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August 16, 2009

Well, whatever gets it done, I guess.

If you've seen any page on the Web that concerns video games, you've probably seen an advertisement or two for Evony, which is a free online multiplayer strategy game that is, by all accounts, pretty decent. 

Their banner ads, on the other hand, have gotten pretty indecent as of late. To show you just how awful they've become, let's take a little trip down memory lane. The series of photos below are Evony banner ads I've seen over the last few months, in chronological order.

Before we begin, let me assure you that each one of these ads is both 100% real and 100% ridiculous.

Picture 3

Picture 4

Now this gets right to the heart of the matter, doesn't it? It makes you think that you'll be playing as an armored warrior fighting for the majestic kingdom of Evony. Apparently, that's not enough for most nerds, so they changed up the messaging a little bit.

Picture 5

Now you think that you'll be playing as an armored warrior fighting for the majestic kingdom of Evony with a few hot-looking sprites thrown in for good measure. Because everybody needs a little eye candy,* right?

*Can anybody tell me how whoever designed these had the unmitigated gall to just photoshop in the blade of a sword. Coming from nowhere. Not connected to a handle. Pointing directly at the queen's chest? Unbelievable.

Picture 8

Now this is where it starts to tip. Granted, they still worked a majestic background in there, but that's a whole lot of flesh showing on the medieval lady who's obviously experiencing some sort of physical pleasure.

Picture 9  

Apparently the bra was a little too modest. And speaking of modesty, here's where it goes totally out the window:

Picture 1

Picture 2

Wait, what kind of game was this again? Am I even going to be playing a game? At this point, I'm not really sure. That doesn't matter, though, The important thing is this: Tits. We must have more tits.

Picture 11

Hot lady in her undies is great, but I SAID I WANT MORE TITS!

Picture 12

MMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRE! BEEEWWWWWWBBBIIIIIEEEEESSSS!

Picture 10

Perfect.



UPDATE (8/18)

Welp, say what you want about the tactics, but Evony is getting an awful lot of attention for these little banners. So much, in fact, that the guys over at Pop Cap Games have fashioned some parodies for their popular Plants vs. Zombies game.

Picture 4

Zombie Tits


Posted by Nick Kinney on August 16, 2009 at 11:11 AM | Permalink
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Comments

WOW! Is this for real? After a while you don't even know what you're clicking on. Doesn't that violate the first rule of advertising? How effective is advertising that fundamentally misleads?

Posted by:Prescott Perez-Fox | August 16, 2009 at 12:03 PM

I'm mesmerized. Must have more tits.

Posted by:Tyler Hurst | August 16, 2009 at 07:50 PM

Discreet boobies, my lord.

Posted by:Todd Weber | August 17, 2009 at 05:55 AM

It is not only the naff advertising. Evony could very well be malware: http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/16/is-evony-malware/

Posted by:Bruceongames | August 18, 2009 at 06:15 AM

Love the addition of "discreetly" and "unnoticed" into the ever-more-boobalicious versions.

And I was tempted to answer the question of "how effective is advertising that misleads" with the phrase "bounce rate." But then that just seems wrong.

Posted by:Crock | August 18, 2009 at 08:33 AM

When I posted about it ( http://adland.tv/content/evolution-evony-ads-or-more-boobies-makes-more-clicks ) they had only reached that Black Lace Bra version, which was bad enough, really - then a helpful adgrunt added the half nude vixen in bed banner to the comments. I can't wait to see what they come up with next. Really. It's like watching a traincrash in slowmotion.

Posted by:Dabitch | August 18, 2009 at 09:53 AM

I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.

To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony's client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.

Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.

Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.

I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.

There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.

Thank you for reading this.

Lee

Posted by:Lee | October 29, 2009 at 11:05 AM

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