You're right on Simutronics, but uhh, Matt is a moderator of TMS and has 'tons' of posts there, and him and Junin both post quite often on TMC as well.



I don't really think so. Mudgamers has ratings, not voting, each person can only rate each MUD once. Not once per day, once, period. As such it certainly isn't at all the same as TMC's and TMS's voting schemes which you vote daily in and do raise the sites traffic.

That's pretty emotive language to use without any kind of explanation. In what way do you think commercial games are sponging off of hobbyists?



Yeah I had forgotten about Matt Mihaly, but then I don't think he posts as much these days and of course he no longer runs IRE. I suppose my examples weren't great, but the point I was trying to make was that I think sometimes people on MUD community sites lose sight of the fact that there are a lot of popular games out there beyond the ones represented here. Perhaps it wasn't really relevant to this thread, I guess reading a few recent threads here (I am thinking the mud celebrity one in particular) gave me that impression.

Right, we don't need more admins just for the sake of having more admins. As people have said, it dilutes the quality of the genre. Of course, we can't really do anything about every random person who wants to start their own MUD, but personally I'm not keen on encouraging people unless I feel there's something different about them – not their ideas, but the person.

The problem with putting quality work online is that reception tends to be somewhat poor or limited. Even developers have comfort zones about what kind of code they like to tinker with, and if something leaves that zone it won't get much attention. There's actually a fair bit of stuff going on in the MUD world, IMHO, but somehow on this site we only really hear about the Dikurivative type stuff. That's probably largely due to the crowd here, but even so I'm not sure how willing people are to leave that comfort zone. As a result I have less incentive to produce and publish certain things because it's likely to be ignored. :shrug:

Does it? I have heard this argument 100's of times and at one point would have said it myself as if its the truth. I actually find no evidence to support the argument at all. Of the 15 or so regular players and staff that used to be on Eldhamud The Oakland Chronicles only 2 are no longer text gamers and lets face it, as far as games go it was a pile of crap. On another game that i used to play, similar story, from a player base of about 10 only 1 is no longer in Muds. A lot of the people who i have met in muds are all still involved in mud at the player, staff and developer levels. Those that have left have done so because of work, new hobbies or other games like WoW et al, not because of a poor experience on a mud or because the game was shit or closed down.


That's a rather discriminatory/elitist thing to say to what is mostly a hobby genera. Sounds to me like its ok for you to have your project but not someone else based on your failed assumption that its shit and will scare a player off? This is mostly a hobby genera and not wanting people to enjoy their hobby and participate is what will lead to the hobby being a fail. What keeps a hobby vibrant and active is people, new people especially. Without new people a hobby is going to wither and die.

I like to mountain bike and am part of a club. I have a bike worth $4000 and as a club if we required members to also have similar bikes we would have 3 members. But we don't, we allow and encourage everyone to join, even those on $80 bikes from Kmart and as such we have a healthy and growing club of over 350 members, who also bring their non club friends on rides aka word of mouth that further enhances our club and the experience we get out of it.

A hobby like mudding is no different, if you want it to grow as a genera you need to encourage people to participate and make them feel welcome and wanted. Not alienated with statements like above.

It's not that I don't want the mudding community to grow, that would be self-destructing considering that it's one of my favorite hobbies. I just think that the community as a whole needs a bit of consolidation before expansion. It seems to be spread so thinly lately and it's only getting worse. If 500 gas stations opened up in a town of 1000 people you would end up with a couple loaded down with customers and 450+ failures. What good would it do to build 100 more stations? And while a terrible mudding experience might not scare off most people, it certainly scares off some. I played a rather non-newbie friendly mud for 10 years, I loved every aspect of it. I had a few friends of mine with very similar interests try it out and they *hated* it. They were never interested in mudding again because they had such a difficult time with the first one they tried. First impressions go a long way. If I decided to try out Mountain Biking with Fury and he took me on an advanced trail down a steep mountain side filled with potholes and I ended up breaking my tail bone, I probably would never want to go mountain biking again.

I also have a suggestion.

Allow (for the Promotions section?) for people to disallow replies for that particular thread if they'd like.


This would, in theory, keep flame wars from starting over promotions.

I would like to second the OP's proposition. A little box that shows only promotions can't hurt.

I would like to disagree with Zenn. If it's a MUD with bad admins, they may lock the thread to hide any feedback.

Zeno is right. It might be nice to be able to prevent thread hijacking and unnecessary flaming but it would certainly be abused by someone, probably sooner than later. That does bring to my attention what I see as the biggest potential drawback to opening up to more promotion, more required moderation. I don't know how much extra time the local admins have to spend on digging through posts but I'm sure nobody wants to spend all day moderating flame wars. Most of what I've seen on TMC's promotion area has been constant flaming of new promotions and just a whole bunch of bickering. That is exactly what led me away from TMC and brought me to this community.

