[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud reviewing

[diablo at best.com]

On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Andy Cink wrote:

> At 02:59 PM 1/26/99 -0800, matt(diablo at best.com) wrote:
> >> >Perhaps there should be some way of showcasing new, original muds, like
> >> >a mudlist in which an imp would submit her mud, and a volunteer would
> >> >evaluate the mud for uniqueness and non-stock-ness, and write a short
> >> >review containing his first impressions.
> >
> <snippage pertaining to mud reviewing>
> >
> >I think one problem with reviewing any non-stock mud is the time required
> >to get to know the game in any depth. Unless you play for at least a
> >couple hundred hours, your review is, imho, akin to reviewing a movie
> >without bothering to watch the whole thing.
> 
> Most movies I know of are nowhere near 100 hours, let alone 200 hours :P
> Even the Godfather series isn't THAT long <g> You have to figure, with
> the number of muds out there, that there's virtually no reviewers who
> are going to have that kind of time to spend on a review. I would consider
> 4 hours a good amount of time to spend reviewing a mud. I guess it depends
> on what you consider non-stock, too, though. I don't see how people can
> discern between who deserves 4 hours, who deserves 12, and who deserves
> 100.

Sure, obviously I realize that, but the analogy still holds. You don't
review a movie without having seen the entire thing, regardless of whether
it is a 20 minute short or an 8 hour extravaganza. I don't even see how it
is possible to review anything as complex as a mud in 4 hours. What you
will end up doing is reviewing a very tiny portion of the mud and
extrapolating your review of that to the entire mud. This may be
efficient, but it does not constitute a review of the mud as a whole.

> Hopefully reviewers are going to review more than one mud, so I think it
> is reasonable to expect that they'll not stay for more than a few hours.
> I also think that supposing each reviewer does have biases, if people
> can read all of the reviews, hopefully one of the reviewers preferences
> match their own. If a person happens to like hack 'n slash, perhaps the
> review by the hack 'n slash liking reviewer would best tell that person
> if they'd enjoy playing on the mud or not. Just like real life, you can't
> really expect that everyone is going to like your game. Some people want
> a graphical game, some want text. Some want to kill mobs, some want to
> kill players, and some want nothing to do with killing at all. Keeping
> this in mind, having 2 or 3 of 4 liking your mud is actually pretty darn
> good.

It's not whether they liked them or not that concerns me. They're not my
customers and I haven't had any customers come tell me "I came to Achaea
because I read a positive review on X". I'm just putting the idea out
there that reviewing muds in 4 hours is like reviewing the entire sundance
film festival in 4 hours. It cannot be done without being such a shallow
review as to be useless.
--matt