Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Here's a few reasons to consider promoting / discussing your MUD in the TMS forums:
Although it received great feedback on release, the new forum is getting very little use. I'd love to hear feedback on why, if only to discover whether further investment in time on this site has any value to the MUD community.

I think you will like the new MUD database and review system, fully integrated with the forum and its permission system, but if nobody cares one way or another that would also be good to know :)

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I think the main issue is the fact that it is hard to attract new users because of the nature of the MUDs(text only)
When you have games such as 2Moons(Acclaim), Quake Wars and other being released, it is hard to bring new users to MUDs.Especially since the learning curve is so high.
Just take me for example. I have been trying to get into Muds for the past 2 years or so and I have had almost no success.
It is just hard to get into text only games
However I am waiting with excitement the new graphic MMO by IRE

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I don't think it has anything to do with the forum really. Of the major mud sites, it seems like TMC has the most active forums (NIC the server-specific forums out there), TMS has the most prominent top 100 mud list, etc....Perhaps if the forum posts were front-paged a little more prominently you would suck more people into the site. Though I don't know how many of your uniques come in through the front page versus coming in through a voting page. I suspect the latter.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that the community at TMC seems to be made up mostly of developers and aspiring developers. In fact you see this across platforms (MUSH, DIKU-clones, etc.). I don't know how true this is for LP, the CWG site, and so on, but my guess is it holds true. Who else would want to talk about all these mud issues but developers? If you could find a reason to draw players to the forums, perhaps you would see more use.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I have read these boards for a number of years now and I have noticed two things. The time when most of the action occurs is when there is some sort of controversy going on, be it the Unshackling of Medievia, Policy changes regarding voting, the (ab)Use of the review system, etc. New topics turn up very often when there are people who seemingly naturally dislike each other giving opinions on issues (theLogos vs Molly comes to mind, but again, check I used the word "seemingly".)

Other issue is that basic topics have been discussed before and older forum users might not feel inclined to revisit them (been there, done that, kind of thing). It is my opinion that if people (developers) were more prone to discuss their games and their approach to games, it would both be beneficial to them (if they are interesting at least :P) and it would let the random visitor know there is something to be learned on the site (I will put KaVir here as someone who frequently and openly discusses game mechanics and others, at least more noticeably than most.)

Finally, I believe the graphic games are a big threat to text games, but given that now cell-phones are starting to be internet able and have a computing power greater than the computers many of us started playing MUDs in, I think cell-phone mudding is not something that is that far away (I have seen a few people who already sort-of do this). This means to me that even as new technology comes out, the allure of text games may be reignited.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I don't think graphical MMOs are a threat to text-based MUDs at all. As Spoke said, there's definitely a good prospect for a resurgence of interest in these games, which cross platforms and computer capabilities with ease. Particularly with the growing mainstream awareness of World of Warcraft (love it or hate it), we may see people discovering freebie games that encourage more imagination and lower computer power requirements.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I think the issue here is that due to the publicity and marketing budgets of the large games, most MUD players have been exposed to World of Warcraft and other MMO platforms. It was inevitable that the MMOs would appeal to a certain percentage of MUD players and we've all seen people migrate away from MUDs towards those games.

I also believe that a number of new MMO players would be interested in checking out MUDs and some would migrate the other way if they only knew about MUDs and got some exposure to them.

It is like having people who only ever watch movies because they don't know that books exist. Most would continue to just watch movies after learning about books, but some would prefer the "intimacy" and imagination that comes with a good read. Just in 1 in a thousand MMO players coming to MUDs would be a huge influx. The catch of course is how to generate that exposure and publicity for MUDs ....

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Well, I've been trying an experiment called a MU*Volucion, using Craigslist. Essentially, I pitch the idea of an "online storytelling club" using the free advertising at craigslist.org. Goes something like this:

If you've got a few minutes to spare, visit your local craigslist.org page and make a new posting under the Groups category. Title it:

Free: Online storytelling club

And use the following text for the ad:


Join creative writers from around the world and share epic sagas that evolve in real time at

Online since 1998, the only requirements for membership are:

* A basic Internet connection.
* Telnet or downloadable free client software. We recommend SimpleMU:
* Good attitude.
* Vivid imagination.

You can interact with other imaginative participants in our storytelling environments, which include the space opera universe of OtherSpace and the fantasy world of Chiaroscuro.

And it's free!

