The review in its entirety:

I shall now offer my rebuttal, which it seems will be rehashing some things I posted in response to the last review.

AR's players are able to choose a race, class, alignment, and ethos. This gives them four different things to roleplay as soon as they create. In addition to that, hometowns have their own personality and players can draw off that for background to represent that they are from the particular hometown, as soon as they create. Now that's the simple roleplay stuff out of the way. I'll move on to the cabals.

Cabals our muds version of clans, and they bring people with a common cause together. Each cabal is associated with a unique hometown. Each cabal's goal is to bring a form of stabiliy to the mud (the only cabal which actually demand killing being the Knights of Valour, who limit this to murderous players only, and under a code of honor). There are four cabals.

Now, since cabals are in the mould of needing to know how to fight, we took the liberty of providing them pacifistic "little brother" subordinate organisations that those cabals are responsible for protecting. So even if you can't PK worth beans, there's an organisation that needs you for your roleplay skills, and its protected by people who can. There are four subordinate organisations, one related to each cabal. These are particulaly rich in roleplaying opportunity, as I'm sure the more experienced rpers of the MUD will happily testify. Not everybody on AR is a great PKer, or even a competent one, but everybody has to learn to use their legs to run. Its the least you can do to avoid being killed by mobs not just players.

That is not to say the MUD is completely cabal focused at all. An independent player is welcome to start up his own clan and we've seen this happen several times recently. For example we had a band of "Darksorrows", which if I recall right was a drow order. We also had an impromptu band of pirates hold the playerbase to ransom simply making them hand over their gold in return for peace. This group was actually more influential than any cabal at some point. Completely ungrouped players can still hang out with the subordinates for social contact and, if they want to play the game alone, then we have "quests" implemented to help them to immerse themselves in the environment.

As if it wasnt easy enough to enjoy a peaceful roleplaying experience on Abandoned Realms, our Justice cabal has been gifted with the ability to make criminals of people who attack within the most popular town. This is not a typically enjoyable experience for any would-be looter, since Justice special guards don't pay attention to the exp-based PK ranges that normally ensure characters in PK are close to each others level. Safety is usually just a recall potion away. Not to mention that every class has a unique guildhall which only their class may enter, allowing them to hide behind a pretty high level mob for added protection. The difficulty of this mob is a deterrent to just about all the low level killing.

Course, there's other ways to avoid the dying, like just learning the way around and using your legs. But basically, given the right conditions (some of which are described above), there is no need.

Players are not required to explain the reasons to their victims to other players when they do their killing, but they are expected to be able to justify them to Immortals upon demand. An Immortal may make such a demand if, for example, a player prays or writes a complaint note about other players engaging in pointless killing. Personally I have banned people from the MUD for pointless killing and I certainly won't hestitate to ban some more when I see that it is required.

That said, there exists a few reasons why no explanation would be given, and those reasons are roleplaying ones. For example guilds that are obviously evil (dark-knights) and obviously good (paladins) are expected to be at loggerheads. The same goes for certain races - elves and drows, and dwarf and duergar both harbinge grudges for each other. Nobody likes vampires, and frankly neither do they. If a player doesnt want to be killed without an explanation, then he can by all means avoid the race/classes that CAN be killed without one. Neutral human rangers spring to mind.

As for the looting, here are some legitimate reasons why people may loot you on AR:

* they wish to sell/wear your items
* they want to stop you pasting them back in 10 minutes

Neither of these reasons require the player to be an #######. That said, we have implemented restrictions on looting to help low level players. If the player is killed in lower ranks, his killers may only take one item from the corpse at a time, and he must use the item's NAME. This gives plenty of time for people to retrieve corpse with nearly everything intact, especially if the victim had used the ever-helpful recall potion and died near where they respawn in town. In addition to that, our OUTFIT command (used in those protective guildhalls I earlier wrote about) provides players with a set of randomly generated items. They're not great items that'll let you rebound as good as you were before death, but it'll get you back on your feet for getting some better ones. Of course, its better to worry about how to avoid the deaths in the first place, then this relatively mild problem won't even need dealing with.


