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Old 10-13-2009, 01:21 PM   #61
Newworlds
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Delerak, you are an embarrassment to the MUD community. I'm beginning to think you got nuked from that game and can't get over it. If you have something valuable to add to the thread, do so, but childish remarks like that are useless.

I will say in conjunction with Donathinfrye I hope that some of the lesser known MUDs that I find thoroughly enjoyable will get some publicity. My vote goes to a somewhat different game that takes you through time. Always one of my favs.
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Old 10-13-2009, 01:32 PM   #62
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

At the risk of getting off-topic: I've also always really valued 4Dimensions and Godwars II for their originality. Their (and a few other MUDs, some now sadly defunct) out-of-the-box gameplay is what is inspiring our Atonement staff's fresh approach to re-inventing what the RPI genre (sorry Newworlds ) is capable of.

Back on topic: Perhaps time to let this thread die. Hopefully, everyone's learned a bit and can focus on what (most) of us have in common - and that is a divested interest in the betterment of the community as a whole, even when our POVs clash. Vote cheating isn't good, everyone makes mistakes - and most mistakes can be fixed. Integrity means a lot to most people here, even if the average player may be blissfully unaware of the community as a whole (something we could all use to work on, in my opinion).
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Old 10-13-2009, 02:01 PM   #63
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

You just couldn't resist, could you?
Because of your professional and supportive attitude to the community in general, it is likely Atonement will be the only game of that genre I would spend more than 10 minutes reviewing and if worth it, promoting. There are a number of players on NWA that like a change in scenery at times and I like to have options for them.

To stay on topic: Rember to VOTE!!!
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Old 10-13-2009, 04:20 PM   #64
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Just being honest. Threshold has made it very clear of his animosity towards myself (even though he doesn't know me personally), so I am satisfied seeing Kavir completely own him and his game.
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Old 10-14-2009, 02:15 AM   #65
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Thanks for the kind words, DonathinFry and Newworlds! :-)

I appreciate it so much more, since you both run quality games.
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Old 10-26-2009, 10:28 PM   #66
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Using a list of TOR proxies only, I ran it up against the voting database. Avalon MUD had votes from 934 unique IP addresses this month. Of those 934, 894 of them were from TOR proxies. Avalon is no longer validated for voting in the TMS listings.

By comparison, the next highest MUD for "Tor Votes" was 7 out of 632 unique IP addresses then 4 out of 519 unique IP addresses. Interestingly, the other 4 MUDs in the top 5 all had zero which surprised me.

I have not repeated this exercise for other open proxy lists yet. No idea how good it is compared to other proxy sites but I have an old subscription to 'xroxy.com' which I guess never expires because they email me a new list every week.
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Old 10-27-2009, 05:05 AM   #67
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Why not just remove the proxy votes? Otherwise it becomes an effective tactic for "assassinating" rival listings. It's also rather arbitrary for one mud to receive a gentle slap on the wrist for cheating, while another gets instantly and permanently banned. Was Avalon contacted and given the chance to explain before being removed?
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Old 10-27-2009, 05:25 AM   #68
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?


I would have to agree with Kavir, while it looks incriminating that they are the only MU* with substantial amounts of proxy votes that were in the top 20, it would be very easy now for someone with an axe to grind to take down all the muds in the top 20 with a concerted proxy campaign. Simply removing the votes and informing the game owner of the reasons why those votes were removed would seem the most prudent thing to do. Unless you can trace the source of the proxying back to the game owners, its hard to know whether this is sanctioned or just a player going one out to make his or her favorite game more popular.
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Old 10-27-2009, 02:10 PM   #69
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

I have to agree with KaVir too.
In my mind, an owner actively urging the players to cheat is far more serious than players doing dumb things on their own, in a misguided attempt to help their game. So the punishment should be in proportion to that. And at the very least be similar for all muds caught breaking the rules; if you ban one, then you have to ban all.

Perhaps you are just overreacting a bit, because you thought that proxy votes were being eliminated by the code.
And this could very well be a player acting on their own without the knowledge of the owner, so at the very least the owners should be informed and given a chance to talk some sense into their players first.

KaVir's suggestion of just removing all proxy votes and then informing the owner, is actually a very good one. Of course, if the nuisance continues even after this, a harsher action should be in order. And hanging them out to dry in the discussion thread is totally OK, in my opinion. Cheating is cheating, whoever does it.