Check out the main website at and learn more about multi-user online role-playing games at the MU*Wiki,


***

So, anyone who wants can feel free to take this idea and run with it, substituting jointhesaga.com stuff for their own sites - and, of course, adding Top MUD Sites and the MUD Connector to the places to learn more about these games.

From small acorns do big trees grow! :)

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I know what your saying about introducing new players to MUDS being difficult.
I discovered muds in november last year I didnt know such a thing existed & when I first saw it & thought what no graphics? But then I realised most graphics games lack any depth at all because it takes so much for the computer to generate the graphics that there is little memory left for game features.

However it is difficult as a newcomer to find a home within mudding as most people have been playing for many years and it seems they are on a level you cant reach. When I fight in my MUD Im seriously rubbish at it as im the newest player even though ive played daily for 6 months now. Thats because most players know everything like the back of their hand because theyve been there for years. It is a nice community in the world of mudding but you have to be able to cope with being a lousey fighter & at a low place in the hierarchy if your new.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I'm sorry?

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I think the issue might be that there is too much reasoning what the admins/devs want from TMS. The question is also what players would like to see. At the moment the website is mainly a place to find a game to play. Once you have found it you use that games forum/mail system. You don't use the TMS forums.

To a player there is very little reason to use the forum, and a way to lure them here would be needed. It is similar with the review system. It is there to attract players to a game, but that doesn't mean it would build a player community on TMS. The goal is after all to build a community on some specific MUD.

TMS could provide:It is very complicated though. Some MUDs use ingame message boards a lot so players might not want to use a web forum. In other cases the MUD might already have a web forum and have no interest in supporting TMS forums, e.g Achaea. It is a bit like when designing a MUD client. You need to offer something that isn't included in the MUD that people need(but don't necessarily know they need).

I know of another MUD list that recently opened free forums for every MUD on the list. It sounded like a very good idea yet there are barely any posts in those forums :confused:. Maybe adding some more modern terms such as mmrpg/mmorpg as meta tags could help to get some newbies find the website?

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

That's a pretty damned good approach, Aeran. Maybe it'd help, Lasher, to look at sites like tentonhammer.com and mmorpg.com for cues in what they've been doing to cater to the MMO fans.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

You know I actually considered an MMO section in the new forums and making the site a little more attractive to MMORPG players. Not to migrate TMS towards that market, but to try to migrate some of that market towards MUDs.

I didn't go ahead with it because there is already massive competition in that area with full time staff creating content non stop, but mainly because I figured it would offend some of the die-hard "MUDders". The only small concession nobody even noticed was the title text "Discuss, Build, Play MUDS & RPGs".

As for specific MUD forums, quite happy to create a forum for any MUD with it's own banner and/or subdomain such as mymud.topmudsites.com with moderation left to the admins of that MUD (with the exception of content that could make TMS a legal target). Just don't think there's much demand for it...

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Why? I don't question the value of text MUDs of course but if you've spent 2 years trying to like them and don't, what makes you continue? What's your motivation in other words?

Thanks!
--matt

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I tried advertising our MUD in the "activities partners" section of Craigslist on several different occasions. I didn't notice that it resulted in any traffic to our website. Since it's not easy to spam craigslist by posting the same advertisement to different cities simultaneously, it becomes a time-consuming process.

I hope it works for you though; anything that introduces MU*s to someone who was previously unfamiliar with them is a good thing for all of us.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I can see a couple of explanations to the problems with activating the Forum.

Of course, I left this Forum a couple of years ago, due to some irritating circumstances, and I've only just returned, when an e-mail about the Forum update made me realize that my account hadn't been deleted, as I thought. So I'm not sure if my observation is correct, but my initial impression is that this Forum seems to be pretty dead nowadays. Possible a number of other active posters left at the same time that I did and drained it of content, but that's just a guess on my side. In any case, the Forum could now experience the same problem that a new Mud has in getting starting up. If there aren't any interesting threads, people soon stop checking. My guess would be that Ide has a point - people come here mainly to vote, not to discuss, so the vast majority of the hits you get are just people clicking the vote button for their Muds, possibly even using a script to close the window immediately after.
So the first thing needed is to get some interesting discussions running, to make people actually start checking the boards and coming back.

Another problem along the same lines is that there are way too many Text Mud based Forums around nowadays, and that there are only so many that you can follow, so people tend to choose the most active ones. And further, as Ide also pointed out, the different Websites specialize in different topics, and you tend to patronize the ones that have the most topics that interests you.

