Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Yes, I'm going there and bring this to the forums attention about the cheating that goes on with voting. I took the liberty to check out the top ten MUDS on this site and I was floored by what I found out.
1 - Aardwolf (players 362) votes (900)
2 - Discworld (players 148) votes (589)
3 - Achaea (114 plus 43 supposed hidden) votes (484)
4 - Threshold (no idea because of no who list but I can imagine around 100) votes (418)
5 - WoT (The new kids on the block with 54 players that gained 150 votes over night to gain this postion. votes (406)
6 - Avalon (With 16 whopping players gain over 20 votes an hour) votes (402)
7 - Imperian (Another impressive MUD with 49 players managed to gain 80 votes in a few hours to gain this position) votes (402)
8 - Carrion Fields (players 20 but yet manage that 30 vote every other hour) votes (383)
9 - New Worlds (players 103) votes (375)
10- Shadows of Isildur ( no idea because I didnt want to sit through their creation but I cant imagine a huge player base. 75 tops. votes (371)
I'm calling out these MUDs - WoT, Avalon, Imperian, Carrion Fields- Give us a break cheaters!!
To the rest who at least try to manage some integrity with this ****ty vote system, hats off to you.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I'm not seeing any conclusive data here.

You logged into Aardwolf and collected how many hours worth of unique logins, to conclude that there are only 362 players?

You do know that a random sampling accounts for zilch in gaming, right? I mean, did you check each of these during their individual game's peak time? I mean, your post arrived here at 3 in the afternoon, eastern, on a monday. Surely you didn't only check at 1:15, when the vast majority of people in the USA are either at work, at school, or on their way home from school, right? When you say Avalon had 20 votes per hour, are you saying you sat at your computer clicking the refresh button every hour, to ensure that your data is correct? I mean, do you think it's possible that 40 people all voted one hour, and no one voted the next? Or maybe, 60 people voted just after supper time last night, and no one voted between 2-4am this morning, but another dozen voted again at 5?

The total number of people logged in at any given moment on a game, is subject to change at any given moment. Furthermore, when 5 people log out, another 5 people might be logging in at the same time. And you really have no way of knowing unless you are watching the "who" list every 5 minutes. Also, not everyone who votes, plays during the time they are voting. In fact, some people don't vote at all. And some people used to play a game and still love it, and vote for it, but don't play anymore.

Gemstone is on the listing and they have almost 10,000 paying accounts, but hardly any votes.

So in summary, back up your claim with actual data and not suppositions based on incomplete spot-checking.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I think the OP has a good and valid point. I've often wondered about games that have few players posting five times their player base in one day, every day. Even you cannot deny this is hardly possible Jazuela. I get players complaining all the time on NWA of the voting scams here.

You talked about Aardwolf, but I don't think the OP accused Aardwolf of anything. They accused WoT, Avalon, Imperiam, and Carrion Fields. And yes, they said that Avalon voted 20 times per hour, so I'm assuming they watched hourly and marked the totals.

NWA has even received emails before on voting fraud and we have over 100 individual players log on every day with consistantly over 50 individual players around constantly. Our playerbase is over 500 active players many of whom never vote.

Here's an easy fix. Change the voting system to that of TMC. Once TMC did that it was quite obvious who wasn't following the rules.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

There are 78 players logged in to Imperian as of 1 minute before I started posting this post. The OP claimed there are only 48 players. Not that there are only 48 players logged in as of the moment he happened to be checking..not that there are an average of 48 players at any given moment..but that there "are 48 players." Which is..let's see. Just slightly under half of what there are, as of 1 minute before I started posting. And it isn't even peak time yet.

That's one game, one moment's worth of checking. Now - do a little numbers crunching him? Let's be generous too just for argument's sake. Let's assume that players of Imperian play exactly 6 hours each, per day. And that the average number of players, is somewhere between that 48 the OP pointed out, and the 78 that I found. So let's call it an average of 65 individuals playing, in 6 hours, per day. That would make 4 different sets of players, every day, at 65 players per set on average...that's oh my - 260 players! Now if only half of them voted twice per day as they are allowed (once every 12 hours)...that'd make - 260 votes per 24-hour period. That's a WHOLE lot more votes than they're showing now.

