Dear Media

[Memento Mori]

Hi @SchwarzNarr. Some people on the grading team thought it should've been graded, others didn't. Grading head ruled it shouldn't be graded. I won't speak for him. I've pasted this topic in the grading discord so he sees it.

I was one of the people who didn't think it should be graded. I don't think some of the topics you've linked should've been graded either. My stance tends to be that stuff that's really tangential should be paid out at a lower rate or not at all, but I'm harsher on that front than some of the others. I do know that this was applied to some of the topics you linked, though.

To address @IsaStarcrossed's point, there's been other media that hasn't attacked or insulted other people which hasn't been graded. Grading this would set the precedent that 'if you include a league-related intro and outro you can write 5000+ words of whatever you like'. I think it'd be wrong if I could write an article saying that in his spare time Brandon Booker likes to play Football Manager and then included a 5000 word section summarising my FM20 save. I think it'd be wrong if I could write an article saying that while at college Brandon Booker got an internship in an office and then I wrote 5000 words describing my typical irl workday.

Back to the general point: People get annoyed when they see giant articles with little or no league-related content paid out for amounts dwarfing league content. As you say yourself, league content is harder to write about. It usually requires research or a lot of background knowledge. This takes time and effort to accumulate. I think your article would've been graded at the usual rate if it'd been shorter, but more words = more pay = more scrutiny. I think we're fairly reasonable with our grading though, and I think some of the takes in this thread are a little OTT. We have paid out over $78,000,000 to SchwarzNarr including millions in bonuses for her creativity in the short time she's been on the site, but this one rubbed some people the wrong way. We're generally criticised for giving out too much money rather than giving out too little, and perhaps the grading has become harsher over time to reflect that. That's me speculating, though.

We don't tend to do individualised feedback, and I'd point to the GFX department for why. It slows grading times down a lot, and there are far more media submissions than graphic submissions. I think a media arbitration thread would be terrible, too. Just look at the graphics arbitration thread and you'll see why. The current media spreadsheet has 4800+ articles we've paid out in it, and there would've been hundreds (thousands?) more that pre-dated this current sheet.