It's true that most of the active posters on most boards are Mud developers, and it is also true that the more experienced, 'professional' and specialized you become as a developer, the more you are picking out the type of content that really interests you. For instance, I am a Builder, 'Designer' and Scriptor myself, so I generally skip the coding boards, because coderish is Chinese to me. But even building questions have to be pretty advanced to really interest me nowadays, and I guess that it is the same for most long-term developers. Also the different codebases have developed so far in different directions that they are no longer generally applicable. So my own favourite hang-out when it comes to advanced building and scripting nowadays has become the CWG project, in particular the Builder Lounge there, where you can get some really interesting discussions and concrete suggestions about advanced scripting. But my guess would be that those examples are only interesting for Circle developers that use the DG_scripts code, because the mob_prog syntax is totally different.

Less specialized Forums, like this one, are best for discussing 'general' issues, like for instance ethical questions. But I totally agree with Spoke's observation that the most interest is generated whenever there is a flame-festival running. Sadly but true, flame threads may be negative from many aspects, but a fact is that even the most immature ones are usually quite entertaining.
However, if you want any serious discussions to develop, you need an environment where the posters actually respect one another. And this atmosphere must be based on REAL respect. Just censoring any inflammatory posts never works, it just festers more resentment, especially if certain parties are allowed more freedom to censor others. Respect has to be earned, it cannot be forced down people's throats.

But you want to attract PLAYERS here rather than developers, and I can understand that, because players are a much larger potential target group.
So far the best suggestion I've seen for attracting more players to the website has been Lasher's idea to provide serious reviews - not the kind of useless fanboy-praise/flamethrowing that generally passes as reviews. If you could achieve THAT, you would really have the potential of attracting a pretty large audience, since most players - AND developers - would appreciate reading serious reviews.
The main problem with THAT is of course to get hold of some serious reviewers, with the time and inclination to actually keep at the task and not fade out after a month.

Another problem is that it means a change of the present policy, where some games are allowed to refuse reviews. If 'qualified' reviews will ever work, they need to be global, and no Admin should be allowed to block out a review because it contains some criticism. No game is ever perfect, so to me the hallmark of a 'good' review is that it highlights both the good and the bad points of a game.

I can see this becoming a controversial issue, but then again that might be a good thing, since controversial generates interest. :)

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

One player-friendly move I've advocated for a long time is to allow reviews on all MUDs, not just a subset. TMS is a third-party site, and it's not clear to me why a MUD owner has the right to arbitrarily prohibit discussion of their game.

Now, not all reviews are useful. We have a few dozen up (I remember we had more from pre-2004, but it looks like the database no longer includes them.), and there's certainly a few that I think are useless, either from the "fanboy" or "flame" perspective. Some contain factual mistakes. But in between all of that is a lot of good information. You could say the same about many forum threads.

I think the review system could guide feedback a bit by asking some questions, instead of presenting a blank slate. Threaded replies and moderation could allow other people familiar with the game (administrators or players) to discuss the review, while reminding people that you aren't there to have a "This is awesome./No, this is terrible!!!/Well, you're too dumb to understand it." playground spat. Even something as crude as a minimum character count (with the caveat that spam will just get the review removed) would likely boost the median quality.

A final important thing to keep in mind about fanboy/flame reviews is that for the most part, they're written in such a way that an intelligent reader can see through them. One review might be useless, but if you accumulate a body of a couple dozen, your game's style will come through.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Well, I haven't seen anyone jump onto my games yet and say "I saw you on craigslist." But it creates the opportunity to be seen. Also, there IS a workaround to the same post in different cities - it just can't always come from *you*. That's why I enlisted players on my games to help target craigslist sites all over the world. Give other players a stake in the success of the marketing endeavor, let them share in building the buzz, and maybe it'll pay off at some point.

It may not generate an immediate hit for your game short-term, but it can't hurt and, long-term, it helps build solidarity and camaraderie among your current playerbase.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Maybe if there was some sort of moderator(specific mods that volunteer to be unbiased and chosen by Lasher) review BEFORE a review is posted could work. I can understand certain MUDs not wanting any random person to be able to do a "review" on their game, because most of the reviews I have read haven't been a review. Most of them are either fanboys raving or someone who doesn't like the game/admin/methods(for example the ever popular pay-for-perks/pay-to-play/DIKUs taking donations/etc) ranting about it.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

The new reviews will be built into the forum. I couldn't find an add-on for VB that quite does what I want so it's being written from scratch. The reviews will require a moderator to approve before they are posted. You will also need a forum user ID to post a review which means email confirmation. These combined should encourage a higher quality review (that actually makes it through to the public list). Obviously they will need to be moderated based on having some real content and information about the MUD in question and not whether the moderator agrees.

