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What is to be suspcious of? Do you watch the active thread list on the front page? There is almost always at least one thread with a title like "To the reviewer of <insert mudname> who is full of crap."
A very large reason there are less quality discussions is because such a huge percentage of the traffic is people complaining about bogus troll reviews.
99% (if not closer to 100%) of all reviews fall into one of two equally self-serving categories:
1) Worthless fanboi drivel (written either by mud staff themselves or by players trying to curry favor). Staff write these thinking it will drive traffic to their game. Fanbois write either them thinking it will get them in-game benefits from the staff or hoping to lure more folks to the game they blindly and zealously support. Both of them are wrong. These reviews accomplish neither.
or
2) Trolls trying to hurt a mud either to benefit their own mud or because they are angry that the mud admins in question had the nerve to enforce the rules of their game. Trolls get a kick out of these because they think they are "sticking it to the man" when they write them. They are wrong. Their immature vitriol is generally obvious to any potential player worth having.
Personally, I think TMS shouldn't have reviews at all unless Synozeer wants to find a couple of talented, objective people to write them all. Randomly submitted reviews are garbage. I can understand why Syn has them because they generate traffic. Traffic = advertising revenue = web site not shutting down.
Perhaps you don't see dealing with outright libel as a waste of your time. Folks running large, successful games do.
Since reviews generate virtually ZERO benefit to the muds involved (see above regarding the self serving nature of reviews), correcting outright lies is a tremendous waste of time. Unfortunately, if you allow reviews and do *NOT* correct the libelous ones, there are a lot of people who take that as an admission. While it could be argued that the admins just shouldn't care about their reputations being dragged through the mud, some folks care about their reputation and just cannot turn a blind eye to the abuse. Thus, they waste enormous time trying to correct the lies.
This is not time well spent. It is time the admins could spend working on their game.
Yes. The more successful and the higher quality your game is the more troll reviews you will get. Why? Jealousy mainly. The better you are the harder such jealous cretins will work to try and bring you down.
Further, the more successful you are, the more players you have, and by the odds alone the more trolls you'll have to deal with.
Are you still suspicious?
Perhaps these rational and well reasoned explanations for why a lot of mud admins prefer not to deal with the headache of reviews will eliminate that suspicion.
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