Thread: MUD Reviews
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Old 10-02-2007, 04:37 PM   #14
prof1515
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Re: MUD Reviews

I've used to go through the whole list of ranked MUDs on TMS and try them out as well as through the search engine on TMC. Overall, I tried about 900+ MUDs (I'll be conservative here even though it may well be more than a thousand) over the last 9 years, most for probably 2-3 hours average (the really bad ones less than an hour, and I mean REALLY BAD). I've played 50-60 of them for at least 10-15 hours each and about half of those for more than 100 hours each.

At one point I considered writing short reviews of most and longer reviews of the ranked ones. I submitted some reviews to TMC but quit because the problem I most frequently saw was that admins would simply lie in response. One once claimed "it used to be that way when Jason played but it's changed since then". I had last played only 2 days before posting the review. As the problem with that game was a massively vindictive and immature playerbase who'd sooner harass and drive off new players than help them ("newbie-friendly" my arse) and a staff that used their positions to make changes advantageous to their own characters, they'd have had to replace most of the people playing/imming in 2 days to alleviate the problems I had mentioned. In other words, the admin simply lied.

It would be nice to see more oversight in the community but it'll be a hard and thankless job for the reviewers. There are hundreds of MUDs and the vast majority of them suck like a White House intern. Even the "average" ones are often pretty difficult to stomach. Heck, of the Top 20, I'd only give 2 or so of them anything higher than ** out of ****. With admin responses, a review system would be crippled even worse. We've seen how resistant a few games can be toward greater honesty in search engine options. Imagine how many games would be resistant if they couldn't spin honest reviews that didn't paint a rosy picture of their game?

As almost always with the MUD community, the lack of quality control is too institutionalized. Would be a massive job to reverse that but I for one would love to see it happen.

Take care,

Jason
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