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Old 02-04-2006, 03:23 PM   #41
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I think it's sad that you're projecting your apparent inability to understand that it is possible to like a product and still be critical about it or its management onto everyone else. I like Google. I think what Google is doing in China sucks. I'm quite sure many MM users are capable of engaging in the same sort of distinction. From their point of view, they have no knowledge of the cheating. They themselves didn't cheat, and no doubt Vassage says he didn't authorize any cheating. They may not even have been playing MM when the incident happened, and so from their point of view, saying MM cheated may just be the kind of thing they've been assured is a lie all along. They have no reason to trust anyone here more than Vassago, for instance.

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Old 02-04-2006, 03:25 PM   #42
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Hmm, I always figured he was doing it using a bank of anonymous proxy IP addresses ... amazing that they were all from the same subnet/ISP and it still went unnoticed for so long.
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Old 02-04-2006, 03:44 PM   #43
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And again, where did I say they were lying? Hmmm?

I'm not projecting my "apparent inability to understand that it is possible to like a product and still be critical about it" as the person I was refering to wasn't critical of the product they liked. If they had, they'd be a good example of someone relying critical analysis rather than preconceived bias. But that's not what they did. And it's sad that you keep twisting the situation in order to try and insult me rather than recognize that.

But I do agree, they have no reason to believe anyone here any more than anyone on the MUD. However, I ask again. Where did I say they were lying as opposed to simply not being informed or having a biased opinion?

Jason
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Old 02-04-2006, 06:50 PM   #44
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What I remember most about this incident was the graph that showed MM's voting.

It looked like stair steps. They would go for 6-10 hours averaging like 2 votes per hour. Then they would have like 100-200 votes in a 10 minute period. Then they'd go another huge span of time with barely any votes.

It was incredibly obvious that a computer script was doing the voting. If indeed Vasago denied he was cheating (I don't recall one way or another), then you really have to just laugh. No rational person would deny they were cheating when faced with that evidence.

As someone else mentioned, the thing about this type of cheating that was particularly bad was the fact that it was not even real traffic. Thus, MM was benefiting from the traffic everyone else was sending ("risking" their own players) and yet they were not risking anything to get all of their votes.

If I recall, there was a period of time where MM was getting these massive vote surges despite not even having a vote icon on their web page. That was when they definitely didn't want to risk even a single player coming to TMS and possibly trying a different game. Too funny.
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Old 02-04-2006, 07:16 PM   #45
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I brought you personally into the discussion because it seems highly relevant to me when someone finds it necessary to debase others for things they themselves have done before.

Materia Magica got votes illegally and was banned because the rule was already set.

Achaea got votes illegally and was pardoned because the rule was not clear enough yet - after which it was made more clear so you could stop dancing around the "subjective" (as you regard it) spirit of the rule.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"...
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Old 02-04-2006, 07:26 PM   #46
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How the heck is having 1 person generating hundreds of votes by proxy even comparable to spamming your own playerbase? Spamming your own playerbase only hurts yourself and your own players because you could annoy the crap out of them enough that they stop playing your game, and you're sending them to a site that offers the same type of games that you run.

What MM did more than broke the spirit of the rules; it completely and utterly demolished it. Comparing the two really lets MM off light.
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Old 02-04-2006, 08:09 PM   #47
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Old 02-04-2006, 09:07 PM   #48
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Oh, sorry. I didn't realize that my post wasn't clear. Achea (I butchered the spelling of the mud name, I'm sure) was the one sending spams to its playerbase to vote. (The details of this has been thoroughly covered in another thread long since ended.) When I played MM, no one I talked to knew anything about voting, so they clearly weren't getting spammed.
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Old 02-04-2006, 09:45 PM   #49
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It is my opinion that if this cheating method still works (whether it does, I dont know) its link should have been sent to Synozeer and not to the public. People are going to abuse it, and maybe better than their predecessors did.
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Old 02-04-2006, 11:54 PM   #50
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Actually I wasn't referring to Achaea's spamming of the playerbase. I was more referring to their rewarding of people who voted (which they don't do anymore because a rule was set in place to stop them from this "cheating").

And if you really want to question my logic, just think about it this way. You're under the impression that this log is true - and as such, Lothos is behind the "crime". If you owned your own business and one of your employees cheated on his taxes, should your business be shutdown and held responsible? How can you possibly correlate the actions of a well-known disgruntled player to the morality of the games owner(s)?

Oh, wait - I forgot. Vassago asked him to do it, so says the log.

"And thusly Lord Vassago said unto his servant, Lothos, 'Taketh your army of vast numbers and cast thy opinions at the Great Ladder in droves of thousands! Do this and thy shalt be rewarded with Divine Quest Equipment and Everlasting Legend Status.' Thus sayeth the Log, and the Log is Truth."
-- The Log 4:17
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Old 02-05-2006, 12:09 AM   #51
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Let me say the most neutral, relevant thing I can, and that's that the TMS forums, especially the frequent posters, are mostly longtime MUDders and MUD admins.  These people aren't stupid, and these people aren't ignorant of the lengths to which a disgruntled player will and will not go.