We apologise for Tatsai's disappointing experience, and wish him the best at his next MUD.

Im going to say this, and I dont say it much, but shut the **** up.

The review system is there for a reason, if everyone repsonded to a review that they didnt like, and or felt
made their mud look bad; Well, thats all our fourms
would be, now wouldnt they?

Sit back, and Eat a bad review, anyone that judges
a mud on one review doesnt need to play your game
anyways.

Or, to put it a tad more diplomatically:

Fight bad publicity with good publicity, rather than defensiveness. Don't counterargue in the Tavern of the Blue Hand. Post about the positives in an Advertising for Players post. My two cents.

So you are a proud owner and coder of a MUD eh? I don't think you'll be very successful in getting people to play your mud if you spew forth such diatribe.

I don't see why its wrong to answer a review here, since the review system doesnt have its own means of reply. I'll even help code in one if you guys want.

I think the very valid, if overly hostile, point made by the other poster is that if MUD owners responded to EVERY negative review about their game, we'd see nothing but defensive responses from MUD owners about their games. The MUD review section doesn't allow for rebuttals, but it DOES allow you or your players to post YOUR OWN REVIEWS. So, rather than spamming the bulletin board with threads that'll get flamed, why not just write your own review and put it with the rest of the reviews if you're not going to do the other reasonable thing I suggested, which is to promote your game in the Advertising For Players section.

I am, I am quite proud of what I do, and I enjoy it.

Me as you say it "spew forth diatribe", is of no consequence
as to me getting players within my game, as I have said within
the start of my post, that I do not do that much, let alone on the fourms.

I choose to go the direct, very to the point while typing and
or talking with people I know. Most play as RP muds, as well
mine is not, and much worse than my post is quite many seen
within the channels of my game.

I just find it quite unbearable to see a post clouding the top
five threads about a bad review, in which is what comes with
dealing with bad players.

As I dont feel dragging this needless post on any longer than
it needs to be, I will not be replying to this post any further;

But first, to answer the question of Davairus, I dont belive its
wrong to reply to a review within the fourms, I just find it
very upsetting to see something as such on the fourm trying
to defend their mud, when a bad review pops up.

This is again, all I will speak of in this thread.

Reviews represent the reviewer's opinion.  If you disagree with their opinion of a game, write a review yourself giving your own opinion. However, rebuttal to every negative post is nothing but spam.  If we've seen your first rebuttal, we know your position and we don't need to read it again.  And as far as the negative reviews go, most readers will be able to sort through them and sift the facts from the opinion.  I'd wager most people are intelligent enough to at least consider that a review is opinion and not fact (if they try your MUD and find the reviewer's claims to be correct, maybe it is fact, but that's your problem, not theirs).  If you get several negative reviews, try taking the time to read what they said and try to address their issues in the way your MUD is designed/run instead of wasting your time writing a rebuttal.

Take care,

Jason

P.S.--After reading the review and your rebuttal and looking over my own notes on your MUD, which I've tried twice, I found myself in agreement with the reviewer on AR and RP.  It doesn't sound like a good role-playing environment, unless you're roleplaying a video game character from Doom (good ol' Doom, my first and still favorite first-person shooter).

I've asked the administrator to turn reviews for Abandoned Realms off. If you have a review, you can post it at TMC, where they're moderated and we can reply to them.

Player submitted reviews (both positive and negative) are utterly worthless. They are complete rubbish.

They are either fanboi suck ups or troll slander (note: fanbois and trolls are the same species).

If it weren't for the fact that they generate traffic, I'd suggest that they be removed entirely.

Any serious game operator turns them off because they know what total trash they are.

A serious game operator doesn't eliminate a venue of free advertising. If you're worried about people saying bad things, always keep in mind they have MANY forums in which to post them. Some people DO pay attention to the reviews and, at the very least, may go to a game to check out if it's as bad as advertised - or if it was just a hack job.

I am in 100% agreement with you.

