Member Discussions

How much time would you expect someone to play your mud to
give an adequate and fair review? Assume the person is just
a reviewer and not a potential player.

I know every mud is different, some you can grasp fast,
others not so fast. Questing/puzzle muds generally take
longer.

Let's say you're out of beta, and generally speaking how much
playing time would you say is adequate when playing a few
hours every day? Two weeks? Three months?

To get an overview of the game play. I'd be happy if they spent an hour.

They can't evaluate end game and higher game features in that amount of time, but I wouldn't
expect a third party reviewer to spend weeks on the game just to reach a point where they
could evaluate that content.

If the reviewer asked to have a temporary higher level character I'd be willing to arrange
that, but it would have to be a credible reviewer.

I am currently in the hunt for a mud to call home and feel that a fair review of the intricacies that a mud has to offer requires somewhere between 5-10 hours. If that seems high then so be it, but that gives you enough time to work through the extreme newbie phase and get to the point where you are actively working on your character. By then I generally have a good idea of what I'm looking at in a mud

I think a few hours would be a fair amount of time for a
somewhat detailed review. An hour would suffice for a first
impression type of deal.

kcaryths, what are you looking for in a MUD?

Not 100% sure to be honest, but there are a few things I look for that are of varying importance.

1) I'm an achiever first and foremost so I like top player lists, points for exploring, knowing how I stack up against others in a variety of areas - it's a factor.

2) A healthy balance of quests/exploration/killing. I do enjoy the odd marathon mudding xp session (44 hrs is my record from way back in the day, though that will likely never happen again), but the broader the base of activities to engage in, the better.

3) Being a full time career guy/husband/dad/volunteer, I pick my spots to play. Generally early morning or late night (with the odd weekend stint) and generally not more than 2-3 hours max per session. While I'm not opposed to "setup time", the less there is upon logging in the better. So this means:

-- a) Rebuying eq is okay, but if it is saved when I quit even better. Not a game-breaker, but a factor

-- b) Roleplay intensive/required muds are not ruled out, but I am very hesitant since I worry that the per session requirement would be too high for my stage of life. That being said I am currently testing out one roleplay required mud now.

4) Having to constantly eat/drink is annoying to me. It would have to be a pretty special mud to keep me if that were a constant factor in the game. Again, not a non-starter type issue, but something I keep in mind.

5) I've played LPC almost exclusively since 1996, but since taking about 5 years away from mudding and now coming back, I am finding myself much more open to a variety of codebases. Skills/Levels etc don't matter so much to me now, as long as there is some real and tangible way to progress (and as mentioned earlier, compare myself to others as a bonus!)

6) Doesn't need to be a huge playerbase as long as there are always at least a few people online and a dedicated admin running the place. I mainly play alone anyways, so it's more of a "background noise/knowing the place won't die" type deal.

7) High end group content. When I played my "home mud" back in my University days I loved getting to the point where grouping for high end kills etc was at least an option. This is minor as I expect it will be a long time before I get there.

8) Good starting help and preferably a website. Active forums are a bonus. I don't mind a steep learning curve as long as there are resources to point me in the right direction.

Maybe there is more, but those are a few things I am keeping an eye out for.

5-10 hours? How can you see the best things about the mud in
5-10 hours? I would've thought 2 weeks would be the
consensus. Very interesting.

Keep in mind the OP was talking about reviewing.

The last mud I checked out for -myself- I was around 20 hours before I realized it was perhaps not the greatest fit.

So finding a mud that's a fit takes longer than just
reviewing a mud?

I usually play a game until I decide I don't want to play it anymore. I'm not really sure you can put a specific time to it, because each mud has a different amount of content to it.

If I were to play a MUD specifically to review it, I'd probably still only play it for as long as I wanted to. It might be 2 minutes, two weeks or a few months. There's no point in trying to push yourself through something you find unpleasant because it just snowballs until you're putting yourself through hell for no good reason.

For example: A MUD that requires you to auto-quest for gear before you can actually play it "normally" is likely to be something I'd get bored of and leave quickly having never really enjoyed the meat of the game itself. Maybe it's great, I dunno. The initial experience sucked, though.

I'll be sure to direct KitKat to this thread, seeing as she
is the one that reviews MUDs for gamingHUD, to offer her
opinion here but in the mean time..

I would suggest several hours, ideally between 5-10 in the
case of an actual review. You may get longer, you may get
shorter but would depend on the individual game.

So, if your game doesn't really start getting fun until the
late game, then your probably going to be out of luck. But
having said that, if your game isn't fun getting there then
you probably have some issues you need looking at anyway.

In my case, yes.

Jodah wrote:
So
finding a mud that's a fit takes longer than just

reviewing a mud?

I don't see why not. When you are reviewing one, you would be
more actively critiquing it, than if you were just out to
play.

Finding a mud is a lot different than just reviewing one. Most players "review" a mud
in the first five minutes, then they log out never to return.

If you have players that log in and regularly give you 5 to 10 hours of playing time
while they make up their mind about you, then you must be doing something a little
better than normal. Ever hour that you manage to keep a player in your game increases
the likelihood that they'll return.

