u/Announcement90

Dear Gog,

I am subscribed to the "wishlisted games are on sale" email. I want to receive these emails, because when I have extra money to spend, I want to spend them with you. Those emails keep your storefront at the front of my mind every time I check my email (which is frequently, and certainly far more frequently than my visits to your site), and have lead to a number of sales that probably wouldn't happened if I had decided to unsubscribe and only catch sales whenever I actively seek out your storefront.

But Gog. Come on. The frequency of emails is just too damn high. Since July 3rd I have received 25 emails (!) telling me that this or that game in my wishlist is on sale. It seems to me to be the same few games on rotation, so the emails could just as aptly be titled "the same three games are yet again on sale, just like they were half a week ago!". I'm not even sure that the sale ends before a new email is sent out, meaning that the same sale of the same game is announced through multiple emails. These emails are in addition to new releases and announcement emails, which I also prefer to remain subscribed to, but the total volume is just too much.

I have around 50 games in my wishlist and understand that the frequency of these emails will necessarily go up when my wishlist grows. That's fine. But nearly one email every day to tell me that the same games are on sale for the same price all the time is just over the top. I don't know how you've set up these emails to work, but certainly there must be a way to set this up with a more acceptable frequency. The options shouldn't be either "none" or "barrage" and nothing in between.

So Gog, I'm hoping someone can confirm to me that this is being changed at some point in the near future, or I will simply unsubscribe to these emails from now on. Neither of us want that, because that will leave me with money instead of games, and you with games instead of money. That sounds like a bad idea all around.

So I'm watching my way through Netflix's "The Roman Empire", and there are a few scenarios that got me wondering about how information exchange and verification worked in the past. For example, in the first season, Marcus Aurelius falls ill. The series implies that somewhere in the information chain to Rome his status changes from "ill" to "dead", which leads Faustina to inadvertently and indirectly cause a revolt when she rushes to Avidius Cassius in a bid to ensure the safety of herself and her son Commodus.

The second season, focused on Julius Caesar, explains that Vercingetorix attacked from within the inner walls when the external Gaul army attacked from outside the outer walls. But how did Vercingetorix know that the attack had started? (I suppose the inner and outer walls could be close enough that one could hear combat at one of them from the other?) Considering that he and his army were besieged at Alesia, how did they even get word out to the other Gallic tribes?

There are also a number of scenes in both seasons, and I'm sure in the third as well, where an emperor (or the appropriate title at a given point in time) brings some piece of information to the Senate that it is clear (at least to the viewer) that one, several or all Senate members already know (and similarly that the emperor already knows information that a Senate member shares), which implies that there is no central intelligence network, but rather separate networks working in tandem, or perhaps more aptly, in competition with one another.

All of these things got me wondering about how information has been gathered, shared and verified in the past. It was the series on the Roman empire that sparked my curiosity, but I'm really more interested in the history of information gathering, sharing and verification in the general past, not specific points in time.

On a side note, were messenger pigeons really a thing? How effective were they, and how could you even be certain a released messenger pigeon would fly to the intended target and not to literally anywhere else? When did they "come into existence", who used them, for how long, and for what purposes?

(Pardon if my retelling of events is inaccurate or wrong. I am not an historian and am assuming that the Netflix version of events is correct, though I am sure they've taken some creative liberties in order to present a cohesive series to the viewer.)