The reviews will also have comments (basically a forum thread) giving others a chance to add feedback to a review. I guess with this we run the risk of a bunch of "fanboys" or "griefers" mass posting to a review, but people see through that kind of stuff quickly enough. The old reviews will be imported but pruned to remove the spam and the "This mud rocks play it! / This mud sucks don't play it!" one-liners.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I prefer to be able to just keep reviews off but if you’re going to allow them, have you considered the implications of requiring moderator approval? By doing so the site is essentially endorsing that review and the facts within and almost surely opens itself to libel charges if anything in the review is false. I heard about a lawsuit recently on NPR where a restaurant was suing a food reviewer and the newspaper that published the review simply because the reviewer said she had gotten a strip steak and in fact it was a porterhouse.

It’s probably not a huge deal but by approving them before they’re posted TMS is essentially endorsing them (as opposed to removing them after the fact if someone legitimately complains) and that's got potential consequences that you may want to factor into how you implement your new system.

--matt

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

True, but anyone looking for that much of a reason to sue could also make the same claim when reviews are actively moderated after being posted - a review is "endorsed" by virtue of not being removed.

If someone posts a flat out lie and it can be demonstrated that's a lie it will be removed, combined with the option to openly respond to a review which is rarely the case in newspaper situations would give the impression of lower liability. If we start to try to determine "facts" in reviews and moderate that, then miss some, that would be more of a liability than moderating only for the appearance of a "real" review.

I did a quick search on "user generated content liability" and uncovered this article which offers some good advice but really only tells me this area of the law is still wide open:



Forget reviews for a minute. Look at our MUDs. I figured this was important/interesting enough to be in it's own thread:

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

These questions definitely aren't settled yet, indeed, but common carriers are definitely allowed to remove people from their service without losing common carrier status. On the other hand, most of us do remove content of various types if it's posted (I don't think too many MUDs would like to see someone encouraging the lynching of rl minorities for instance) which seems to call into question any claim we have to common carrier status at all.

(For those of you not sure what we're talking about: Common carrier status is a status under US law that's granted to phone companies, pure ISPs, etc. It allows them to avoid liability for content that travels over their network. Imagine if you could sue the phone company because someone defrauded you via the phone service....it'd be quite hard to run a phone company.)

Anyway, yeah, not a huge worry but thought I'd point it out.

--matt

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I like reviewing systems which allow the user reviews to be rated by other users, either via a "was this helpful? [yes/no]" method, or via a x out of 5 scale system. Higher rated reviews are either ranked higher in the list or are "featured."

Reviews that simply say "this mud is awesome!" would slowly sift down the list of reviews, or can be removed by a moderator.

The main disadvantage with that feature would be that it seems that detailed positive reviews always place higher than detailed negative reviews.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Lasher, are you saying that you are taking away our right to turn off reviews?

I think anything short of professional reviews is effectively spam. I occasionally read a few reviews off the front page here, and the overwhelming majority of them are still fanboy/flame reviews. They are complete garbage. Moderating them MIGHT reduce the most extreme offenders, but the ones that get through will still mostly be junk. After all, the tendency of moderators is to let through as much as they can. They will err on the side of approving rather than denying.

Being able to mail you about libelous or dishonest reviews simply means more workload for the MUD operator. Why should I have to comb your site regularly just to protect myself from defamation? Furthermore, noticing it and reporting it are all after the fact. You will still have given these kinds of misanthropes a forum to spread their lies for however long the review is up.

The MUDs that have reviews turned off tend to be the more popular MUDs. That alone should be a big clue as to their value (or lack thereof). If they had reviews on, you can be sure they would get a lot more positive reviews than negative. But these operators know that it isn't worth the hassle of dealing with the libelous ones, and the truth is the reviews have no actual value anyway.

I sincerely hope you intend to let us still keep reviews off. The people who list their MUDs here are the ones who send the traffic. Let them have the right to just avoid the agony and hassle of having to deal with it.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I think it would be a bad idea to just 'censor' the reviews. Lies should be exposed to the light and dealt with, not just suppressed. If someone posts a 'flat out lie' about a game in a review, it should exposed and proven to be a lie, rather than just censored in the original post. If this is done, the poster of the lie will lose all credibility, which is a much more effective way to deal with things like that. TMC has a system with comments to reviews that seems to work very well. I remember seeing some partly negative reviews there, which the Mud owners dealt with in such a balanced and mature way that it left me with a high degree of respect for them, and actually made me a lot more inclined to try out their game than I would have been if the original review had been a 100% positive one.

