I have a request that someone nail the recently posted Legends of the Lance review, in which the poster makes alot of crap insults, namely a hsot against Jews.

It makes me sick that even here, on MU*'s where there is no color or races that bigot morons can still spew their filth and hate.

Get a clue little man. If the admin at Legends of the Lance got rid of idiots like you, they are on the right track, because you would obviously only ruin the experience for those of us who don't have **** for brains. I'll be trying LotL now.

Talking about different kinds of races here... You're saying "Don't say dogs are less intelligent than people!", but the original post claimed "Don't say person A is less intelligent than person B just because he believes in the Torah or has a different skin color"

Oh? We have multiple types of a particular race (Tsol'aa) in Achaea, for instance, and regularly ascribe specific traits to them. The Tsol'teth branch, for instance, is evil. The Tsol'dasi branch is good. Highly racist.

Fantasy books and worlds engage in this kind of thing all the time.

--matt

Fair enough, logos, I'll rephrase:

It shocks me that even here, in the world of Mu*'s, with a plethora of opportunitys to spread hate and racism in a fantasy setting, that some people still bring their RL prejudices and bigotry.

Better?

Heh heh, yes. Let's burn the dwarves, not the Eskimos. I'm with you.

--matt, dwarf hater.

Yes indeed, it does make me sick. Luckily, on one of the MUD's i play, the one that acutally attracts alot of people like that (for who knows what reason) severly punishes racism. Listen, this is the way i see it. Sure your allowed to have your own view, but if it is gerally un-accepted, then keep your mouth shut. Most people MUD to get away from all the things we dont like in real life

But yeah, im a victim of MUDracism. Im curently the only Troll on the prior mentioned MUD, and i never stop getting **** about it. In the worlds of Welkasre, "TROLL POWER!!"

I agree that there are definitely problems with the review system here. Two suggestions I would make:

When viewing a review, add a link to "report" the review to the webmater or whoever is in charge of the site. Anything vulgar, obscene or otherwise unacceptable could be easily relayed to the staff for removal.

Secondly, give viewers the ability to "rate" a review. Places like Amazon use this procedure. Reviews are then listed not in chronological order, but based on their rating. This way poorly written reviews (short, no facts, etc) will get pushed to the bottom of the review list.

Or you could just ignore them given that they have no value as reviews. =)

Or you could just ignore them given that they have no value as reviews. =)

Yes, but you have to click through the chaff to get to the useful information. The advantage to the 'ranking' system is that it saves you time, not that it provides you insight into any one particular review.

the problem i see with this is that people would always rank down bad reviews to their mud, even if it their points are valid and well thought out. ####, maybe even give rewards of other doing it. ya never know

None of the "reviews" have value as reviews

That's exactly what I said!

--matt

Yep. I don't really understand why TMS bothers having them.

--matt

Well, I can see why TMS bothers having them. They're player reviews and they generate traffic to this site. Whether they're high quality, accurate or objective is beside the point. They simply provide another interactive aspect for TMS.

I've found a number of the Carrion Fields reviews to be very useful in describing our game to potential new players. Likely more than half. They also tend to hit topics besides what we usually talk about in our promotional material, and I appreciate that they give a broader perspective.

A sorting system would help de-emphasize the less useful reviews. If you don't find the reviews for your game useful to anyone, or if you've disallowed reviews, a sorting system doesn't hurt you, in any event. Go find something else to complain about.

Hello, long time reader, frist time poster. I'm Branchala on rise of the dragonarmies, owner of the mud. Please don't confuse the attitutde of a few of the reviewers with the attitude of the entire mud. Hate speech is not encouraged on my mud in any way, although I do not tell players what they can and can not say on non public channels, as long as they're not harassing other players.

Oh that's vague.   Define harassing. ;-)

You know, I was wondering why he'd started posting here again, after telling us all that he was no longer going to participate in these discussion forums...

Going back to the idea that muds are racist-- I don't think that's true at all, unless you're playing NaziMUD using the DiKKKu codebase.  Because you say elves have higher intelligence than trolls is not racist, it's simple fact, much in the same way you can say parrots are smarter than turkeys.  

Let's call them specist, instead.

Since this topic no longer applies to the title the author created it with, seeing as how the flame war began with the_logos give the guy a break if it weren't for him and Kavir how interesting would these things be? More informative yes, interesting not really.... With that said with no point and really no meaning I will go twiddle my thumb and continue to see what hilarously funny stuff comes out next.