So where's the cheating?

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Oh also, as of 8:24 pm, est, a full 5 hours after the OP posted, Imperian only has 394 votes. Where'd he get 402 from? Perhaps instead of obsessing over how well everyone else is doing, he could inspire his own games' players to vote.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

*just chuckles* I just made 20 characters in 10 minutes on Imperian. I guess I'll pull out my proxy list now and add 20 more votes because the playerbase surely supports it. I'll get two of my friends and add another 40 players and votes while I'm at it. Yes, lets number crunch. *smirks*

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Er, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how many characters you have on a game. Topmudsites will only accept one vote from your IP address, per 12 hours. You could have 400 paying accounts on Gemstone, if they're all coming from the same IP address, you'll still only get 1 vote per 12 hours.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Whenever I have concerns about someone's voting practices, I report them directly to Lasher, and he looks into them. He's the only one with the hard data, so everything else is conjecture (not that I haven't worried about a few myself). Still, I wouldn't necessarily think that someone is necessarily cheating based on usage vs. votes. Our voting usually stays about the same even when our usage dips simply because people will continue voting even if they aren't currently playing. Still, if you've got some serious concerns, just drop Lasher a PM with the name of the mud.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I think you missed the point. The OP said that he logged on 20 characters, so your count that you were crunching numbers over was off. But all of this doesn't matter. If the vote system changed to TMC style, it would be better like at TMC and you'd get rid of the bogus 10 player 400 vote craziness.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

With a proxy list, you aren't voting from the same IP. You're voting from a ton of different IPs. A few muds have been busted doing this, so it's not really an uncommon thing. It's also not necessarily the mud administrator's fault. Players can be very creative, and a lot of them are pretty good scripters.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

It's perfectly possible to cheat the system consistently if you have the inclination to do so. The only way to regulate votes from the server is by IP and/or cookie, and both of those measures can be countered. You could go further and disallow votes from IPs on the same subnet or those from a known proxy list, but you risk discounting legitimate votes this way and of course new proxies are always popping up.

The only reliable indicator is votes vs average player numbers, and even then provided the game in question doesn't inflate their votes way beyond their playerbase size you couldn't be certain they were cheating.

The best you can do is make it difficult for the cheaters but anyone who is really determined to cheat the system is going to find a way.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

True to both Orrin and Milawe.

On the other hand, these games have been around awhile now, and their counts have been reasonably favorable on the list pretty regularly. I don't play any of the ones in question, and never have played any of the ones in question, or any of the other IRE games for that matter (I know Imperian is an IRE). But I imagine that if there's been cheating going on with any of those mentioned games, it would've been noticed by now. Their presence on the top 20 isn't exactly new.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I'd say you are right Jazuela about some of the games, but every month you get a few that are obviously working the system. I think that is the rub. I think TMC was getting the same, but a huge change happened when they changed their voting system and it was obvious. All those that were obviously cheating and high ranking here and there dropped like rocks on TMC.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Yes there was some discussion with a few forums of particular games, back when TMC changed their voting rules. THe general consensus was that it was too much of a bother to vote there, so people just stopped voting there. That doesn't mean people are cheating here..or not cheating there. It simply means people can't be bothered jumping through hoops to say "I like this game."

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

If there's cheating, collect what evidence that you can and report it to Lasher. I've suspected it, many times, and sometimes from games that I even like. Calling games out for cheating on the forums without having access to the IP logs, though, that's pretty presumptive. There's a better way to go about dealing with this. :p

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Imperian (or any IRE game) does not cheat on the TMS. We have set up in game reminders (within the TMS rules) and post quite often on our announce boards and forums asking people to remember to vote. We push voting at the beginning of the month when the TMS first resets. Keeping that rate of voting will be pretty hard for Imperian. On that note however, we have had 419 logins from unique IPs in the last 24 hours on Imperian.

Do I think a couple of the games you listed above are cheating? Yes. I follow the number of votes quite closely. I know exactly how much work it is to get every single vote. TMS voting is a constant discussion at our weekly producer meetings.