I would have preferred 'professional' reviews, written by independent authors, without a vested interest in the game they review, but I can see the difficulties in recruiting qualified and respected reviewers. However, the changes that Lasher proposes for the current system seems to be a definite improvement. Allowing the option to respond directly in the review thread should be a very effective way to deal with any 'defamation' or obvious mistake, (intentional or accidental). And even if the original review was poorly written, the comments would definitely make it more interesting, and isn't that what we are looking for here?

Rathik's suggestion to give the readers the option to 'rate' the reviews for content might be helpful too, provided it was used actively. As it is, very few of us actually read any reviews (except of course the ones for our own games), because the general quality is so low. But if the content improved a bit, that might quickly change, and the ratings would sort out and expose the bad posters - at least theoretically.

I'm not sure if it would work well in praxis however. In my own Mud Forums we have a system where the readers can 'applaud' or 'smite' a post, and this will in turn affect the 'Karma' of the poster. While the idea seemed a good one theoretically, it caused some abuse in praxis, where one player would 'smite' all posts of another, just because he disliked the poster. (I could see the same thing happen here). Also it seems that the rate system was used very actively in the first few weeks or so, and then people just tired of it, and would stop using it. Today it is hardly ever used by anyone.

I definitely agree with Valg that the present option for some games to turn off all reviews should be removed. The site should offer the same conditions for all members.
It boggles me why some mud operators are so afraid of reviews. If you have any confidence in your own game - which you should if it is a good one - what is there to be afraid of? People are usually not that easily fooled, they will see through the disgruntled-player flames as well as the fanboy fluff.

One would have thought every Admin that runs a decent Mud would welcome seeing reviews about it. After all, it's exposure, and isn't exposure what we all are looking for? Even if some negative things are occasionally pointed out, isn't it be a good thing for the Admin to be made aware of the problems, so you can deal with them? And even if there is the odd mainly negative review, wouldn't the majority be good, if your game is any good?

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Nope. Read the thread again, you'll find suggestions by others to do that. The "lie" comment was in response to the idea of liability if reviews are moderated.

Reputation management for a public service on the internet is a fact of life, you either do it or you don't. If players want to talk about your MUD they're going to do it on their own pages, on forums in non-review areas and in any other way they like.

This operator strongly disagrees after having our Wikipedia entry removed due to insufficient "external references" to back up facts on the page - Most other MUDs still there made it through by referencing external reviews, even bad ones. The existing reviews and articles on TMS are also some of its most highly ranked pages in search after the front page. Aardwolf had reviews off because they were unmoderated, spammed and when someone did post complete junk about the game there was no way to respond, leaving reviews out there indexed for years with uncorrected false information.

Regardless, I don't plan to remove the option, but that doesn't prevent someone from discussing a MUD in a post of their own outside of the "reviews" area.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

This is a third-party site. I don't see why User A (a MUD owner) can decide what topics User B (a MUD player) can write about. If you want the site to be appealing to players, you can't treat them as second-class citizens.

We've gotten a number of reviews that I'd find useful as a prospective player.

Part of this thread was about making the site more appealing to players (especially since players vastly outnumber owners), and if the administrative stance is that players are too dumb to write reviews, I think we may have located the source of that problem.


Like calling the written work of site users "garbage"? Or lumping them as "misanthropes" or "fanboys"?

Again, it's not hard to see why a player wouldn't use this site if that's a prevailing opinion.

And the people who are writing the reviews are giving the site traffic. Word of mouth sends this site traffic as well. A healthy forum community would send this site traffic.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Pre-approval probably solves a lot of that, both directly (irresponsible reviews get snipped) and indirectly (people tend to behave better when they know someone is watching). The ability to reply serves two purposes:

1) The replier can provide factual corrections, context, and explanations. Presumably, the replies would feed in through the same moderation option, so flame wars can be rapidly brought under control.

2) In the case of a MUD administrator replying, a browsing player can see how the ownership treats criticism, constructive or otherwise. For a lot of players, that's important information to have while "shopping".

The fact that the review sections are frequently searched speaks volumes about what you could do with the site to draw in a wider audience.