I'm frankly alarmed at how frequently I have to take The_Fury/Eldhamud/Tommi
seriously lately. Hopefully he reverts soon to a form I can dismiss as a loon.

That said, this is a good point and I think it should also be taken
seriously by the MB admins. If this is a "mud community" site, then
I think this is a good time to start putting real time and discussion
into listings, reviews, voting, and the like.

On the other hand, if this is a "mud developers community" site, then
this would be a really good time to just come out and say so, and
make clear that further debate about listings, reviews, voting, and
the like is pointless.

It looks to me like the reality here is the latter, and that there
just isn't will or desire on the part of the admins to take up any
of the slack left by the collapse of MR/MM. If so, I understand that.
It's my opinion that if you want to leave a real mark, you find the
one thing you do well and do the hell out of it. Diversifying
into player interests here might be good in a number of ways, but
if the admins don't have the heart for it, who can blame them?

Let's just hear one way or another, so we know whether time in these
discussions is being spent or is being wasted.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

I thought we'd made this clear already. Perhaps we did not. Or perhaps people would like to pretend we haven't said so already. So I'll say so now.

We are *NOT* going to institute voting, period. That is not going to happen. Ever. Voting serves no useful purpose other than to cause bickering and flamewars.

We are not opposed to people posting reviews of MUDs they've played, whether they liked them or not, but I don't see any real need for a more formal process than that. If you have something you want to say about a game, post it. Just don't expect us to open a dedicated section of the site for that purpose.

We will also not give people the ability to lock their own topics in the promotional forum because that would lead to abuse of the intent.

We already have listings. They provide a space for the admins running the game to describe their MUD in whatever method they choose, subject to approval. They are permitted to supply with that a website address, telnet listing, and an ad banner to go in the rotation. We don't even charge them to put that banner up, and I think we're the only community site with something like that setup. There's not much more to it than that. If this particular portion of the site needs refinement, then present some options. So long as they don't include voting or formal reviews.

Hopefully we don't need to explain this again? :)

Nothing wrong in keeping you on your toes Cratylus/Cratylus/Cratylus,*giggle*. The good thing is that you don't dismiss everything i say just because i have been a loon, but rather judge things on merit.

Well, the idea that the free games are losing players to commercial games is statistically supported about as well as the idea that junk MUDs scare off possible players. However, there is a major difference. I can advertise anywhere a junk MUD can. What I can't do is have a banner on the front page of TMC.

For a long time, no one except a deranged psychopath ever thought of competing with TMC. One big, complete listing has always been a goal of the community, and TMC served that purpose well. Now there are several alternate sites. Why? Could it be people don't want to list their games on the far side of a gauntlet of banners for commercial games?

Maybe it's just my age, but I feel there's something wrong with charging money for what most people do from love. There's even a word for it. The idea that someone would look at a group of amateurs having fun and think, "Wow, I bet I could make money from that!" really irks me.

That's bullshit. I know it, and I'm willing to bet you do too. I'm not suggesting voting be added, because I'm not sure the gains outweigh the costs, but to say their are no gains is utter rubbish.

Gains:
Increased traffic for MUDs ranked high on the list.
Increased Traffic for the site as a whole.

Fizban, as someone associated with 4Dimensions, I suppose you would see gains. The rest of us, not so much. :grinning:

To be honest, I wish I had Molly's talent for self-promotion. If I did, then perhaps the original game with players shifting between four time dimensions would still be running. :sad:

I agree. It can cause flamewars and the like, but saying it serves no useful purpose seems like you're the one trolling now.

The companies that advertise on sites such as TMC presumably pay to do so, so how is that in any way sponging? A large site like TMC is going to have monthly hosting and bandwidth costs and if you want to draw in players from outside the MUD community things like advertising and Google adwords all cost money too. Any free MUD that lists on TMC can benefit from this exposure without paying anything towards it, so how is that a bad thing?


You are aware that there have been commercial MUDs around since the 1980s? There are even some still running that predate DIKU, lpmud, Tiny and their descendants. Regardless of whether trying to make money from an amateur hobby is wrong or not, it's just not true to characterize commercial MUDs in that way.

GemStone definitely fits that qualification, and I 'think' Avalon does as well.

EDIT:

Yes they both Definitely do:

GemStone: 1988
Avalon: 1989
DIKU: 1990

To the best of my knowledge Dale hosts TMC for free.

I rest my case. It's already causing bickering and flamewars and calling people trolls for merely pointing out that that's exactly what would happen and we don't even have voting. Continue to argue about it if you like but it's not happening. No useful purpose was chosen for a reason. Yes, it would increase traffic, but that's not the kind of people we want to bring in as traffic. Vote stuffers are bane, not a boon. The people who then follow to bitch about how their rankings are being "rigged" by negative voters generate more of the same kind of traffic. That type of traffic would only be useful to us if we were making money off of Google ads or paid banner rotations and needed more raw visitor count to leverage a higher return.