It has nothing to do with people saying bad things. If it was just that, then you'd be right: all news is good news.

First, players get upset when some jerk lies about their game and posts a bunch of BS. Then they feel compelled to post replies on these forums, or flood enough reviews to counter-act it, etc. I want my players having FUN playing our game. I don't want them stressing over or feeling bad about some troll's review.

Second, the reviews are bad because of the "good" ones as well. Fanbois get OUT of control. They make outlandish claims in good reviews- sometimes false. They also often expect some kind of tangible gratitude from the game/game admins for their loyal support. When you catch a fanboi cheating, they'll give lame excuses like "but I sent 5476901231 positive reviews to TMS/TMC/site of the month." Remember: Fanbois and trolls are the same thing. They are unbalanced, crazed, lunatics engaging in totally inappropriate behavior.

Third, there is a big difference between "saying bad things" and outright defamation. If someone has a successful game, then the trolls and jealous wanks will do everything they can to attack it- including devoting their lives to posting as many false, defamatory (a bit redundant) things they can about the mud, its admins, and its players.

Fourth, (somewhat implied already) it is the personal attacks that trolls use that are far more damaging than "saying bad things" about the game. Such things should not be tolerated in "reviews", but they happen constantly via player reviews.

That is why any serious game operator should do the smart thing and turn them off.

It doesn't matter if the reviews you are turning away are good, bad, or somewhere in between. There are huge negatives about all of them and barely any positives.

AR is a mud where there's a mob in the newb area with uber 1337 eq and one with no eq, and it's like "try to be like the dude with uber 1337 eq". The whole focus of the game from what I've seen was on mob bashing, pk, and eq ammassing. As soon as I got online, somebody sent me a tell "wanna group" and then that was followed by me following him around while he never said or emoted anything ICly, while he talked OOCly "let's go here, there's such and such eq you're gonna need, let's kill these mobs, the give lot's of xp/gold". I was hoping this person was just an exception, but then I read the forums, and it was all about pking and one person was like "I was attacked by a bandit and the guard was right there and didn't help" and the guard responded with "I had to go level up some with a friend".

Of course, this was maybe a year ago? A lot of stuff could have changed in that time.

I didn't write the review(I only review games that I've played recently), but if you're gonna talk about how bad somebody's review is, I guess I'll follow up by talking about how accurate it was.

I think you're entitled to respond to my response, and wouldn't try to deny you the right to doing so. Though if you wish us to take any notice of your review response, you will need to post it at TMC where it is moderated and we can reply back. Complaints about the MUDs gameplay may also be posted on our forums, in the thread we have set aside for this specific purpose. You have our apologies for any time you feel was wasted at Abandoned Realms.

We've always allowed our players a voice through reviews. Some have chosen to write negative things. If you scroll through our archives, you'll see we leave those up. Many more of our reviews are positive, but only a tiny fraction are 100% glowing. The clear majority have both good and bad things to say, and we think that as a group they provide a good description of our game.

This is true of many games- while any one review may be spurious, if you read several, you get a feel for the game. That's all they're intended to do.

Part of our positive experience with the review process might be that we tend to draw an older playerbase (*) than many games. But we also make an effort to treat our players like adults, which includes letting them speak. Deriding their contributions as "utterly worthless" and "complete rubbish" is inaccurate and beyond arrogant.

(*) I can't prove this. Just an impression from interacting with the playerbase and some informal surveying.

I couldn't agree more. Saying you're not a serious game operator if you allow reviews of any kind is akin to a movie director claiming you can't call yourself serious unless you ban all fan criticism, good or bad. People talking about your game, movie, book ... whatever ... IS good advertising, and free.

Ive been playing AR for ummm four years or so , three maybe.? It is by far the most balanced PK mud there is, Our learning curve is a bit high too, which might explain why some get frustraded , I am sure he wrote the review after getting Pwned and was ****ed. but I bet hes addicted and comes back too!!!  RP is there if you want it and take part in it , Just to recap my post for the non ramblings readers.
AR is the Most balanced Pk Mud there is ,
Welcome, You will never be the same.