This seems confusing to me, even though it's how the site has operated in practice-- threads about MUDs which did not allow reviews came up in the forums anyway. Synozeer even participated in some, suggesting he didn't disapprove of it in theory.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Please don't turn the comments of one non-administrative poster into "the administrative stance is that players are too dumb to write reviews" or "prevailing opinion".

If someone doesn't want to have to deal with the "overhead" of responding to player's reviews of their MUD that's up to them and people will make their own decision what that means. If players just don't care then it makes no difference either way. If players do care the only thing that is harmed is that MUD.

I turned off reviews for Aardwolf under the old system not because of any opinion that "players are too dumb to write reviews" but because there was no way to respond to false information - you could post something in the forums but that was quickly forgotten while reviews are out there indefinitely.

All a matter of perspective, you could also argue the fact that the administrator would prefer not to have that feedback (on this site) at all is important information players will not be aware of if there is no option to opt out.

Most posters in this thread are Mud admins, so thankfully they're all understanding of those situations where you make a change knowing that half your users will love it and half will hate it no matter which way you go --- right? :)

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think TMC moderates reviews before they appear -- they never appear instantly after you write them, in any case, but seem queued up, as a bunch arrive at once. Basically what Lasher proposes is the TMC system, and I think it works well.

edit: on the other hand, I don't know if mud owners can turn off reviews on TMC.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

So I was digging around in old threads here about reviews, and one thing that came up was that Brody said he wrote a 'review' article for TMS under the old management.

Lasher, is this still something you would accept as an article?

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Valg, please try to avoid projecting your own opinions about players onto other people. If you think players are, to quote you, "too dumb to write reviews," then post it as your own opinion instead of slyly attributing it to someone else. I said nothing of the sort.

Real players are perfectly capable of writing good reviews. This should be obvious, since how could anyone write a review that doesn't PLAY MUDs. A good review can ONLY be written by a player.

Most people who take the time to write reviews, sadly, are not "real players" and they certainly do not write reviews in good faith. Most "real players" are so busy playing the game they like that they won't bother with a site about MUDs or writing reviews. Yes, a few will. Those are the few reviews that are actually good and worthwhile (be they positive or negative).

But the majority of reviews get written by people who are unbalanced for one reason or another. The people who actually end up taking the time to write reviews are more likely to either be blatant suckups or enraged haters. Those are the motivations that are most likely to supply that last, final bit of motivation to actually take the time to go to a site, create an account, and write up a review.

You see this same phenomenon all over the place. It is why comments on ESPN.com stories or responses to movie reviews on movie sites tend to be only the most extreme. The more normal folks with less virulent opinions can't be bothered to post.

That is why MUD reviews that are not written by "staff" are doomed to always be mostly junk. The majority of the time, the thing that motivates someone to take the time to write a review is not something that lends itself to a good, honest, objective review.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

TMC has an option to refuse player reviews, yep.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I do recall writing a review article once. I think it was about Armageddon. Long time ago. Not sure where it went!

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Was it completely a review? Or was it an article on a certain type of MUD using Armageddon as an example?

I'm surprised it was published as an "article" if it was 100% review.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Actually, the more I think about it, I recall it was an objective piece spotlighting Armageddon - so, more of an article about the game than a review.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Except I obviously don't think that, which is why Carrion Fields has always allowed players to write reviews, why we actively encourage our players to do so, and why I've held a consistent stance that third-party sites like TMS should allow it. My actions dictate that I do think reviews, in aggregate, are valuable feedback.

In this thread alone, you've referred to the majority of player reviewers as 'blatant suckups', 'enraged haters', and/or 'misanthropes'. You've claimed that 'anything short of professional reviews is effectively spam'. This attitude unfortunately pervades a lot of threads here on TMS. Now, if a player comes here and sees posts of that sort from MUD administrators going unopposed, how likely are they to contribute to the community? If no players are coming here, what good is your promotional material?

Individual reviews can be bad or good, which is where moderation comes in. It's no different from forums. There are plenty of posts on the forums which I don't think much of, but I'm not advocating that we shut down all forums.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

While I've always left the reviews enabled, the above was one of my major concerns with the original system as well. I think allowing responses to reviews is a vast improvement, and would certainly make the site more player-friendly. You can also tell a lot about a game based on how the admin respond to negative reviews.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

If you prune the name calling and gross generalizations from Threshold´s posts you end up with his main (and strong) valid point. Forcing open reviews on all MUDs would force upon the administration of said MUDs the policing and following of the reviews on their MUDs, knowing that even though a good response to a flaming review from a disgruntled player could be as powerful (or more) than a good review, a bad and unfounded review left unanswered will at best be ignored by some visitors at worst negatively affect the game´s perception by the audience.