At one point I considered to stop pushing voting on our players, as the reward for doing so is quickly extinguished if other games are cheating. Not just because our games are listed below cheaters, but also because TMS traffic is artificially inflated and real people are not actually seeing our listings and ads.

In short IRE does not cheat, we condone any form of cheating, and should any of our users be discovered to facilitate cheating, we would ban them from our games.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I completely disagree with this. The voting process for TMC is simple. It just requires verification that has significantly reduced the ability to manipulate the system. The results of this system are very clear.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Sites like TMS need traffic to make them worth running. Making it harder to vote reduces traffic. Adding a captcha (while a good idea in theory) would reduce traffic. This website is a business that revolves around getting as much traffic as possible. The more traffic that hits the site, the more money that can be made on ads and the more players all of us get to share. Would a lot of it be cross traffic? Sure. But I am fine giving up some IRE players to other games, because I know players from other games will be trying out ours. Cross pollination is a good thing.

Despite the fact that I will get textually slapped for this, I seriously suggest relaxing the rules for voting. In particular the rules about how we can remind players and reward players for voting. On our games alone, voting would increase significantly. Hundreds of new people visiting the TMS from our IRE games. Forum activity would go up, my precious IRE players would see all these other games a lot more often (as they would actually be seeing the site).

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I'm not sure what Lasher's exact reasoning for the current rules are, but I am glad that rewarding players for voting is off of the table.

Many game owners would see this as a breach of ethics; therefor, the games that would benefit the most from "reward votes" would be the games that are more likely to live in the more grey ethical area. Since many of the games that would be likely to benefit from this change are already some of the most popular MUDs, this would lead to an increasing top-heavy competition for voting rank. In turn, this means that traffic to the site looking for a new game to play would be more likely to play an already popular game that would be benefiting from what smaller game owners might see as a questionable reward system that they would not want to personally implement.

I know that as a game owner, I would definitely not want any sort of OOC reward that could affect in-game progress; this is why I have never used a pay-for-perks model. Likewise, I am a fan of encouraging players to vote and support their community and game, but I believe that they should do so based on the merits of the game and not to earn rewards.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I agree that many game owners wouldn't be willing to take this step. But if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to compete with those that did, and would see their rank falling as a result. I suspect you'd see many such muds asking their players to vote elsewhere instead - why send your players to a website that promotes dozens of less-popular games over yours, when it's unlikely you'll get many players in return?

But another issue is that it's sending out mixed signals in regard to cheating. If the players are being rewarded for voting, then they have a strong incentive to cheat (using scripts and proxy servers to get your mud's rank as high as possible so that they can get their rewards), which probably isn't something TMS wants.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I don't think anyone really thinks you guys are cheating. IRE has enough players between all of its games to justify the votes that it gets.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Actually, the current rules reward that type of cheating. You are allowed to give your game a mud-wide reward based on a result (being #1, being in the top 10, whatever). You are not allowed to give people a specific reward if *THEY* vote (I believe IRE used to have their vote button setup so they knew which IP numbers hit the vote button on their web site, and would reward players in game accordingly).

Rewarding game wide encourages people to do whatever they can to get the mud's total ranking up.

Rewarding people individual only encourages that ONE person to vote one time.

I am not arguing for a change in the rules, but I think if anything, the current system rewards cheating more than the old, no-rules system.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

You cannot offer mud wide rewards.



Or have those rules changed?

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Those are all player specific rewards.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

That looks like he is saying absolutely no global events. Am I misinterpreting it?

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Disregarding the crappy data collection, there is also problem with analysis. Muds that were popular in the day don't necessarily lose their voting advantage when they lose players. I haven't played Carrion Fields in years, but I still vote for it as being the best mud. How many players a mud currently has isn't nearly as important as cumulatively how many players it has had in the past.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

You are correct, nothing like "We will run double experience this weekend if we are in the top 5" etc.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

The site has a subscription to Xroxy.com and receives a nightly feed of new open proxies.

Well, I just discovered that the format of the feed changed and the script that flags a high percentage of votes for a particular MUD from proxies hasn't been working. This could get interesting...

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Lasher, since you are involved in the thread, what is the status on busting some of these 15-20 people muds that are clearly cheating to be in the top 5 or top 10?

