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Valq - done, bud. I was pretty sure I asked a staff member for the number on your MUD, but I honestly cannot be 100% sure that my memory is correct, and so **'d it as asked. I did go out of my way to try to receive the full numbers for the MUDs surveyed, though.
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Well, I got home too late this evening to do any real stat-work, and I'll be travelling tomorrow, so here's a brief(not-so-brief) glance;
Just a few things to take note of are tendancies between 'Ratio of [Total Recent Votes: Players Logged on] between 4pm-5pm'. Just at a glimpse, it would seem that the average trend for this is probably 2:1 at this particular time frame. The more interesting things to note are the MUDs that sported more total votes than their players logged-on. This infers repetative, dedicated voting by a small playerbase.
Other trends can be seen, also - with most of the larger MUDs filling the top slots (except for a few MUDs like RoD, etc), and then some comparatively small MUDs(Solace and Daedal Macabre, for instance) holding consistant slots in the top 10-20(they still hold those slots now, 12 hours later).
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One suggestion I could make, and I am unsure if this has been made before; perhaps go to a system more akin to MudConnector's, where there is a verification code required for every vote. It is possible to create bots to vote, and while it not might be a large contributor to the top 5-10 slots, a small group of players using bots could easily affect slots 10-25 voting-wise. Couldn't hurt to require some sort of verification, no?
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While having a large playerbase that you remind often enough to vote is likely to help you receive more votes/hits to the site, you can see around 1/4th of the top voted sites appear to exist outside of this rule, relying instead on smaller, dedicated playerbases whose populations have a much higher percentage in voting, and who are more likely to vote again-and-again-and-again.
My assumptions would be that physical reminders(both in-game and website) seem to be the primary instigation for voting(duh). Also, an enthusiastic playerbase who is dedicated to voting for the MUD also seems to prevail, and this is especially true with around 1/4th of the top MUDs on the vote list. While you could argue that MUD quality tends to co-incide with voting pattern, I can say that my immediate reaction to the majority of MUDs on this list that I either revisited today(had been a player before), or visited for the first time today is this; I've seen better MUDs, with no recognition on this voting list. Some of these listed are amongst the best MUDs out there, yes - in no way, however, would I say that the voting list or playerbase sizes of some of these MUDs are an accurate rating of which MUDs are the best-of-the-best out there. Some of the most amazing MUDs I've ever seen do not even have one vote. Of course, this is all glazed over by the great fog of subjectivity, but I think you can see where my conclusion would be pretty on.
Reader's Digest: The Voting is mostly affected by 1) ingame/website reminders to vote, 2) playerbase size), and 3) percentage of voting-dedicated players, in that order. Reviewing the MUDs at hand shows instances of none of these attributes necessarily being a direct reflection on game quality.
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