Honestly, if reviewers are spending 5 to 10 hours playing a mud just to write a
summary of the game, then I'm not surprised that there are so few reviews.

I am surprised to hear this. I would of thought a game that
took 5 years to make would prefer its reviewer play longer
than 5-10 hours to really get to know the game.

Obviously most mud owners would prefer reviewers to stay longer, but it's not really practical to expect them to spend weeks playing each game just to write a review.

There used to be a mud review site called Game Commandos which wrote pretty decent reviews, but sadly they shut down. A few other people have tried something similar, but they always seem to give up after one or two reviews.

In the past I've suggested one hour reviews. Many muds have a lot more depth in the later game, but that's no excuse for not being interesting and fun right from the start. Most new players quit within the first few minutes anyway, so even one hour would reveal far more about the game than most newbies would discover for themselves - and being so short, it would allow many more reviews to be written.

Jodah wrote:
I
am surprised to hear this. I would of thought a game that

took 5 years to make would prefer its reviewer play
longer
than 5-10 hours to really get to know the game.

And I'm sure that the people who put the work into that game
would prefer they were reviewed in a positive light regardless of actual impressions, too.

Ho dude...saw your tweet this morning.

Okay, subtracting the 'real life' things that take up my time and conspire to derail any reviewing I do (grin) it still takes a couple of weeks to do a comprehensive review of a mud.

Depending on the mud, I try out at least two classes/races and if they offer a magic system I make sure to play some kind of mage for one. I go through every room of every painful newbie school (and don't kid yourselves, with a few notable exceptions all your newbie schools are soul-destroying pits of despair) so I can see what the mud looks like to new players. I try to get one character up high enough to run around the more advanced areas and play with the higher level spells and abilities.

I read the boards and follow the in-game channels to see what kind of atmosphere the mud generates and what level of mud-knowledge as well as what type of player the mud would best fit. Sometimes I ask stupid newbie questions to see how the staff responds. Mostly I just play. I log in at different times of the day/night and different days of the week to get an idea of the playerbase. Sometimes I even recruit a friend or two to log in for a couple of hours and give me a another viewpoint. I even have a dude who plays from his ipad so I can get an idea how the game looks and runs on mobile devices.

I read the mud website, check out any related media, and read a few player game logs if available. I usually have a few questions for the game admin and I ask those before I write the review.

I have to do all that because the reviews are more than just "oh this sucks, or hey, this is cool." We cover all aspects of the mud just like we would a regular video game review.

I will admit I am a tad slow and somewhat easily distracted but a couple of weeks / around 10-12 hours is a good estimate.

Kitkat - is not obsessively playing DAO just because Alistair is pretty and lets her boss him around -

That's a pretty slick review process, kudos to you!

(and don't kid yourselves,
with a few notable exceptions all your newbie schools are
soul-destroying pits of despair)

Agreed 100%.

Let's say a magazine like PC Gamer wanted to do a piece on
indie gaming and picked your mud. Let's assume this review
can make or break your mud. 5-10 hours would still be an ok
time to review it?

Jodah wrote:
/>Let's say a magazine like PC Gamer wanted to do a piece on

indie gaming and picked your mud. Let's assume this
review
can make or break your mud. 5-10 hours would
still be an ok
time to review it?

Let's not.

Ooh Ooh. Let's say a meteor is about to strike earth and you have 24 hours left to live. In the mean time someone wants to review your mud as a last act before all of humanity dies. Is 5-10 hours too long?

I like this game!

I am of the school it depends on the game, but that means some
games give that it's not for me vibe I'd have to stop. So I'd
be a horrible reviewer! If you wanted a full out review of say
AU i'd recommend at least 200-300 hours... Since you'd want to
get a feel for classes, world, possibly PK, and other things.
but who knows what someone else would think really.

I don't really think it matters how much time the reviewer took before they wrote the review - it varies (in our case, from 3 seconds to 16 years) and you have no control over it. In my view, the length of the review is much more important. With that in mind, to me the only bad review is the short one.

In many ways, long negative reviews are just as useful as positive ones because they turn away people who would not have enjoyed your game anyway - i. e. they prevent other negative reviews. Also, the longer the negative review is, the more likely it is for the reviewer to reveal to the reader what kind of person they are - if they sound inexperienced and uninformed, or if they sound like they have very different preferences, then a reader may even be tempted to go and check out the game for themselves, despite all the negativism.

Long negative reviews are also more likely to provide useful feedback to the maker/admin of the game. If the person sounds like the target audience, but is unhappy, then they may give clues as to how to improve the game.

Short reviews, both positive and negative, are uniformly bad news for a game. In a list with other reviews, they draw the eye without providing anything other than an unsubstantiated opinion. A short positive review means little because if the user who liked the game is too lazy to write more than a sentence or two, how exciting can that game be? A short negative review is worse in the sense that it usually condemns the game without saying much about the who the writer of the review is.

Thankfully, sometimes even short reviews reveal enough about the writer to help readers decide whether they should take the opinion seriously. When I see a new one-sentence review of my game, I find myself hoping that it's in bad English, or that it states a silly reason for liking/disliking my game, because that will help readers discount/account accordingly and hopefully go on to read a more detailed review.