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Hmm, you changed the post, what I came to reply to was:

Late 2003 was the first time I found TMS and I don't recall mud-wide rewards ever being allowed. Maybe they were some time before that.

As for those other MUDs that may be cheating, I had thought proxies were already taken care of. Perhaps something will show up there, but I've googled many random IPs from certain MUDs (and one in particular) and found nothing. Referrals looks normal (not all from a pay-per-post site etc). There's other things to look for, but going into detail is like publishing a guide to working around them.

Thinking someone might be cheating and proving it are two different things. If you and I were in a bar having this conversation completely off the record I'd have probably used some stronger terms, obviously I have to tread carefully here.

So the status is that to you they're "clearly cheating", to me their voting activity compared to numbers online looks worth a more detailed look and certainly is suspicious, but I can't just remove them based on that.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Wouldn't expect you to, honestly. Every game administrator has run into a situation where something looks fishy but simply can't be proven. Hard evidence is really the only thing you can use without possibly creating some really bad press and hard feelings.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

To be honest, I dont think the top mud sites top 20 is a true indication of anything other that 'Top 20 Most loyal, ferverant players clicking to support their mud'

I think it is refreshing to get reminded of some of the other muds out there, and overall the top muds are still all in the list. Accusing people of lying is a bit underhand.. it does not take many fingers to work out that most votes could be accurate.. its a not all about players.. could be admin, builders who dont play, could be casual players who play infrequently who vote from work.

I also occasionally vote for a game, even though I no longer play it.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

It's good that it's being looked into, in my opinion, because if games are cheating to hold a Top Ten or Twenty spot ... they're taking up space from new games and other games that are struggling to get seen, but aren't stooping to illicit tactics.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

You know...I can think up at least four ways right off hand on how to vote...It's not that hard to think up ways to get around rules. That is one reason why I liked the fact that TMC went to a user account based vote system.


As it is, in my opinion if you have to cheat the system to get the votes that your own players aren't giving you...Or even knowing that your players are voting in a manner such as this...Why are you a part of the Administration of your Mu*??


Part of being a member of the Admin Team should be the ability, and the courage, to not only follow the rules of your own game, but to also follow the rules of the sites upon which you list your game. If you are clearly incapable of following such simple rules, then why become Staff?


Being a Staff member is a privilege and an honor, and should be viewed as such.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I completely agree with the above poster. In one mud I played, numerous people would actually admit to voting at home, school, etc. (on their chat channel) on a daily basis just to push up the mud rankings. The admins wouldn't even scold such behavior. Of course, they wouldn't condone it either. They'd post little vote reminders on the channel and within seconds, players would state that they'd be voting in different areas, so the admins knew what they were doing.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Becoming admin on a MUD doesn't grant you supernatural powers. You're limited very much in what you can actually do when people are not directly going through the MUD itself. You can lay down rules, you can even lay on a smackdown, but in the end, having rules that you can't enforce makes you look incompetent. And that's okay, because if you are laying down rules where you can't even detect *who* is infringing them, then you *are* incompetent. It all works out.

All you can do is try to encourage an atmosphere where voting is considered important, but breaking the rules is considered, as part of the MUD ethos if you like, unacceptable. In the end though, you are relying on people to police themselves. I think we've cultivated the right atmosphere on Discworld, for what it's worth, but it comes from social pressures between players rather than an edict handed down From Upon High.

Drakkos.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I can't speak for other MUDs, although I would assume it is the same, but at WOTMUD we have a huge base of ex and mostly inactive players who haunt the forums. In the heyday of the mud average player count was at or near 200. When you consider how many people it takes logging in for a hour here or an hour there the number of individual players was significantly higher.

