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Well said, and I agree completely.
The whole bribery process that some muds engage in is really in poor taste and risks a "race to the bottom" where muds think of increasingly more sleazy and annoying ways to force their players to vote.
On the flipside, I think a mud ultimately hurts itself by using such tactics on their players. People don't like being forced to do things, and in the long run I think those kinds of tactics make players of a game feel like the admins are manipulating them. This is especially true for commercial games (by that I mean any game that has a payment structure designed to turn a profit in any way). If people are paying for a game they expect to not have to deal with such things. They are already demonstrating their loyalty by forking over their hard earned dollars.
One thing to keep in mind is that there's no way TMS generates enough income to justify Synozeer spending numerous hours every week tracking down and investigating accusations of "bribery" by muds on the lists. As a mud administrator, I am pretty grateful for the work he does here already, and I say that as someone who does pay to support TMS (through advertising), and have done so for at least 2+ years now. I can understand Synozeer not wanting to start down a path of potentially painful "policing" of muds.
I am not saying that I don't think such a policy as mentioned above would be a bad idea. I think it would be a really GOOD thing. I am just saying we certainly could not expect Synozeer to devote a significant amount of time to enforcing it.
It is good, however, that we continue to put PR pressure on the muds that DO use sleazy bribery tactics to bloat their vote numbers. As those players visit this site perhaps they will read about it, see that such tactics are NOT common practice, and re-evaluate their choice of mud.
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