I am certain I seen a thread in which Synozeer said it WAS allowed to offer a mud wide reward for 'voting' on the top 100. However, in rules it states that you cannot offer ANY incentive. Which is correct or under what circumstances can we 'reward' our players for attaining a goal via voting?

Rewards of any sort, whether for single players tracked by IP address, or to the entire mud, or percentage of players, or one person, or anything, is completely forbidden and against the rules now.

There are no circumstances which you can reward players for voting.

Synozeer wrote

[/quote]I've decided to go ahead and not allow incentives and rewards to be given to players for voting. Here is the new entry in the Rules section:

Quote  
You CANNOT offer incentives or rewards to players for voting. That means you cannot give players items, experience, or anything else in return for votes. You CAN offer a game-wide prize (e.g. for ALL players on your mud) for reaching a goal, such as getting your mud the top 20, finishing in the top 10, etc.


I decided to go looking for what I had seen. Perhaps the rules section has not yet been updated to reflect this policy?

Directly from the rules...

You are not allowed to offer incentives to players to vote. That does not mean to say you can not give all players, even the players who have not voted, a reward if you come say 10th or above in the top 100.

Actually, you can't do that either. In the first draft of this rule you were able to, but now you're not allow to give rewards for anything to do with voting.

Synozeer

Actually, you can't do that either. In the first draft of this rule you were able to, but now you're not allow to give rewards for anything to do with voting.

Very cool news, Synozeer. I think this greatly improves the reliability of the data.

Other thought: What do you think about adding a "I found this review to be helpful/unhelpful" (Amazon-style) feature? For example, our MUD has dozens of reviews up, and a couple are of the "This MUD roolz. (n/t)" variety, whereas many others are quite thorough. It would be useful to me if I was browsing a MUD to be able to see "Helpful: 15 Unhelpful: 3" before I click on a review, to help guide traffic towards the better-written ones.

The sad truth is that even features like "I found this review useful" are targets of abuse. I remember seeing a series of posts where some moron was boasting about always clicking the OPPOSITE of what a reasonable person would select: Not Useful for anything that sounds like a fair and balanced assessment , and USEFUL L for obviously biased, bash-fests.

If I truly want a review of a book (I buy many, so I do this often) I read the 'official' review first, remembering that it will not likely point out flaws or other negative aspects; afterall, they ARE trying to sell the book. I then scan the user reviews; I feel that I can get a good sense of whether or not it was written intelligently with just a glance; sometimes the first sentence or two.

I respect Mud-Connector's use of a review format and that there is some level of accountability; they do not allow just anyone who logs onto the site to submit a review. That being said, even though there are a significant number of fluff and bash submissions here on TMS, I find *some* value in even those.

I understand why IMPs may wish to shield themselves from abusive former players who 'have an axe to grind', but even in those, I often pick up hints about the mud that ARE true.

Anyway, if it is an easy thing to implement, I would be all for adding the "I found this review usefull/not usefull" feature; if not, I don't think we will really be missing that much.

My 2 centavos' worth.

No one answered me the last time I asked this, so I'll ask it again.

Does Achaea still give bonuses when players vote?

I cannot be bothered to create a char there to find out.

Somone must know.

Nope. We stopped as soon as the rules were changed. We are sticklers for the rules and despite what some exciteable types might claim, we don't cheat.

--matt

So it's safe to say that, even though this News item from Achaea was dated *after* the new policy went into effect, it's since been rescinded?

Just curious...

Of course. It was rescinded as soon as the second rule change went into effect. Synozeer made two rules changes:
1. Disallowing individual rewards, followed, a few days later, by:
2. Disallowing all rewards.


--matt

Actually, when Synozeer and I were chatting about the rules, I considered bringing this up, but I figure, if you can survive as a MUD by punishing your players for not voting for you, well, more power to you. Our players loved getting the reward we gave them for voting, and I am still getting complaints from players asking why we had to remove it, but I'm quite sure that if it was a punishment for not voting instead of a reward for voting, we'd have an insurrection on our hands.

