're going to do at this point, but we'll keep looking at the problem. There are a few leads, but nothing we're sure enough about to talk about at this time.

Someday we'll run into an issue with a simple solution. I'm sure of it. :P

Update 48 Scheduled for Next Week

We're moving Update 48 content into our staging playtest server for final testing beginning Monday. We're shooting to release the update on Thursday, November 16, depending on final testing.

You know, it's funny that someone decided to post old beta notes to the forums this week. Ironically, what I expected to see there didn't turn up.

You see, two times during beta, I was told to put a certain feature into the update notes because it was ready to go. Two times, the feature was not in the update. In fact, the feature never made it into The Matrix Online...

...until now.

I'm sure many players know what I'm talking about, but since the feature just got integrated for testing, I'm not saying what it is until I see it for myself. I'm just going to step away from the keyboard and see you on the other side next week.

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