PS And last year is along time ago for AR!! Check out our changes to combat and defence.

For whatever it's worth, mud admins may want to consider that 7 of the top 10 MUDs on TMS have reviews turned off, and all of the top 4 have reviews turned off. There's a reason for that and it may be worth learning from the experience of some of the people who are the best at promoting their MUDs. I also note that Dragonrealms has reviews turned off, though Gemstone doesn't (though no review for Gemstone has been posted in well over a year).

Take it for whatever you think it's worth.

--matt

No it doesn't. You actually said you agreed with many of my points ("While correct in many cases"), and then you go and say this?

For any successful game, .000001% freakish trolls will grossly outweigh 99.999999% normal people. Most normal people just do not have the time to bother with things like reviews.

Out of control psycho trolls have nothing but time to burn.

Any successful enterprise will eventually have the misfortune of having a couple of psychopaths as customers. The first time something goes wrong, that's it. Then everything I wrote above kicks in.

These lunatics will always drown out ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else written by normal people- whether it is praise or criticism.

I chose my words poorly.

Anyone who runs a successful enterprise that serves a large number of people (thousands rather than tens or hundreds) had better just shut them off.

The odds are not in your favor that you'll be able to avoid having any psychos show up at your game and then flip their lids the first time something in game doesn't go their way.

Please note that I am differentiating between negative reviews (which are fine) and defamatory, psycho spam (which is what happens to large, popular games if they operate long enough).

Nobody gets publicity from player-submitted reviews.  Most people who are MUDders have one MUD that they play and no amount of persuasion could make them play a different MUD.  I mean, a MUD MAY get some new players if it has a lot of good reviews, but there aren't very many new MUDders coming into the market.  Chances are if you get a new player, he is from another MUD.  Every once in a while, you get a player who has never played MUDs before, and he will most often stick with the first MUD he ever plays for his entire time of playing MUDs.  The first MUD you play will always be familiar to you, a bit like home, and moving to another MUD is not very common.  As for reviews, people who are already MUDders will not often look at reviews, because they know who write them.  So reviews don't give you much publicity except with a narrow new-player demographic.  Most MUDders will not take other's words for it and will try it out themselves first.
Bottom line: Make a MUD you enjoy, it doesn't matter what others think as long as you like it. If others decide to flame it, who cares? (of course, that's for non-profit MUDs, those upstanding fellows who make MUDs for the sheer sake of creation)

As I said before, most people can sift through extremes quite quickly noting overly-positive or overly-negative reviews and make a decision for themselves. The more extreme the action (pro or con) a person takes, the more likely they are to be dismissed as a reliable source (ie, "it can't be that good/bad" line of thought). And if they have expectations of the MUD going in, most of the time it's due to the way in which the MUD advertises itself, not what some unknown player says about it.

For example, I've tried hundreds of MUDs, dozens of which made claims they could not live up to. That's pretty much the case with most things in life. I always try to maintain an optimistic yet cautious attitude when trying out a new MUD (or giving an old one another look) but I never go into it believing that the game's description of itself is entirely accurate. I can't say I've ever taken anything I've read in a review too seriously either.

As I said before, I agreed with you that many reviews are too positive or too negative, to an extreme, but those aren't the reviews that impress upon me. It's the reviews that balance themselves showing pro and con that make any impact.

Take care,

Jason

We've very rarely had the latter kind, and in those few cases where someone just listed a pile of obscenities or whatever, Synozeer kindly removed them within a day.

I'm not willing to bar all player participation because the rare troll shows up.

Really? Just me, but I try lots of different MUDs. I'm not dedicated to any yet, but I'm trying to get into Arcadia, and will be playing the new Iron Realms MUD in 2006.

Actually, I don't really care that much. There are plenty of muds that aren't very roleplay focused(the vast majority) and AR just happens to be one of them. I have tried a large amount of muds and don't feel I have "wasted" my time on them. I just wanted to say that this review actually has a good point(unlike most reviews). He was showing that AR isn't as RP focused as it claims to be so that way RP oriented people don't have to bother with it(as they're just gonna leave anyway once they see that it's almost all mob/pc bashing and OOC, why do you care?).

