Ok, I dunno whether it's just me or if other people feel the same way, but I just feel that people are using the Reviews section in the same way they use the Mud Promotions forum.

Personally, when I read a review, I look for both the good, AND the bad in a game. If I see a review saying "This MUD is perfect", I ignore it and move on to the next. So my problem here is, why do everybody keep posting reviews saying that their game is 100% perfect, without listing ONE bad thing? Isn't that what the promotions board is for?

I might be crazy, but I just had to write it after seeing the last two Sharune reviews.

Yes, but its promotional value lies in its honesty.  If I want to see how good a movie or computer game is, I will try to find places which give reviews of the good AND the bad.  If a place constantly says "this is great, buy it!" and I find that it's rubbish, I won't trust those reviews any more.

Unfortunately there are very few people who review muds properly (alas, poor Game Commandos, I knew them well...)

For the most part, this is how I see reviews:

There are either reviews from excited mudders who are just getting into this new mud they found and post a paragraph about how great it is...

Or it's a giant flame.

Otherwise, yes...reviews are promotion from veterans of a mud. But what does that say about the mud itself? It says that this player enjoyed the mud so much, that they stuck around and are writing what they like about it. That, though promotional, does say something.

Best bet? Take it all with a grain of salt. Your own experience is all that matters.

When I reviewed my mud of choice a long time ago, I mentioned the good AND the bad. I probably went into more detail than a lot of reviews do because I wanted to pique people's interest about certain aspects of the game and give them a chance to find out what they thought about them, providing they were interested enough to try the game out.

In all fairness, I have to say that I've seen at least one other review that mentions both good & bad aspects, although I don't remember what mud it was for. I don't tend to read reviews that often.

I guess mud reviewers are a lot like mud players. Most of them just piddle around uselessly and/or break the rules, but every now and then someone does it the way it's supposed to be done.

Ilya from Game Commandos now works for us actually. He had to quit running the Game Commandos site precisely because it just takes too much effort and time to run a proper mud review site. Unlike a movie which you really only have to see twice (maybe once if you're sloppy) to review properly (4 hours of your time or so?), some muds you can't really review in any sort of depth without hundreds of hours of play.

--matt

What if the review area was broken down a bit more, rather then having Name, Email, Review it was more of a series of rankings + reviews, like this:

Rate these from 1 to 10, 1 being worst 10 being best

Use of Color
Descriptions
Items
Helpful Players
Helpful Administration

What do you like most about <mud>?

What don't you like about <mud>?

What advice would you give to new players?


Off topic:

What I'd like to see is a combination of Reviews and Brody's Underdog Mud of the Day.

Take the idea where Brody posts a mud, maybe not daily, but weekly. Something like 'Mud of the Week'

In this MOTW section players can rate the mud and post a review of the mud. Then you can have a Mud of the Month, the best out of the four muds. And possibly a Mud of the Year... and so on.

Reviews are, of course, biased. I encounter a problem with the wonderful lil' muds that seem to offer rewards for spamming the reviews full of 3 line statements about how great their mud is... Or, even worse, have admins make 10 names and spam 10 reviews. They make it very hard to wade through it all.

Come on... You can't possibly believe that even the most fanatic player can't find even ONE thing wrong about the MUD? I don't know... an imm who cheats, unbalanced skills, badly built areas...

And I'm not even talking about those reviews that consist of nothing more than: "tHis Muds !!GREAT!! you must come and check this 1337 Mud!"...

I'd actually be willing to pay for a professional review I think. Once I get the place cleaned up a bit..

I dunno, I'm just saying that there isn't a "Perfect MUD", and most of the reviews out there are written by people who only WANT to describe the good parts of the game, and even if they had a few bad sides, wouldn't want to list them because it would attract less players...

If I, as a MUD owner, would write a review for my MUD, I would definately list some of the worse aspects of it, because even though it's my game and in my eyes, it's all great, I know that it just doesn't fit every player out there.

Actually I was just commenting on how useless a lot of reviews are because they tell you nothing you can't find out from looking at the mud's listing here, or if you happen to be a bit less lazy, the mud's website. It doesn't really matter whether they think the mud is good or bad, if all they do is spout the same crap that's already been said before.

As for me, if a mud has negative aspects (and just TRY to find one that DOESN'T have negative aspects), I'm sure as #### gonna mention them in my review. Not because I want to flame the mud and hurt its player base, but because some things that are only slightly annoying to me might be annoying enough to someone else that once they find out what they are they'd get ****ed and stop playing. Players don't want to waste weeks or months or years on a mud they don't enjoy, and the mud admins don't really want players who don't enjoy their mud playing it, so I think it helps everyone all the way around to just be honest.

The difficulty is: There aren't any professional mud reviewers. Even the professional game reviewers at IGN or Gamespot or whatnot are not very good, and that's at reviewing largely single player or limited-multiplayer games. Their reviews of graphical muds like Everquest are generally shallow and crap.

Unlike the literary or film worlds, games haven't yet developed a critical theory, which makes reviewing them tend to boil down to "Uh, I liked this feature" or "I didn't like this feature."

--matt

I'm not saying that people should be forced to wrack their brains trying to find something negative about a mud for purposes of reviewing it. However, if they're aware of negative aspects, I think they should at least mention them in passing so a potential player knows what to expect if they decide to play it. Although personally I don't see how anyone can think any mud has no negative aspects, unless they're some 1337 d00d who has no clue anyway.

And I think the main reason there are no professional mud reviewers is that generally it's hard to be objective if you're trying out a mud that's totally out of the category of what you usually like. Mudders tend to be either rabid supporters of RPI's, or H&S's, or unrestricted PK muds, or DIKU's, or whatever, and totally hate anything that doesn't have whatever feature they're most fond of. So for instance if I tried to review some H&S mud, I really wouldn't do it justice because of my low opinion of the whole entire category.

And this is totally apart from how long it can take to learn the ins and outs of some muds. Not to mention that some people just aren't interested in every aspect even of a single mud. For instance I've played one mud for over 3 years and still don't know details about half the quests, because I have very little interest in doing them. And with RPI's especially, your experience of the game largely depends on which political faction(s) you have experience with, or whether you've had experience with organized groups at all. Someone who's played a char in a group on the losing side of a war, or in a group with very few members and thus less RP interaction, will have a very different outlook on the game from someone who's been on the winning side of a war, or played in a group of healers, or refused to join any organizations at all. And considering how long it takes for some political organizations to trust an outsider enough to let them join, if you decided you wanted to see the mud from several angles before expressing your opinions of it, you could be waiting a VERY long time. (After 3 YEARS I still have no idea what it's like to be a member of half the factions of the mud I play, heh.)