I think I do agree that a change of this sort should be at least carefully thought because it would force administrators to spend more time here (opposed to coming here because something interesting is going on or because they want to contribute, this "feature" would encourage coming just to cover their backs). On the flip side, if a player is interested enough to be checking reviews, as soon as he/she notices that a game has blocked reviews but sees that there are tools in place so administrators can respond making the review system a solid one, his/her opinion might just be that the administrator does not care to hear criticism or deem them inferior just for that. In this case not allowing reviews would only affect the unlisted game, as Lasher pointed out.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Indeed it would, but is that necessarily a bad thing? It's extra work for the admin, certainly, but it could also bring in a great deal of extra traffic to TMS and give free publicity to the mud in question. Players are going to complain and flame anyway, and I'd rather they did it here where (1) it's immediately brought to my attention, (2) I can refute or respond to their claims on neutral ground.

But I think the real question is whether Lasher wants to make TMS primarily a website for admin to promote their muds, or a website for players to find and review muds. If TMS is primarily aimed at mud owners, then it makes sense for mud owners to be able to switch off, control and/or filter reviews. If TMS is primarily aimed at players, then it makes sense to allow players to post their views about all muds.

Right now TMS is geared towards mud owners, and I suspect that's a big part of the reason why the traffic is fairly low. Most of the active posters are developers, while the players typically have little to discuss and usually only log on to vote. The only time I really see lots of players joining in the discussions is when one mud or another is being flamed.

As has been pointed out already, the Mud Connector has more active discussions than here - however its reviews are pretty quiet. I suspect this may have much to do with the moderated nature of their reviews compared with the unmoderated nature of their forums. There's not much point posting negative views about a mud if you know it'll just be removed (assuming it even makes it through the review filter), but if the forums are unmoderated you know you can vent your (non-libellous) frustrations without being censored.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Speaking as someone who is pretty active on some other forums that are specific to a particular MUD, I can tell you why I haven't been very motivated to post here. Basically it comes down to the fact that I don't know anyone else who posts here, so the "community" aspect is absent. Also, most of my involvement in other forums revolves around game-play and/or culture topics that are specific to one MUD. TMS is by definition aspecific, and I'm not sure there's any aspecific information I need/want.

Note: this isn't a knock on you, the site, or the forums. They seem to be designed well, and I'm sure there are intelligent and helpful people posting here.

When it comes to reviews, I think individual reviewers can post useful information, but I also admit there's a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Personally, I think the long-term life of TMS relies on the site being for players (and the encouragement of playing/supporting MUDs) rather than just a haven for MUD owners who want to protect their projects from bad reviews.

MUDs aren't like restaurants. They're effectively clubs people can join. TMS, in my opinion, should act as a sort of matching service, introducing newcomers to MUDs and giving veteran players information about which games are getting good word of mouth and which are getting slammed. I really like the idea of reviews that take into account questions about different criteria and then allow reviewers to add a full-fledged comment, if they like, while also giving others a chance to respond to those reviews.

As for how we might generate more activity in the forums - well, maybe we need to broaden our minds a little bit and do more brainstorming in the forums about how to find new outlets for publicity, potential new resources for players, and articles that spotlight games that are listed here.

Also, reinvigorating the Articles section - perhaps making it part of the forums - would help a lot too. I know that in the earliest days of TMS, Synozeer's efforts to get articles brought in a lot of voices from the MUD community and that helped build recognition for the site.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Thanks for the insights Isildur, and absolutely not taken as a "knock" of any kind. You phrased my original question better than I did - there is no doubt that each MUD has a community, but is there really a "community" at the macro level? Is the shortage of activity a symptom of this site, or a symptom of MUDs in general? By definition each MUD is a silo that will develop it's path independently of others.

Most traffic to TMC is one of two kinds:

1. A player came to vote for their favorite MUD and may or may not stick around for a while to read a post/review/etc. Generally, someone coming to vote for their favorite MUD isn't in the market (right now) for a new MUD, but you hope your MUD somehow catches their attention (banners, rankings, forum posts, reviews, etc) then maybe they'll check you out later.