--matt

Nevynral says:I'd think that'd end up backfiring on the MUD, causing its players to vote for *other games* out of spite. Players don't tend to do things on behalf of their MUD to avoid being penalized - they can log off and avoid penalties. They do respond well to being rewarded, one way or another.

Do you think mud owners add their muds to the listings for an ego boost, or because they want players searching for specific muds to come across theirs?

Do you think mud owners post adverts to the promotion forums for an ego boost, or because they want to attract new players?

Do you think mud owners pay for advertising banners for an ego boost, or because they want to draw more attention to their mud?

Top Mud Sites is one of the most popular mud sites on the net - I'd probably guess the second most popular - and it's main "feature" has always been the "top muds" list. A mud which is in first place is going to gather a lot more attention than one which just adds a banner - and unlike banners, it's free advertising. All you have to do is get your players to vote.

Of course if the voting is unfair, then so are the results - if you do something which encourages (say) 80% of your playerbase to vote, while someone else is only able to get 40% of their playerbase to vote, it really doesn't take a great deal of complex maths to work out that the voting is giving a poor indication of what it's supposed to.

What exactly is it that the voting is supposed to represent?

You know, I get the feeling that people post in the promotion forums largely for an ego boost sometimes. If not, they're not thinking very clearly, as these forums are read by no more than a large handful of people. Not a very attractive advertising medium.

In response to what topmudsites measures, however, I'd say it's completely fair and measures exactly what it's supposed to: How much traffic you send here. The only way that could be unfair is if someone figured out a method to spoof TMS with fake IPs, or hacked the database. In the end, any assumption that TMS measures anything on the rankings list beyond traffic sent here is a perception imposed upon TMS by the user, not the other way around.
--matt

I run a site that currently sits in the 21-40 turf of the listing.

And I think, after much consideration, that the direction we're going with the "rewards-for-voting" dilemma isn't necessarily the best to follow.

Oh, I definitely believe it's wrong to use fake IPs to inflate votes and bypass the one-vote-every-twelve-hours limit. But even if I might never see my site in the Top 20 *again*, I still think games should not just be allowed, but *encouraged* to hold gamewide rallies to see if their players can pull together as a team and reach a certain level by voting, and they should be allowed to hand out XP or whatever they want as a reward to their players at the end of each voting cycle.

Part of building a successful game is developing a sense of camaraderie and community - and Top MUD Sites provides one of those cool competitive features that can allow a Little Game With Attitude the potential to rally and make it into the Top 20 sometimes. It's not merely an ego boost for a game developer, but also for the players, to see their game on the list. That's a motivator for building community. It also keeps people coming back to TMS, more and more. When we had the ability to reward an entire game for making progress on the list, I saw more of my players perusing the forums and posting here. Since we quit that due to the rules changes, there's really not as much motivation to either 1) vote or 2) spend time in the TMS forums.

Some people will abuse the system, no matter what form it takes or what rules you put on it.

I just think we should be careful not to regulate the system into oblivion. The current setup - banning any gamewide rewards - marginalizes the players who might get behind a voting rally for their favorite game.

I understand the *point* behind a blanket ban on rewards-for-voting, and I respect the premise, but I suggest we keep in mind that adding regulation on top of regulation to the site may have a long-term detrimental effect. A game like mine, for example, might make the Top 20 if I can rally my troops with the promise of XP at the end of the cycle. But the bigger games don't *need* to dangle a carrot-and-stick much - they've often got the playerbase to dominate without it. Taking away the gamewide-reward option hurts the smaller games, in the long run.

All that said: I once again encourage those small games who *can* to help support Top MUD Sites and buy a banner ad that can run in the front page rotation. Now that I'm back to writing a column for TMS, I'll probably get back to advertising - and we got lots of visits to my games thanks to those banner ads when we ran them in the past.