[WGA] Media Module, a reason to quit

Day 1,590, 17:47 • Published in Pakistan Serbia • by bozli
QUETTA, China - Gentlemen, I am talking as a regular citizen now. For Pakistani, my final article as a CP of ePakistan will come in a few days.

The topic of today's article will be recent and not-so-recent change in Media Module, which decayed gaming experience by a lot. While Media Module was not the most important one, it clearly was the one which affected all other game modules and made them fun.

Back in the day, during beta, newspaper ZA WARUDO had writers and editors. There was a whole team behind one newspaper, which informed citizens of the Holy Empire about news in the world. This is the only example unfortunately, because I haven't played beta and my knowledge is limited.

During eRep's golden age (late 2009, early 2010), there were many journalists whose main focus was Media. Most were oriented towards their own country, but there were quite a lot of international writers. During that period I didn't have to google translate articles to find out about stuff in foreign countries, big local articles were translated.

Then we have a first big change - you could only publish a newspaper in your citizenship country. Orgs were excluded. This was in fact a good change, because there were less spam on the media, and less fake orders which were, honestly, very annoying. While this change was good, it also pushed people more towards their own country, and the number of international journalists had decreased.

Second bigger change was one of the first "bad" changes in eRepublik - articles were split into sections. Yes, media was big, but it wasn't really uncontrollably big, even in media hyperactive countries such is Serbia. New players had harder time to find good articles, and it became much harder to promote your newspaper (IRC became the main tool rather than ingame options). This was the first step of "Media darkness" as I will call it. Fortunately, eRA script kinda solved the problem, but it still exists with new players.

One minor change, that personally annoyed me, a 2clicker at that time, was that your subs section had articles which were 2 days old at most. So, if I don't read media for a week (vacation), there is almost no way of getting back into what's going on.

After that change, Media Module was quite untouched (no big changes unlike in Military Module). The next "big" change, which is affecting smaller communities more than large, was that you see top articles of the country you live in rather than a citizenship country. While this was default during most of v1, at that time not many countries were completely erased and it was possible to publish in other countries. This change for Pakistan for example means following: while we are deleted, new citizens will not be able to read any Pakitani articles, simply because they don't know how to. Thanks a lot admins.

And we are finally here, to a new change implemented few days ago - revamp of subscriptions submodule. I don't know how it works, admins haven't explained. I have heard a few possible mechanics, none of which fully apply in my personal case. All I know is that I see maybe 10% of all newspapers I am subbed to, which totals of 3 articles per day at most (~200 subs).

After that change, I have stopped checking media, and do not plan to continue until it is changed back or improved in some other way. Availability of information is a key to internet, what admins did with Media module is disgusting.

~MorbidAngel,
Media lover, once upon a time.