2. After Wikipedia, which ranks #1 for pretty much everything informational, TMC and TMS rank #1 and #2 for the phrases "MUD" and "MUDS" in Google. The other type of traffic is people interested in MUDs following those links and other links to TMS from various sites coming to learn more about MUDs, browse the database, read some reviews and maybe try a MUD out. I think we could do more to help these folks out with general information on MUDs, what the classifications really mean and, as Brody suggested, this is where a revived articles area could be a big help.

Most of the traffic is not active MUD players coming to discuss MUDs in general, because they don't care about MUDs in general, they only care about the MUD they play - until some time in the future when they might be interested in a new MUD for whatever reason. MUD Admins tend to care more about the kind of issues that affect MUDs at a global level and, if anything, that is why TMS is more aimed towards Admins. It would be interesting to hear if this was by design right from the start or if it just turned out that way - but I don't think Adam is around even lurking anymore...

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I recall back in the day that the original design was pretty much for MUD owners to list their games and MUD players to vote/rank their favorite games and compete for the top spot each cycle. The forums became, more or less, a water cooler and free advertising venue.

Not for nothing, but I think a lot of the stagnation on TMS has been a result of a stagnation in the top tier of MUDs in the rankings. There's no competition, really. New games don't stand a chance of ever seeing the front page unless they pay for it through TMS advertising. The top games are always going to be the top games.

I think if there was some way to give other ranked games an opportunity to hit the front page - sort of like TMC's random MUD links - then the site might become a little more energized by visits from players and admin alike.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

What might not be a bad idea too is to be able to enter your selection options when searching the database and have a "Random MUD that matches these options" link. This may already be how the TMC link works - not sure.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I agree, and this is much of the angle I'm coming from here. If an undecided player comes here today, they're going to get a canned blurb from each MUD, the ability to read some advertising, and some discussions that are aimed at developers precisely because developers are virtually the only ones who use the boards. That limits the size of the site, the utility to advertisers (who wants to advertise to other MUD owners?), and the depth of the discussions. If more players felt like even a portion of the site catered to them, you might see improvement on those facets. Reviews strike me as a place which could naturally fill that niche.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Nobody wants to advertise to other MUD owners I'd imagine. Advertising here is valuable for 2 reasons, however, neither of which have anything to do with advertising to MUD owners but everything to do with what MUD owners do:
1. Lots of MUD owners send their players to it to vote.
2. TMS places highly in MUD-related searches because lots of MUD owners link to it.

You can theorize that somehow, magically, the forums are going to become a magnet for players but I don't really see a reason for it. There is no "mud community" I'm aware of despite how often that term is thrown around. There are "mud communities" oriented around the individual MUDs, and smaller communities of developers oriented around a few MUD forum sites.

I mean, just look at the popularity of MUD forums around the net. Achaea's forums alone are considerably larger than TMS or TMC's forums and Achaea didn't even put up official forums until 2004. When a single games forums (and I'm sure Achaea is not the only MUD with forums that size) are more popular than -any- general MUD-related forums that ought to tell you something about how MUD players in general view their community. Further, even with the size of Achaea's forums, most of its players don't participate in them, much less ever read or participate in general mud-related forums.

It's only natural and to be expected. You don't find an international "bar" community. You find communities around specific bars. You don't find an international "town" community. You find people generally more interested in the community OF their town. Similarly, players are just naturally more interested in the community around the world they call home. Disproportionately, it's developers who have a reason to participate in a meta-community, just like with most things (like a bar....bar owners may communicate and go to conferences or whatnot together, but their patrons don't).

--matt

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Well, that's similar to arguing that there's no general MMORPG community and would only be communities around specific MMOs. While I agree, generally, that the specific community sites will be much busier, there are, in fact, pretty busy MMO community sites that help get the word out to prospective players about graphical MMOs.

I don't see why TMS/TMC couldn't serve as a similar kind of hub.

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

Yes, there are somewhat busy MMO forum sites that are general MMOs. Of course, there are also magnitudes more people interested in graphical MMOs than text MUDs. What you want to look at is the ratio there, and it backs up what I'm saying. There is no general MMO forum that even approaches the size of the specific MMO forums. Scale that ratio down to the size of the text MUD market and you're back to what I wrote.

--matt

Re: Reasons to promote/discuss your MUD on TMS.
 

I guess I'm more optimistic than I thought I was: My feeling is that the discussion here is geared toward trying to capture some aspect of what the graphical MMOs are getting. I don't think we'll see anything on the scale of graphical games, but I do think we can offer similar features as those general MMO sites and bring more MUD-related traffic here while continuing to grow the community.

Normally, I'm a happy skeptic. But...I think there's hope here ;)