Thread: MUD Reviews
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Old 10-02-2007, 03:07 PM   #8
TheDisciple
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Re: MUD Reviews

I think this is basically true:


95+% of MUD reviews are either fan raves or disgruntled player hack-jobs. However, I disagree that this makes them useless.

There's a lot of information in a group of even crappy reviews. (Note: This assumes the reviews are crappy and not wholesale inaccurate. If I review a MUSH and then paste that review for GodWars, obviously that's just inaccurate and moderation is necessary to take care of that.)

For example: if reviews argue about how balanced the PK system is in a game, I can tell that PK is probably an important part of that game (something the limited different choices for PK in the current search/listings doesn't do especially well). Based on the kinds of things people are saying are great or bad about it I can get a sense of their assumptions. Does PK imply a roleplaying context for them? One on one or group on group or anything goes? What kind of restrictions are there? A lot of this is going to come out one way or another if half a dozen reviews for the MUD are up. You can tell a lot in what they say, and in what they take for granted.

If reviews mostly rave about features I know are fairly standard in that kind of MUD, I can guess that it probably has a playerbase that hasn't played too much of the competition. If reviews allege a kind of staff abuse that really bothers me, I know to at least look for another side of that story before getting too invested in the game. Reviews can help convey a sense of the game's RP culture, PK culture, feel in general (i.e., is this the kind of game where people stay logged on idle even if they're not doing anything? Or is this the kind of game where that'd be stupid dangerous?)

Any given review can and probably will be crap. A lot of them will be written by disgruntled newbies who tried the MUD out and really were looking for a different style of game. A lot will be written by players that don't much know better. Taken together, you still can learn a lot that's hard to learn quickly any other way.
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