Most of us have moved on with families, school, work, etc and cannot spend the time to login and play much. Dental school keeps me personally from playing for more than a few hours a month. But I check the forums everyday, just like I check patriots.com everyday even though I don't have the time to go to the games everyweekend. Every once and awhile a player will get a burr up their but to start a vote thread. Occasionally it is an admin, but usually a player that makes a drive to vote, and all those oldies who aren't contributing to the 52 some odd players online will get on and click a link to vote. That is what got me to log on and I happened to see this thread about cheating and that WOTMUD was implicated. I cannot think there is any cheating going on, and if it is its just some high schooler who hits up all the computers in the library without any permission or understanding that there are all these rules about voting, not a contrivance of the administrators or some accomplished programmer writing scripts to cheat. I had no idea till I read this thread that that was even not allowed. I figured if your going to go to the trouble of going to the library, a wifi spot, your home, work etc and vote on each one, that's a lot of effort on your part and obviously you love the game. *shrug*

Also, WOTMUD has a link from their main page to click and vote, but their forums have been down and moved over to freeforums.com temporarily so for a long time people have not even been going to the main site because the forums weren't there. Tthis week they began moving back to the old forums on their main page, so more traffic is going to see the link to vote now.

Anyway, I am sure that when the admin of this site looks into it the votes will be legit, but it is categorically unfair to accuse a site of cheating just because they have low play numbers. Additionally, we probably had more than 50 some odd playing when you checked anyway - there are three races and each one has a separate who list. Only admins can see the whole who list, so there were probably more like 70-80 playing when you checked.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

"If you have access to additional computers or IPs or whatever, that is great, but the most important thing is to simply mobilize the people we have and get them voting every day.

If we are able to maintain position in the top 5 on all sites, we will do fun things like a few hours of double xp, half price food, special events, etc. to reward everyone."



"Voting in October 2009 - Lets Get Serious!"

"If we can get in the top 5, there will definitely be some double xp Nights and/or days. We will definitely reward you all for the effort!"

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

At a very quick glance, that would definitely appear to be in violation of the voting rules, atleast from my perspective...

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Haha. Kavir just owned Threshold. How delightfully satisfying.

I'm guessing Aristotle is Threshold?

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I have not looked at Thresholds forums for some time... but "ouch!" comes to mind. I didnt know there were rules for TMS.. I dont see any harm in rewarding a good position in the charts.. it IS cause for celebration after all.. but not to sure about the multiple ip thing

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

As soon as we found out about the no mud-wide rewards, we ended any such promotions. Milawe and I both apologized to Lasher in email. Since this is now public, we also apologize to other mudders for our mistake.

For YEARS, the rule was only that you couldn't reward specific people, but mud-wide rewards were fine. Because even people who didn't vote would still benefit.

I can't help but wonder why Kavir posted here instead of PMing/emailing me first to ask if I misunderstood the rule, or PMing/emailing Lasher so he could deal with it. If he had, he'd know that it had already been dealt with days prior.

As soon as someone posted the link to the updated rule on page 1, I talked to Lasher in email and had already changed our policies to comply with the rules. So the issue was already addressed and fixed.

The linked posts were on a PUBLIC forum available to anyone - even non-players. If we had been trying to do something sneaky, we definitely would not have posted it there. I also posted on the first page of this thread that I thought the rule was against specific player rewards, not mud-wide rewards. So it is pretty obvious that this was a genuine ignorance of the updated rule.

It this where we are now as a "community?" Digging through mud's forums looking for things to attack them with? And not even bothering to ask them privately first what is up, so if it is a mistake they can correct it? Wow. That's a real shame.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Uh, actually it's a low moment for you Threshold. The fact that you disregard it and are playing the "ignorance" card shows what kind of character you have. Man up and admit it. Trying to act innocent just makes you look even more cheap than has already been proven.

I think it's hilarious that both threads are now deleted and gone. I'm glad I checked the dates on the October one. It's so blatantly obvious.

If you had any shred of integrity you'd have kept the threads up so others can decide for themselves, instead you quickly remove any and all evidence of wrong doing.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I'd rather not have a really big flame war about this, but it might be inevitable. We've already been in touch with Lasher about this, and I already made the statement to the mud that we were in violation of TMS's rules and we would not be celebrating over ranking status again. Anyone who plays Threshold knows that we easily have the number of players to support our ranking on TMS, but regardless, we were in violation of the rules.