That said, even this well-educated (on this subject) and reasonably sympathetic crowd knows that sometimes disgruntled players have a point or tell the truth.  This comes down to a question of credibility, and no one here is ignorant of that -- they just don't necessarily draw the same conclusion from the evidence that you do.
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Old 02-05-2006, 01:57 AM   #52
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From the Rules of TMS:

# Players from my site are trying to cheat. I can't control their actions

Much like a parent, you are responsible for what your little ones do. Make it well-known on your site/game that you will take measures against any player who is trying to cheat this system, and that it can only end up hurting the mud instead of helping it.
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Old 02-05-2006, 09:17 AM   #53
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I find it quite amusing that you'll ban mm from the voting but still accept money to have their mud advertised.
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Old 02-05-2006, 10:43 AM   #54
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I never once said that he didn't do it, or that that wasn't how the whole situation went down. In fact, I lean more towards believing him than not - BUT, I'm the only one who's intelligent enough to realize that when there's no definite proof that I can't pretend like there is and throw my ignorant opinions around like they're the indisputable truth.

Haha. Yeah I just noticed that too. Kind of ironic, seeing's how the only point to being on the voting ladder is advertisement.
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Old 02-05-2006, 11:10 AM   #55
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Like it or not, this has been the case for many a business. You may remember in the 90s that a famous bank of England that had existed for several hundred years was basically brought to ruin by one guy, a young, upstart genius that they had hired that year. Many businesses pay for the actions of their employees.

Now, granted, this Lothos guy isn't an employee of MM, per se, but keep in mind that MM has also been kicked off of TMS's list twice. Isn't it kind of strange that some random player of theirs just starts cheating for them everytime they're on the list?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not bashing MM as a mud. I played there for a good week and had a good time for the time I was there. It's not really suited to my style of playing.
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Old 02-05-2006, 02:57 PM   #56
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Terrible, worthless analogy. That individual's personal taxes have nothing to do with the business. Let me fix the analogy for you.

If your CFO engaged in tax fraud, then yes, your company would be held accountable. Hello Enron.

For quite some time, there was *no* TMS vote link anywhere on his site. Not on the forums. Not on the front page. Nowhere. He got reported for this by one of his own players who visited TMS. At that time, other TMS folks logged in to MM and ask players if they knew about voting. Nobody did. So MM was getting hundreds of votes per day with no vote link, and the players of the game had no idea what "voting" was.

The punishment for that first incident was a warning and he was forced to actually put a vote link on his site.

Then we have the incident described in this thread, where MM would normally average a handful of votes per hour, and then every 10 hours or so would get about 200+ in 5 minutes.

For you to say Vasago had no idea something was being done so enormously to his benefit just doesn't pass the sniff test. This went on for weeks. There is no reasonable way he could not know about it. Firstly, mud admins generally know what the heck is going on related to their games - eventually. Secondly, while players can be quite zealous in support of their game, that type of zealot doesn't do things without wanting credit. Even if it wasn't Vasago's idea (though I believe it was), you can be darn sure Lothos would have told Vasago about it if for no other reason than to get credit/appreciation.

The fact that there is additional circumstantial evidence just adds to this. In fact, that person's web site where he explains what he did fits perfectly with the facts from the time. There are things he says on that site that were not publicly revealed. He knew about the graph that someone else generated by tracking MM's voting pattern. He described exactly how the vote surges worked for MM. He knew details about the situation that only someone actually involved in the process could know.

Your ridiculous fanboism has reached a truly insane level. What we know as fact is that MM was caught cheating multiple times, and the last one did them in permanently. What any reasonable person can deduce from the situation is that Vasago knew about it and sanctioned it.

Your silly denials to the contrary are absurd.
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Old 02-05-2006, 02:59 PM   #57
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Considering what a value advertising is here, I'd say that decision is to MM's benefit, not detriment.

The reason they cannot be trusted to participate in the voting portion is because they repeatedly cheat in a manner that involves not sending traffic to the site. That means they get the benefit (vote placement) without sharing traffic.
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Old 02-05-2006, 07:09 PM   #58
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Considering I was clicking this link, I think your wrong.
Plus, as I said, people were doing a bit of spamming on the message boards saying to vote, so they had to have a link.

Not all zealots act alike.

The graph was mentioned publically.

Just because Lothos, the person claiming to be responsible for the cheating, knows how the splurts went, doesn't mean Vassago was involved with Lothos.

How did Lothos manage this? Even with a script, wouldn't it take much longer than 5 minutes to change his IP 200 times...
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Old 02-05-2006, 08:24 PM   #59
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Got it. You're smart and everyone else is dumb. Clears that right up.
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Old 02-06-2006, 12:35 AM   #60
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You are unaware of the timeline. You were clicking the link after the first time he got busted. I know this, because pretty much every other MUD in the top 20 complained about what he was doing. Then it was researched by Synozzer, and it was discovered that he had no link anywhere on his site.

Your saving throw versus historical revisionism has failed. :)

If you want to sit here and keep dreaming up Vasago-is-innocent scenarios that stretch reason to the breaking point, enjoy yourself. His history of repeated cheating is well known and well documented. The evidence of his involvement in the one that got MM permanently banned was quite extensive. But if you want to sit here and insist the Earth is flat and Man never landed on the moon, have fun playing with yourself.
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