Pardon the Dick Tracy speak, but... oh wow, my head is spinning right about now.

I found my way to this thread, intent on just browsing a message or two... started reading about the voting war of DR vs. Achaea, and spent like a half hour going, "jeez are both games populated entirely by egotistical, ultra-vain megalomaniacs? Just why on EARTH is VOTING on a "top mud site" so absolutely critical that if their game doesn't get enough votes, somehow the entire collection of hardware used to host and run the game will just disintegrate completely into a pile of metal shavings?" I couldn't help but think about all the sites where you download ROMS of old vintage video games and all the sites have huge banners that proclaim, "We are not getting enough votes all the sites out there with barely any good roms all have more votes than us and we are getting tired of it our site needs more votes if we do not see a MAJOR difference in voting for our site soon we are going to shut the site down so **VOTE" As well as all the ROM websites where you go to download a ROM and you get a window with four links, "Vote1," "Vote2," "Vote3," and "Vote 4" and the instructions "Click on each link to vote for our site then close it down. No votes, NO ROMS!! NO exceptions!!!!** Oh, the morality or ethicality of downloading and playing ROMS when they are technically illegal to own or distribute unless you also own the actual physical game cartridge or CD (even if it is literally older than YOU are, which many Atari 2600 games are in the case of anyone who isn't old enough to drive yet) is entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, because I was going for the ANALOGY in comparing the voting on topmudsites.com to the voting on top50roms.com, etc.

Then I found the messages talking about a disgruntled ex-DR player who totally blasted the game in a review on topmudsites.com a few months ago, and all the positives and negatives surrounding her review. The people who said, "You can't please everyone" got it right on the money... Just as one person's trash is another person's treasure... so one person's treasure is another person's trash. In the TV show Alien Nation, the aliens were totally unaffected by a kick right where a human male's reproductive parts are, but two fists driven into both sides of the torso right below the bottom of the rib cage literally knocked them completely unconscious. Some liquids or solids that could kill a human, they could drink or eat without any effect at all... and yet they actually became intoxicated on sour milk (All the stores no longer had to throw away milk when it passed the 'sell by' date... they just took it off the dairy shelf and sold it to liquor stores to be purchased by the Aliens). In the old TV miniseries V, to the "Visitors," poisonous spiders and scorpions were h'ors douevres, not dangerous... but if a medical emergency arose, and they were in great pain from a serious wound, an injection of morphine made them just as dead as a roach that inhaled Raid.

THEN I read Conskill's "Conskill to graphics: U sux!" review of DR, and wound up reading topics ranging from entire novels of every pro and con imaginable regarding DR's pricing structure (something I admit has been a rather sore spot for me for quite a while) to the most subtle and intricate nuances of all sorts of postgraduate-level analyses of economics and marketing which made my head spin (of course, the fact that it was the middle of the night and I was starting to get sleepy probably had something to do with that... :p )

THEN I read Mmorpg's interview with Solomon, and all kinds of discussions surrounding THAT... and right now my poor head is spinning so hard that I wonder why I didn't just stick to playing CHESS.

And the funny thing is, while chatting in instant message earlier today with a fellow administrator for a teeny-tiny (don't worry, the entire genre is different, so no competition for Simu) little internet game that I help run, I ended the conversation thinking that the heart and the mind are as volatile together as fire and nitroglycerin... when logic goes head-to-head with emotion and everything you've been carefully brought up since birth to BELIEVE in... it's enough to turn the most intellectually gifted savant into a hopelessly mad, drooling vegetable.

Bottom line: I've gained a lot of wholly new-found respect for DR and Simutronics in general in some ways, while in some other ways I've just reaffirmed old sore spots. But most importantly I've come to the realization that on one hand it's never going to be exactly what I want in a game or everything I want in a game... but it will always be in my blood, even if nowadays I am only around now and then. I still would dearly like to sit down for an open, heart-to-heart discussion with a knowledgeable GM regarding some of my remaining issues with the game... but I realize now that just because they might tell me exactly what I need to hear doesn't necessarily mean I'll come running back to my old levels of play, and just because they might tell me exactly what I am afraid of hearing and don't want to hear, doesn't necessarily mean that I'll never be seen or heard from around here again. The fact that, as a game administrator myself, I understand and empathize with the cripplingly huge workload that most GM's labor under, and that for them to find the spare time to sit down and discuss Philosophy 101 with a player is as daunting a task as doing root canal on a cockatoo, notwithstanding and irrelevant. :)

I guess, if you want the short-short version of all this... DR is okay. Simutronics is okay. What more need be said.

--An old ghost who's been in more multi-player online RPG's than many folks can shake a stick at... starting with Island of Kesmai in 1984