User:AimeePlaysMSM/TapJoy

Preamble
TapJoy is the part of the My Singing Monsters game available through the Market where you can earn 'Free' diamonds. 'Free' in quotes, because it's never just given to you - you have to do something for it. Sometimes that something is simple, other times it requires a lot of time and effort, other times it requires you to pay for things directly. Sometimes they involve other apps and progressing through those apps. Because those apps have often proved to be problematic in getting rewards, a separate progress section at the bottom is used to keep track of whether or not that offer paid out promptly or whether a manual claim was sent in, and the status of that claim. This page is thus divided into that section, and my rants and rambles following:

Rants and Rambles
TapJoy is a great service on the face of it. Advertisers pay them to have their product placed in their listing, in return the advertisers get players of a game to view whatever they advertised. In the case of apps that means a download, which can affect their rank in app store listings - always quite valuable. The player, for their effort, gets a reward. In the case of My Singing Monsters, that's in form of the Diamonds resource.

But it also tends to have problems. Very often, the summary is inaccurate. "Answer 3 simple questions" it might say, but before you know it you have to hand over your e-mail address, too.

When there *is* a problem, there's no transparency when you go to claim your rewards - provided you can (offers that you accepted eventually disappear. You can't manually claim when there's no page to claim from, and TapJoy do not offer claim support via any other means). They say to watch your e-mail, but you don't even get an e-mail acknowledging your claim request. Are they working on it? Is there a problem? Do you need to provide more evidence? Good luck finding out.

Depending on the type of offer, further types of problems will vary. The following are very coarsely the offers and what their pros and cons are as perceived by this individual.

Watch a video
Pros: Everything. You watch a video, you get your reward. I've never had these fail. Takes ~30 seconds of your time, pays out 1-2 diamonds.

Cons: None that I can think of.

Install an app
Pros: Almost always works. You do often need to also at least open the app, and may need to leave the app open for a few minutes. Can introduce you to neat new apps.

Cons: They usually aren't neat new apps, and some of them want your permission to access every single thing about you and your device. If you don't grant them and the app closes, sometimes the app will not signal back to TapJoy that the offer should be paid out; after all, you didn't really open the app.

Purchase a project / subscription
Pros: To my knowledge, practically always work. Multiple parties would be in heaps of trouble with interstate commerce laws if they didn't AND they made an issue about claims.

Cons: Costs actual money. Of course if you were planning to purchase a subscription to a magazine anyway, then you might as well go through the app and get some (usually hundreds off) Diamonds for it. But otherwise, you may suddenly find yourself stuck with a product you didn't really want or a subscription that's a pain to get out of. Unless it ends up being much cheaper than buying Diamonds in the Market directly and you're willing to work to cancel things, just not worth it.

Read an article
Pros: None. Whatsoever. Cons: Read an article - simple, right? No. The article is split across 10 pages, each of which is littered with ads, and a lot of buttons that make you think you'll go to the next page in the article, but they'll actually take you elsewhere, and more often than not you just broke whatever was tracking your progress through the article so even if you manage to get to the end, you will not get your rewards.

Answer survey questions
Pros: None. Whatsoever.

Cons: Answer some questions, what could be easier? Well go ahead and answer some questions. Say a car manufacturer wants to ask you 5 questions. You first have to enter your details - name, address, etc. - then the first question may be how much money you make in a year, the second question asks about your age, the third wants to know your education, the fourth wants to know what car you're currently driving, the fif... OH, that's right. You don't even get to the fifth because suddenly "it seems like you're not a right fit for this survey, try another!". HOLD UP. You just gave the survey company as well as their client all the information leading up to the one question that magically disqualified you, and you get... nothing. NO rewards. This particular type of offer toes the line of what should make legal types' fingers itch.

Play this game, reach some milestone, get reward
Pros: They often have higher Diamond payouts without requiring you to spend money AND the apps usually don't want access to your firstborn, AND some of them are perfectly reasonable to attain.

Cons: Some of them are ridiculously hard. Reach level 25 in a Candy Crush/Bejeweled/whatever-type game. Seems easy enough, until you start playing it and you realize you could play it 24/7 for a month straight and probably still not get there. In addition, these do fail to give rewards far more often than should be desirable. Worse yet:

* You don't get any feedback from TapJoy that you started the offer, so you don't even know if the game knows how to send you reaching the milestone back correctly. * You certainly don't get a progress indication in the TapJoy screen, so you better keep track of it yourself, which is fine. * If it does fail to pay out, you may have just spent 2 weeks playing a game that you don't really care about but really wanted the several hundred Diamonds, and all you can do is file a manual claim and wait for them to either pay out, or... well I've never gotten an e-mail so I can only presume that their statement online that they'll contact you if they need further information is true.

All in all, whether or not it's worth doing TapJoy offers is up to you. But TapJoy could certainly make a few changes that would enhance the experience greatly: * For apps that require progress: Show that the game communicates back to TapJoy correctly after first opening the game. Better yet, let developers signal back progress so users know whether that communication continues to function. * Require accurate offer descriptions. If the summary says "3 questions" but the page that pops up says "5 questions", one of you is wrong. * Allow users to HIDE offers that they don't care about. If a user scrolls past "Purchase a subscription to goopbox today!" every time they go through the list, they probably just aren't interested. But they might be interested in an offer further down. But if getting to those takes 3 minutes of scrolling with pauses for every time the next batch of offers is downloaded, the user won't reach that offer. That's a loss for all involved.

TapJoy offer progress
Since the Festival of Yay 2018, I have actively been doing TapJoy offers besides the videos and occasional app install. Some have worked fine, some have not. Below is their details as far as I can still find information.

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