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9:51 pm
February 1, 2009
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Vladaar
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Hello,
Is voting sytem working properly?
I mean isn't it supposed to clear back to zero at the beginning of each month,
so the newer muds, get a chance of making the ratings?
Vladaar
http://6dragons.org
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9:52 am
February 2, 2009
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Gotrek
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They're working properly, I do believe Orrin never stated that the votes would be reset monthly.
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10:42 am
February 2, 2009
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Orrin
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My plan was to reset the voting every 2 months and see how well that works out but as the site is still in development I haven't gotten around to resetting it yet. However I'll say now that I'll reset the rankings at the end of this month and start a new cycle from the 1st March. I'll also create a thread for past rankings and post the current rankings there each time they are reset.
Does anyone have any strong opinions on how long the voting cycle should last? I think 2 or 3 months would be good, but I'm open to suggestions. Let me know your thoughts before the end of the month.
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11:42 am
February 2, 2009
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Gotrek
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Post edited 10:49 am – February 2, 2009 by Gotrek
I would think every 2 months would be good at this stage. There doesn't seem to be that many people voting overall that a MUD can't come in half-way through the cycle and still get up there. As site traffic increases and as such voting, then it might be prudent to convert to a monthly cycle if this is the case.
Edit: I forget to mention that there is more than one way to get exposure on the main page here. The voting system allows those MUDs whom may not get voted much, but rated highly to get on via that method and of course the most voted (whether they get good rating or not). Factor in "Featured Game" which is changed daily and randomly chosen (correct me if I am wrong Orrin) as well as "Today's picks" which randomly picks several MUDs upon page load. (Again correct me if I am wrong. :P)
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5:33 pm
February 2, 2009
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zivilyn
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Three months seems great Matt.
One thing I'd _really_ like to see is just one vote per machine/cookie/ip address/etc. Still very frustrating to do the vote thing when you get a couple 1 votes per day from someone just trying to push their own game up by comparison. Although I suppose I could just 'not' vote at all, not direct players to the link, and be happy with the 1 ranking. Hard to say, it just gets frustrating when it doesn't seem to do the purpose it was put in for (ie how much do you like THIS game that you play/tried).
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  Zivilyn/Skol/Dave
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5:47 pm
February 2, 2009
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Orrin
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Right now you can rate each game once every 24 hours. Do you mean you want it so you are only able to rate a single game in any 24 hour period? That would certainly stop people from rating a bunch of games at 1 star, although looking at the logs this isn't that widespread.
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5:50 pm
February 2, 2009
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Orrin
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Post edited 4:52 pm – February 2, 2009 by Orrin
Gotrek said:
Edit: I forget to mention that there is more than one way to get exposure on the main page here. The voting system allows those MUDs whom may not get voted much, but rated highly to get on via that method and of course the most voted (whether they get good rating or not). Factor in “Featured Game” which is changed daily and randomly chosen (correct me if I am wrong Orrin) as well as “Today's picks” which randomly picks several MUDs upon page load. (Again correct me if I am wrong. :P)
The 'Featured Game' is a promotional spot for paid advertisers, however the 'Today's Picks' is a random selection on each page impression. But yeah, every 1 star rating is still pushing you up the 'Most Popular Games' list.
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9:47 pm
February 2, 2009
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zivilyn
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Post edited 8:48 pm – February 2, 2009 by zivilyn
Orrin said:
Right now you can rate each game once every 24 hours. Do you mean you want it so you are only able to rate a single game in any 24 hour period? That would certainly stop people from rating a bunch of games at 1 star, although looking at the logs this isn't that widespread.
Yeah, I was thinking single game in 24 hours.
Basically, there's no way that someone's playing like 3 muds all day long (or enough to rate them), but we know there are people going 'move my mud up, 5 stars'/'move your mud down, 1 star'. I think about 20% of the votes for my game are such (slightly over as it's under 4.0, and I'm surely not downvoting my game).
It's hard to say, I think any voting system seems to have ups and downs. And, if people can… they will, when it comes to things like downvoting, or multiple voting etc.
Anyway, don't sweat it Matt.
You've done a great thing with the portal, I hope to see it for a long time.
Any thoughts of wrapping it into a Facebook app? I think it could be monstrous that way. To benefit 'each' game, maybe offer it as such for a fee or run mudgamers links on the interface etc. (Then they could have like 'myneatMUD FB app' which is the flash wrapped link to thier game only, with a big MudGamers.com sign etc).
If that all makes sense?
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Zivilyn/Skol/Dave
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7:06 pm
February 5, 2009
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Orrin
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Post edited 6:06 pm – February 5, 2009 by Orrin
I'll have a think on limiting the ratings to a single game in any 24 hour period, although I wonder if that would be admitting defeat on the ratings concept and we'd be better going to a straight vote system. Anyway, if I make any changes they will go in when I reset the votes at the end of this month and I'll let everyone know.