Apart from that, just the thought about some Mud using this to miscredit the opposition, shouldd make you think twice.
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Old 10-27-2009, 02:56 PM   #70
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

An automated solution which compares voting IPs against a known proxy list and discards those votes which match would probably be the best solution. However, it does bring up the wider issue of how far should individual games be held responsible for the actions of their players? If the admin of Avalon were to come back and say that they were completely unaware of this activity how do you prove otherwise? If you hold them responsible then as KaVir mentions it does leave the possibility of someone maliciously cheating on behalf of a game they don't like.
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Old 10-27-2009, 04:45 PM   #71
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Generally speaking, I agree with everything that has been said so far. I usually quietly deal with these things, communicate with the MUD in question, make a decision.

I posted because:

A) There was a definite implication in this thread that 'nobody cares'. Same in some PMs and Emails received based on this thread and voting in general.

B) This wasn't a mud that suddenly started to see votes increase due to a malicious player. It came out of nowhere, got listed, ranked in the top 5 almost constantly with <20 players online. The ratio of proxy votes was so high that if you take them out of the equation Avalon would barely be in rankings at all, so same net effect.

I probably shouldn't have posted, but I did. Moving forward, quietly dropping these of course makes the most sense, which was actually happening at one point but stopped working. I also completely overlooked TOR in the original setup - the proxy list service I was using did not cover TOR anyway.
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Old 10-27-2009, 04:47 PM   #72
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Routinely removing all the proxy votes would remove the incentive of doing it.

If nothing is gained, either for the game itself, (supposing it's done to get a higher position on the list), or for the hypothetical rival doing it maliciously, then there is no incentive for doing it at all.

And, at least in my country, one is innocent until proven guilty.
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Old 11-03-2009, 04:00 AM   #73
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Hey, I'm a player of WoTMUD.

I'd just like to thank you for the great advertising of calling us cheaters without taking the time to actually look at our mud and its player base. Firstly I'd like to take you back a few years to when WoTMUD was competing for number 1 on THIS database against Achaea I believe it was. Eventually as you do, you kinda think well... Everyone knows we're the best, so I won't bother voting. Hence you lose your place. Recently in a push for recruitment of new players the promotion of voting once more for WoTMUD on top mud sites arose. So we all started voting and yes in just a few days we made number 4 on your database. It's not hard or unreasonable to believe as the lists reset every few weeks or something anyway?

Posting out of jealousy that your own mud is dropping on statistics isn't exactly the way to go about things.

This forum thread on the WoTMUD forums that should show the "push" towards voting in recent days:

For more info please read through our website:

Our MUD is based on the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and it might interest you to know that the first book of the series is now being made into a movie.
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Old 11-04-2009, 05:37 PM   #74
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Yes, great advertising. It's gotten you all the way to 97th place on TMC with a whopping 3 votes. Give us a break, your cheating is so obvious it shouts from the penthouse windows.
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Old 11-07-2009, 12:32 AM   #75
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Errr... We're still in the Top 10, so I have no clue what your talking about. Perhaps the ladder reset and you should spend more time thinking about what you post than actually posting.

Can some Admin please tell Anjanas that we're not cheating? Or can Anjanas actually go to our forums and website and perhaps see how active our mud actually is?
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Old 11-07-2009, 07:30 AM   #76
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

You could also point him to , which lists average player numbers for 9 of the 10 muds listed earlier in this thread:

1.

Average (30 Day): 307
Maximum (30 Day): 377
Minimum (30 Day): 234

2.

Average (30 Day): 124
Maximum (30 Day): 186
Minimum (30 Day): 70

3.

Average (30 Day): 170
Maximum (30 Day): 275
Minimum (30 Day): 23

4.

Average (30 Day): 62
Maximum (30 Day): 127
Minimum (30 Day): 34

5.

Average (30 Day): 67
Maximum (30 Day): 121
Minimum (30 Day): 24

6. Avalon: ??? (not listed)

7.

Average (30 Day): 58
Maximum (30 Day): 109
Minimum (30 Day): 19

8.

Average (30 Day): 12
Maximum (30 Day): 20
Minimum (30 Day): 5

9.

Average (30 Day): 78
Maximum (30 Day): 80
Minimum (30 Day): 77

10.

Average (30 Day): 26
Maximum (30 Day): ?
Minimum (30 Day): ?

