Three simple ideas for the media module

Day 2,007, 19:42 • Published in USA USA • by Bucephalus92

Greetings Bros,


There is no need for us to try too hard

Some of you may have seen Gnilraps' article about a writing contest involving suggesting new ideas for the game, for those of you that haven't you can find it here. (Scroll down past the crying man to get to the part about the writing competition)

This is actually pretty lucky for me as I had already planned on writing an article discussing three simple ideas that I think could improve the quality of the Media Module. The first of these, and arguably the easiest, would be the return of citizen ads. For players that have been playing this game long enough you can remember a time when citizen ads were the norm, for those of you that have not been playing as long I will provide a brief explanation. Citizen ads took up an amount of space that were roughly

yay big. They could be purchased for a small amount of gold and would be seen by thousands of people in your target country. When clicked these ads typically linked to an article or in some cases a form.

Pros
-This idea has already been previously implemented in this game, meaning it should be relatively easy to re-introduce.
-Ads cost gold, Plato loves gold.
-These ads would provide another dimension to a boring and dead media module.

Cons
-This idea has already been in this game...and removed, whatever reasons (if any) caused the admins to remove it in the first place may still exist.
-When it was implemented in the past these ads eventually came to consist almost exclusively of pictures depicting, for lack of a better term, hot pieces of ass. This is something that is a negative for the female audience playing this game, and makes showing this game to other people kind of weird.

Overall I believe this idea is one that is worthy of being re-introduced to this game. This is because the prospect of increasing the demand for gold should make Plato happy, and increasing the depth of a boring media module outweighs the potential negatives. It is also important to remember that if in game mods actually did there job effectively then citizen ads could consist of more than just pictures of babes in bikinis. (Not that theres anything really wrong with that)


Now maybe its just because I've been watching a lot of MadMen recently, but if this idea were implemented I would totally start an advertising company, cause why the f*#k not?


The second idea I would like to introduce that I believe would have the potential to really shake things up in regards to the Media Module would be the introduction of paying to view articles. I know this seems a little outlandish but bear with me, I am not talking about forcing people to have a subscription fee. However I think that if we implemented a payment option for articles it could increase the allure of becoming a media mogul and thus actually increase the number of people writing. Its not as if we could have fewer people writing articles at this point. This would be implemented in one of two ways. The first would be to have a pay per article style of payment plan. This would involve setting the cost of each article individually before publishing, and would most likely cost 1-5 CC per article. The second payment option would be to have a weekly, monthly, or even yearly subscription fee. While the market would ultimately be what determined the cost of these subscription fees I would expect the fee to be between 5 and 100 USD. This large range is due to the difference between having a weekly or yearly subscription fee.

I am a big fan of this idea because I believe it would provide a lot of incentive for more people to join in the media module, without raising the cost of articles to such an extent that people who currently read articles would stop. If the Admin in their infinite wisdom returned the use of orgs to us then this could also cause the development of actual media empires, with a person hiring writers and paying them with the money earned from these payment plans. I concede that the admin introducing orgs in such a way would be unlikely, but a guy can dream can't he?




The final idea I would like to propose is a small change that allows players to automatically shout whatever articles they have voted. This is a feature that a player could choose to have turned either on or off and would help increase the visibility of quality articles in the media, especially for the newbs. So as to not to spam Military Unit and Political Party feeds with article links this change could be made to only post on a players friend feed, similar to how some apps post automatically on Facebook walls.

Artists depiction of what this would look like


Well there you have it, these are three relatively small changes that could be made that I believe have real potential to inject life into the media module. The reason that I would rather suggest small changes than big ones is that with smaller changes there is less potential for the admin to mess things up.

In order to see the viability of these three ideas I would appreciate it if you would take a minute to fill out this survey, your input is very much appreciated!



https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xOG_WcKUpIft1rD8sHxi_w2cCo3f5cyc24YrzOkOfOw/viewform