I had a look at doing a facebook app for another project and I honestly found their API one of the most confusing and poorly documented I'd ever seen so I don't really want to go that route. However, individual games are welcome to make their own apps using the normal FMud client (or you can grab the non proxy version of this one as it's probably more up to date). I'm not sure I'd want to use the proxy version as it would be a potentially huge extra strain on the server for no tangible benefit to the site that I can see.
On a similar vein I had thought of doing a version of the client with a frontend where players could pick a game from a list with a brief description showing next to it and then click a play button to connect to the game. This client could be put in a facebook app or on Flash gaming sites, although again I don't know if the extra hit on resources would be worth it.
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4:54 am
February 6, 2009
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zivilyn
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That might be the way, do you have a link to your latest version of FMud client?
I'll see what I can work up, I read their API as well, and had the same conclusion heh. But, if I get it working, it could be a boon to games for the FB world. Er crap, I'd still have to get the server to host the statement too right?
One thing I'd like to add is a 'direction' pad (although I know the arrow keys work right?),
then also buttons with fields next to them like:
[kill]___ [look]___ [open]___ [consider]___ [get]___ [wear]___ [eat]___ [list/buy/sell]___[flee]/[equipment]/[inventory] etc.
I wonder how hard it would be to make mobs/objects clickable?
IE. equipment, list pops up, click item, then [remove/wear/drop/examine].
IE. look, shows room, click mob, then [look/consider/kill]
I'm sure I'll have to play around with it, but maybe like the main 'actions'.
Anyway, just thoughts, thanks for the ear :)
- Dave.
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1:36 am
February 7, 2009
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Orrin
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Yep you'd still need to serve some kind of socket policy file to allow the connection to the game server from the flash app.
Action buttons is something I'd thought about, but they would have to be configurable by each game as a MUSH may have very different commands to a DIKU for example. It's one of those things that I'm not sure there's enough demand to make it worth including.
Making the screen clickable like that should be possible, for example you could locate the character under the cursor and scan forward and back to capture a whole word, then select an action from a menu to apply to that word. However it's impossible to distinguish between same named objects this way without something more sophisticated server side such as MXP. I think if I were to do this I'd have to look at implementing an existing protocol such as MXP, otherwise you're never going to get a system that is satisfactory for all games.
I've updated both the MG and FMud clients today, so expect a release on my blog this weekend.
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6:04 am
February 26, 2009
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hollis
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Orrin said:
Post edited 7:06 pm – February 5, 2009 by Orrin
I'll have a think on limiting the ratings to a single game in any 24 hour period, although I wonder if that would be admitting defeat on the ratings concept and we'd be better going to a straight vote system. Anyway, if I make any changes they will go in when I reset the votes at the end of this month and I'll let everyone know.
So, ConQUEST hit the 20-vote mark last night and entered the list strong with a 4.32 rating. It is 24 hours later, and the mud has received 3 consecutive ratings of 1. What's amusing about this, however, is that only two people have connected to the game during that time — myself, and a regular player who doesn't even use mudgamers. Notably, I refuse to vote for my own mud, so I certainly wasn't the one dishing out 1's!
This isn't meant to complain or say "I have been treated unfairly! Whine!". I'm sure this is an issue everyone has to deal with. I just thought it was an interesting example of the absurdity a rating system can lead to when people treat "rating" as some sort of competitive (popularity) measure. And, hey, I'm all for competition! But it's unfortunate that it is disguised as a measure of quality. That can be misleading. Better to just say what it is at face value: a measure of popularity, or votes. Judgements of quality might be better left to player reviews / comments, where the effort required to judge a mud precludes downvoting.
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4:14 am
April 4, 2009
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Gotrek
| | Australia | |
| Member | posts 50 | |
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Sorry for the late reply, forgot about this thread. I can understand that getting voted down sucks, I wouldn't like nor would many other MUD admins either. What discourages downvoting I think, at least in my opinion, is that although your MUDs rating might be taking during a particular voting cycle they are inadvertedly helping your MUD towards featuring in the Most Popular section.
The rating system isn't just exposed to people downvoting either; but "upvoting" that is, people giving their MUD a rating of 5 just to try and get up there. How many people can sit down and and vote honestly & objectively and still give the MUD they are voting for a 5? (Not saying there isn't any worthy of the vote; there is and I have played a fair few that are, at least in my opinion anyway.) At the end of the day, both are just as misleading as each other and all you can do is hope that people, provided with the knowledge that even if they are downvoting your MUD, they are actually helping you, it may just prevent it?
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