We apologize to any other muds or administrators who are upset about this, but we honestly believed that you were not allowed to reward individual players but could encourage the mud as a whole. That was definitely allowed while Synozeer was running TMS. Either way, we have been informed. Our playerbase has been informed. And all posts annoucing mud-wide events in response to TMS ranking have been removed.

Also, we apologize to Lasher for diregard of the rules. I hope you know that we were not trying to disrespect the site or the participants of the site. Otherwise, we wouldn't have made it so public. (Not to mention Threshold outing us in this thread.)

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Just so people know, we both already apologized to Lasher in private email days before Kavir's post. As soon as someone posted the link to the updated rules on page 1, we were pretty shocked and surprised. So the issue was already dealt with completely, and Lasher understood and forgave us for our mistake.

We acted immediately to stop any such promotions and we informed our players.

As Milawe noted, the threads have been removed so new and old players will not read them and think those promotions are active.

Threshold has been around for over 13 years. We have been a part of mud community sites like TMS from the beginning. Rules have changed over time, and sometimes people make mistakes keeping updated. We made an honest mistake here, and we definitely feel bad and apologize for it. But I think it is pretty clear there was no deliberate cheating going on, since I outed MYSELF on page 1, and all of the posts referenced were in a PUBLIC forum.

I know that won't stop the haters from doing their thing, but I think most objective people will be able to see through to the truth.

Thanks,

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

We're not trying to look innocent. Threshold outed himself on this thread. We've already discussed this with Lasher in PMs. We blatantly broke the rules and apologize for it. Our ONLY excuse is that we missed the change in the rules from when mud-wide events (rewards) were made unacceptable. Threshold has more than enough people to support the votes that we have. Regardless, we DID break the rules, and we apologize for this.

Most of our forums are PRIVATE. If we wanted to hide this, we would have just posted in one of our private sections. Then you guys wouldn't have been able to look at it at all. Seriously, there is no sneakiness involved. Plus, all the relevant parts are posted here on the thread, and they are accurately posted. Thus, you can make your judgments from here.

We took them down when we told our players that we were in violation of TMS rules and that we would not be continuing this.

The evidence of wrong doings are already in Lasher's mailbox as well as on this thread. Again, we apologize FOR the wrong-doing. It was done in ignorance and WILL be discontinued. I think we're a bit bewildered that we missed this somehow, and you are right in that I DO feel shame that we didn't know.

Unfortunately, we're absent from TMS for several months at a time over the course of several years. Missing the post stinks, and I wish that I HAD known. This makes us look like we were cheating. We're well aware of that. And it's a great disservice to our players who would have voted regardless of the events. This is definitely a situation where the admins messed up and the players might end up paying for it. Please excuse me if I'm a tad bit defensive. I can't help but be because I don't want our players paying for our mistakes.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

Its good this was sorted, and Milawe has been very professional and suitably contradictory to put this issue with threshold to rest.

Regardless of intent KaVir did post up a violation of the rules and mentioning the potential axe to grind and that they are part of a group of haters is not going to stop this thread degenerating into a flame war.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I'm hoping you mean conciliatory. I'm not trying to be contradictory at all, I promise, though I might be coming off that way.

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

I'm sure everyone appreciates the apology but in no way, shape or form does Kavir or anyone else owe Threshold a pm or email for THEM violating the voting rules here.

It really does appear that they outed themselves and thats a good thing but that initial response to Kavir's post doesn't sit very well with me and I'm sure I am not the only one who got that feeling...


Threshold has a huge following and it should, its a great mud. They will still rank as high as they are whether or not they give in game rewards for their voting.

Just my 2 cents...

Re: Lets Talk about Voting - Shall we?
 

No, the TMS rules say to mail Lasher about any potential cheating, so they do NOT owe us any kind of PM or Email. Again, it's one of those things where I'm still boggled by how we missed that post clarifying the rules in 2007.

No one appreciates being kicked while they're down! :) We were already dealing with trying to rectify the situation and making amends to Lasher. Getting hit with it on the forums when we thought it was in the process of being resolved stinks but is probably a very necessary part of making amends. It's hard to ignore the obvious glee from some of the posters that we made a big mistake and are paying for it now. Still, that's part of the process, and I'll take the licks because I understand that people may very well feel slighted by us. Again, we apologize.