For whatever it's worth, 5 of those 7 MUDs (Threshold & the Iron Realms MUDs) are all pay for perks MUDs.  Hmmmm...

Personally I'd be equally suspicious against games that have scores of one-eyed, fan-boy blurbs with nothing but praise for the mud, as I am against those that disallow all reviews.

My theory about the first category is that the owners reward their players for writing those useless 'reviews'. Which of course is just as lame as rewarding them to click the vote button.

My theory about the second category is that the owners are either paranoid or very hardhanded in handling player conflicts, and that there is no way for the players to vent their frustrations within the game without being punished.

All muds have problem players and disgruntled players, but I wouldn't label those as 'psychos', and most of them don't run off to troll discussion boards and write negative reviews either. In the cases where they do, there has to be a reason.

GuruPlayer mentioned another factor; pay-for-perks. Obviously this system attracts a lot of people, because it offers a way to become powerful without having to be a skilled player. But the system also mainly attracts the type of players that are most likely to become a problem; the ones that cannot tend for themselves and want everything handed down to them the easy way. And if the ones that write bad reviews are the disgruntled ones, there is of course more to be dissatisfied with in that type of Mud. Either they are upset because they don't think they are getting their money's worth, or they are upset because other players pay a lot more and get ahead of them. This type of disgruntled players  doesn't exist in the muds that don't use pay-for-perks system.

If I was looking for a new mud to play, I'd look for one with few, but balanced review, where both good and bad sides were discussed, and where the owners were confident enough about the standard of their game to not feel compelled to block out any hint of criticism. The best kind would of course be where the owners take the criticism to heart, and try to do something about the problems.

Yeah, that they are. Pay-for-perks is quite a popular system with many MUDers.

--matt

Really? It sounds like you must have a lot of experience with pay-for-perks muds to so generalize about their playerbases. I assume you have some sort of statistical data to back up these assumptions, or are you just making things up wholesale? I'm betting it's the latter, but then, don't let a total lack of experience and data in the area stop you!
--matt

Be careful about generalizing. We just had our 50th review posted, and we've never handed out rewards for any of them. (Unless you count a 'thank you' email from me!) We do encourage our players to speak up, but there's no incentive system to do it.

I'd disagree with "few"- more reviews means you could invest extra time into sampling a wider array of opinions. Other than that, this is exactly what I've been trying to communicate in my other posts-- our target audience can see through both "fanboi" and "troll" reviews, and thus those reviews don't worry us much. They certainly don't worry us enough that we're going to silence our (more numerous) players who just want to give their opinions. That's just throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

If you visit and read the mudconnector reviews AR has, what you'll find is exactly what you've described here. We're not stopping you from posting your review there, since its moderated and we can also make a (moderated) reply.

AR gets a LOT of infantile criticism from anonymous people at TMS, and I believe its mostly because we squish asshat cheaters, not because there's much wrong with the game. That's the usual time they show up. The same sort of thing simply doesn't occur over at TMC.

Every MUD deals with cheaters of some type, so I highly doubt that's a specific problem for your MUD.  In fact, in the case of the review which prompted this discussion, the poster in question was not a cheater, simply someone who was disappointed by the experience of your game.  Your decision to post a reply here and to suspend reviews seems far more motivated by your unwillingness to admit to the failings of your MUD and your desire to spin any realistic assessment of those failings in another direction.

As for posting reviews on TMC, that just suggests that you want to be able to spin every review.  If this is such a problem, I'd wager the issue lies in your game, not in the people that review it.  I've seen this problem before.

Years ago, I posted a review of a MUD on TMC, and the staff of that MUD responded that the problems I spoke of "were true at one time but that was a long time ago" yet I had witnessed them only days before posting.  It was a lie on their part (because I'd also pointed it out on numerous occasions to their staff within a period of months prior) and a conscious effort to spin my observation in a positive light when it was a serious problem with the game (which was otherwise a fantastic MUD).  That seems to be the case here as well.