No, there are not many. Unlike here where there ARE many posts, but they're largely noise. I mean, I learned more from one of Bartle's posts on Mind's Eye than I ever have here, despite the much-more-frequent postings here.

Do I feel qualified to comment on how to run a site like Topmudsites? Yes, though it's got nothing to do with Mind's Eye. Remember that TMS and Mind's Eye have explicitly different purposes. TMS exists for...well, I'm not quite sure. Probably some pocket money for Synozeer along with a general good feeling he gets for running a site that's well-respected by mudders. Mind's Eye is explicitly non-commercial and was put together to allow people with actual successful experience to share that experience with each other. Unfortunately, there aren't that many text mud people with actual successful experience and there are a lot of concerns that commercial muds have that non-commercial ones don't.

What I'd love to see is for Topmudsites to improve the signal to noise ratio where it was similar to Mind's Eye, but with more participants and more traffic. I'm not sure if it's possible. Perhaps we will just open Mind's Eye to more people but simply ban all flaming or ad hominem attacks (*ahem*) and all advertisements so as not to compete with the content here or at Mudconnector.

--matt

How about when you say wood elves have a lower intelligence than high elves? Sounds to me like saying Caucasian humans have a lower intelligence than Asian humans.

--matt

I think horrible reviews should stay up. Why? Well, reviews are supposed to influence your choice in whether or not to play a mud. So if a mud has a whole slew of reviews that you think are terrible, that tells you that the playerbase are not a bunch of people you'd want to spend any amount of time with. There ya go. They did their job by influencing your choice.

Personally, I tend to prefer systems that may impose some preset limits on the 'individual', over ones with different attributes based on other factors, like species. However, there are often good reasons for it in high fantasy settings, where there are definite and obvious differences. But this brings up the comment I think I read in Dragon or some place, "The players are the heroes, not just the normal population. It should be expected that they don't quite fit the 'norm' for their race." It is a complicated issue and on the mud where I play it is so slipshod that quite a few races are almost totally useless, since their attributes make them incapable of doing well in every guild in the game. I suspect, due to the way the combat and other systems work, and the lack of alternative methods to really advance, that they would never do well in 'any' guild. But yeah, keep the RL stuff out of the game.

The stuff 'in game' needs to be based on in game issues, like people going around killing innocent foxes... (inside joke)

P.S. Thought I smelled a Troll on these forums Gemini.
-Kagehi Kossori grins at you.

As true as this is, one can only do so much while maintaining any form of consistency throughout all of the systems in a game. If you allow players to just define their strengths and weaknesses at will, the majority will just min/max their way to greatness. It isn't very exciting when all of the PC trolls of the world are suddenly leaps and bounds more intelligent than the NPC trolls because a high intelligence for a troll makes for a tanky mage. People will metagame any system they can, and this has to be taken into account when designing how racial characteristics are ascribed. Certainly some degree of variation from the behavior of NPC's of the same race is to be expected, and desired of course, but this should be handled through roleplay moreso than through code support, as it quite simply makes balancing issues almost impossible to deal with, as evinced by your comment about the various useless races on the realm you frequent.

As true as this is, one can only do so much while maintaining any form of consistency throughout all of the systems in a game. If you allow players to just define their strengths and weaknesses at will, the majority will just min/max their way to greatness. It isn't very exciting when all of the PC trolls of the world are suddenly leaps and bounds more intelligent than the NPC trolls because a high intelligence for a troll makes for a tanky mage. People will metagame any system they can, and this has to be taken into account when designing how racial characteristics are ascribed. Certainly some degree of variation from the behavior of NPC's of the same race is to be expected, and desired of course, but this should be handled through roleplay moreso than through code support, as it quite simply makes balancing issues almost impossible to deal with, as evinced by your comment about the various useless races on the realm you frequent.


~Cyre

I have brought this up before, and I don't know if you're still talking about reviews, but I say that in certain cases a horrible review should stay. If, for example, a MUD had a slew of terribly written reviews "OMG, liek, u will LUV THIS GAME OMG!" then dosen't that give you a good idea of the people that are in that game.



That, combined with one of the other Runescape reviews (There are three- two are quite bad) would give me a good idea of what i'd find in Runescape. And I would be right- anyone who has played that trash heap (Getting a bit off topic, ahem) knows. If a game has a ton of bad reviews but the owner really thinks they are unwarrented, they can be removed. (If the owner is mature enough to ask them to be removed in a calm manor, that's all the convincing i'd need to help 'em out)

-Kenjar, he of the unpopular opinion.