personally, when i'm looking to take want ads, i tend to gravitate towards the ads that 1) are pitching a plot, dynamic, or direction that genuinely interests me to play out and 2) have a very strong vibe that the requester is very strongly interested + enthusiastic about getting the plot in play..... which, as you might imagine, tends to see me favoring more detailed requests than more open-ended ones.

(don't get me wrong, there's other stuff that can make a want ad more attractive to me, like if there's other potential plotting opportunities for me to step into or if the requester seems to be compatible with me for similar rp preferences for stuff like posting speed or ooc engagement, but like... the plot and enthusiasm are the main pitches for that ad for me, there's almost no chance i take the ad if it just doesn't seem interesting for me to want to play out or if i'm feeling like i'm the only one hyped for the ad i'm about to be taking)

but i also say that as someone who doesn't get as many character ideas as i used to and who doesn't have a whole lot of rp friends that i can give the kinds of "big investment plots" to. (and my own luck with posting those ads myself is typically abysmal.) so. take that with that grain of salt.

(i also personally used to say open-ended want ads were great ways for me to pick up extra plotting opportunities + connections for a character idea i already had and a part of me does still believe that... but in all honesty, i don't know if i ever actually did use this more than a couple of times back when i was making characters more freely, so like.... was it me being more hopeful about myself, is it me having largely forgotten a time when i was playing original characters as opposed to canons, do i want to use my anecdotal musings out in wider practice, instructions unclear, character app was submitted to the toaster.)

edit to add: i guess i'm also a weirdo in that i typically go for romantic requests over anything else, but i mean, i guess that makes sense too since romance ads tend to be the ones with those more solid concepts of plot + direction that i specifically seek out for ads. i've done other kinds of requests before and it's been all right (i raise a glass to one of my best times on a site being me picking up an ad for someone's kid + then ending up making the baby mama too) but honestly these days i check then more as a formality than with any real intent to take one unless it's involving canon characters, just because i've had too many bad experiences for taking the request and then getting largely sidelined by the requester or struggling to get any kind of meaningful direction going for my character in turn.



in all honesty though, if you're really wanting to hedge your bets about getting a want ad taken... i will skip past the usual rpc advice of "just ask a friend to take it lmao" and instead give the advice to look at what want ads actually are being taken on the site and what the site culture is around want ads in general, since those two things are going to be your biggest factors.

if the site just doesn't have the culture of taking want ads, it probably won't matter all that much how you pitch it, because the members just don't really take them; conversely, if the culture is really good about taking them, either style will likely have a decent chance of getting picked up. or if the site is somewhere in the middle, where one kind of want ad tends to get picked up more often than the other, you're probably going to have better luck following that trend than straying from it.

(anecdotally though, i think the more open-ended want ads generally tend to get picked up more often than the more specific ones, but on the flip side of that, i also kind of get the impression a lot of those more open-ended want ads tend to be surface-level box-checking than they are solid plots to consistently keep a character active in the long-term especially the mega loose ones like "avengers-inspired friend group" or "same-series fc coworkers" or "fellow canonmates wanted".)