You don't seem to have an issue with reviews, you have an issue with insightful ones.  It doesn't appear, and again I cite the review that prompted this discussion, you have the problem of trolls and cheaters (posting); you have the problem of disappointed and/or dissatisfied players.  Disappointed/dissatisfied players are usually the result of one of two things:  either the MUD itself is deficient in some basic way or the way in which you've advertised your MUD is not altogether factual.  Those lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction.  There lies your problem and only by correcting this will you likely be able to solve your issues.  But simply responding to reviews just perpetuates the problem.

Take care,

Jason

Of course Viagra MUDs are popular, but not for their quality so much as their ability to allow even the most insecure and impotent to feel that they're something as long as they've got a valid credit card.

But that's a discussion for elsewhere.

What GuruPlayer is refering to is the fact that 5 of the 7 MUDs which you refered to are commercial MUDs, which have an invested interest in preventing their flaws from coming to light.  Any review that doesn't correspond with the image of the MUD that their propaganda suggests is a danger to the bottom line.  So turning off reviews doesn't mean that doing so is a sound advertising scheme or that it is a path to success.  Rather, it means that turning off reviews are a good way to counter anything which runs contrary to the image you're trying to project, regardless of how accurate or inaccurate that image may be.

Take care,

Jason

Valg wrote; July 05 2005,15:11

Maybe I expressed myself badly. I wasn't referring to Muds that have a large number of balanced reviews spread over a long time period. Especially not when those reviews show several aspects of the game, and are not just a bunch of 4-line promotion blurbs. This seems to be the case with your game.

What I was referring to was the phenomenon that certain Muds suddenly get 5-10 short but over-enthusiastic 'reviews' in a couple of days' time. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that either the owners themselves write them, or that some form of in-game reward is involved. The latest example of this deplorable practice was Medievia (right before they disabled all reviews) but there are lots of others. A quick look at the date of the reviews can be very enlightening.

And again; the people who have any intelligence take all reviews with a big grain of salt and would be perfectly able to sort out both the fan-boy crap and the trolls.  In addition to this the List Admin will remove any blatant and unfounded attacks on the request of the game owner. So that is really no valid reason for disabling reviews. There must be other reasons for this, and most of us can use the same intelligence guess what they are.

In total AR has 41 reviews.
- 30 of them are positive.
- 1 of them is so-so. (He states 5/10)
- 8 of them are negative.
- 1 is just an imm responding to a negative one because it was a cheater.
- 1 is flaming other muds (boggle)

I particularly enjoyed reading these again:



My reason for disabling reviews is that we are not allowed to reply to them. (We being the players and immortals of this MUD.) Since we are not allowed to reply then we will not allow them to be posted here. If this situation changes, I'd definitely want to turn them back on. Some form of approval before actual posting would also woo me back. Until then.. so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Hee hee. ViagraMUDs. Good stuff, Mr. Prof.

Davairus,

I have very little experience on AR, but if you're getting a LOT" of infantile criticism, I'd suspect two causes that haven't been addressed elsewhere:

1) Your game draws a younger playerbase. I got that sense while checking AR out, and while young players can be very talented, they also tend to be more volatile. I don't know what to suggest here.

2) It might also be how you deal with cheating. You use the word "squish" in your post, and some of your posts have come off as a little 'cowboy' with respect to how you handle cheaters. (I was a delightful little rule-abiding citizen when I tried your game, so I have no experience here.) You can take a firm stance on cheating (we certainly do) without attacking the cheater or escalating a confrontation, regardless of your level of contempt for what they did. I have some learned-by-doing tips here, and when I have time later I'll try to start a discussion on it.

At TMC we have a mere six reviews, but all of them led to game changes for the better.
- 4 are good
- 2 are bad (both have comments left)

Here's a TMC player review of how the rules are enforced on newbies, so you don't have to take my word for it or try to guess from just my "cowboy" TMS post style: