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In that sense then, just listing a MUD skews the list, because your MUD wouldn't be anywhere on the list without listing it first. (Incidentally, Achaea was #3 before we began rewarding our players for voting.) In that sense, skew isn't a bad word. It's like saying that someone who trains hard to win a race is skewing the results. Yes, it's true, he is, insofar as his training is altering the results, but that's not a bad thing.
There's no question that a higher percentage of a playerbase will vote when given an incentive to, but that doesn't skew the results, as the list does not measure the popularity of a MUD. It measures how many people (whether from your MUD or not) you can send here, and how often. It's doing a fine job of that.
Again, it's a mistake to think of topmudsites as some authoritative list on the most popular MUDs. It isn't that, and while there's a correlation (gotta have some players to have votes, regardless of whether you encourage them to vote or not), the strength of the correlation differs across MUDs, so one cannot really draw a conclusion from that. But then, since the site isn't set up to provide you with that conclusion, and since it IS set up to reward a site for bringing the most traffic here, I don't see how anything is being skewed. The site is accurately measuring exactly what it was designed to measure.
--matt
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