Note that the lack of min/max data for Shadows of Isildur suggests the average number is likely an estimate rather than calculated, and may be out of date or outright wrong.

The other muds are usually checked daily I believe, so they may be inaccurate if the MUDStats bot happens to log on during your off-peak hours. Some listings are checked hourly (as you can see from the "Charts & Graphs" tab for Aardwolf), but I think MUDStats only does this if you support . If you feel MUDStats is unfairly representing your mud you might want to consider supporting MSSP (it also gives other information, which crawlers can use to update mud listings, but I don't think any do that yet).
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Old 11-07-2009, 10:22 AM   #77
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

Not sure about every game but Shadows of Isildur does put up some stats on their website. They used to have charts as well which showed all sorts of information (far more than was needed in my opinion since back then the functionality of the website was lacking in regard to information about the game world) but seem to have trimmed it down to this summary page:

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Old 11-07-2009, 02:38 PM   #78
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

What I find interesting about this... if they have rank 8 or 9, and still so few players, how is them being top-ranked actually benefiting the game? By so few, I mean in comparison to games with 60-100 average players etc. My own game is generally 10-20 players as well, cozy with a park-like setting right? .
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Old 11-07-2009, 02:53 PM   #79
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

The same way it benefits any of the games I imagine - exposure. But how many new players really check out the listings I wonder?

I'd also like to refer back to one of the posts on the first page of the thread:
I think this is a good point. I know I used to do the same thing with Realms of Despair, back when they bothered playing the voting game, even though I hadn't played it for years.
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Old 11-07-2009, 04:14 PM   #80
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Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?

This seems like it describes the so-called "graveyard shift" numbers of online players, during which the number of players online drops drastically. During graveyard shift, Americans are sleeping in their night and Europeans are at work. Clearly, by logging in to Carrion Fields (CF) and checking some statistics you can see that the statistics presented by KaVir are clearly too low to realistically describe the situation in CF.

I'll toss in some statistics taken directly from the game (these are freely available for any player/character by logging in to CF and typing commands 'users', 'users playerbase' and 'users logon'). Here are the statistics I got:

Users yields minimum of about 15 players and maximum of about 45 players for last 24 hours and claiming average of 30 players online.

Users playerbase claims that the number of active characters in CF is about 1000 (statistics over 52 weeks were graphically presented). The game automatically deletes any character that hasn't logged in in a month.

Users logon yields following information:

Total Logons 216 characters
Average Logon Length 53 minutes
Median Logon Length 42 minutes
Carrion Fields started up at Sat Nov 7 03:35:05 2009 (CST)
System time is Sat Nov 7 12:56:38 2009 (CST)


This totals 11448 minutes online for all characters during the uptime (since last crash/reboot) of 561,53 minutes, yielding an average of 20,38 players online all the time (the game peak hours are not included in this calculation). The MUD peak hours are not included in this number due to the small amount of presented data. AFK players are automatically kicked from the server so you can assume everyone in CF to be active in the game when they are online.

There was 26 players visible to me online when I checked and my friend claimed that there was 36 players online some time later. The game boasts with 80+ players online (see Grobbak's ad here at TMS) during the peak times. Personally, I don't play the peak times and thus have seen a peak of this magnitude only twice or so during the five years I've been around (I haven't played very actively for last two years). Personally, I would say that seeing 10-60 players online isn't too uncommon, depending on when you play.

Furthermore, I counted the number of user accounts in CF's fansite forum in (an unofficial site not maintained by the game staff). The number of accounts that had checked the forums that day was about 130, with about 280 or so accounts checking the forums within that month. has a voting reminder that periodically asks users to vote, counting from the last time the user clicked the vote link there. Due to this reminder, many of CF's votes to TMS come from that site (part of the votes come via the game's Official website, which doesn't remind people to vote beyond having the button on the site). Personally, I have never felt any pressure or obligation to vote for CF due to the actions of the game staff nor have I seen any active endorsement of cheating in CF-related forums.

Thus, I think that Anjanas's claim of CF cheating with its votes is false. In addition, I would like to ask Anjanas to refrain from making accusations based on guesswork against others without knowing the facts or having any actual evidence in the future. Please, report any game you think is cheating for some reason to Lasher, but refrain from public accusations and leave it to people with the tools to do so dig up the truth.
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