arathaine

Weird this never affected my inbox, but I use thunderbird for my mail client, I haven't signed into my hotmail account directly in years.

That is your opinion and you are welcome to it... this is the comments section after all, that is what it is for. On that same note that was my opinion and I am entitled to it for the same reasons, if you don't like the length of my comment don't read all of it.

You will notice that I did not pick apart any individual sentences or parts of the article. That is because I felt the article as a whole had a negative tone. It would be good writing if it was supposed to be an opinion piece. I didn't feel that the article should have represented any opinion of the winners or how they won.

Um, please look up the terms Readers Choice somewhere online, it basically means public opinion OR popularity contest. by allowing their public to vote they turned this into a popularity contest. How are you people not getting this?

Ok, let me make myself perfectly clear on this. My problem is not with the results of the Readers Choice awards, I think they speak for themselves. It's not with the opinions of the readers of the article, that's why you have a section at the end for comments. I don't have any qualms with the staff opinions, I even agree with some of them if not most. I am not even slightly upset with the possibility of cheating by some of the voters, it's good to expose weaknesses in a system that reflects public opinion.

What I have a (gigantic, Massive, huge... please choose one) problem with is the negative tone of the article towards Runes of Magic and its players for stepping up and "letting their voices be heard". Any issues with the choices should NOT have been addressed in this article. This is in effect an awards ceremony; a celebration of the winners. Do they do this in other award settings? I don't think MTV writers are going to have their presenters making negative comments about their awards committee choosing K-Fed, regardless of how little he might deserve Best New Artist, Single of the Year or whatever award you want to throw in here. Sure he may not even qualify for some of those awards, but if the vote is in his favor and a good system of checks and balances was not implemented by the people that make up the rules, then you need to suck it up and congratulate Kevin on his win. This being a public opinion poll, I believe that is even more imperative in this case.

There are many ways you could have handled the issues with the results, and I believe this very negative article was the absolute worst one you could have chosen. You definately should have made the staff awards a separate article entirely. If any cheating was involved you should have found a way to prevent it and let your readers vote again. Frogster took your "Readers Choice" awards seriously and now you are going to slap them and their playerbase in the face for it. Now that is good journalism!

I have to say that up until this point Massively was my favorite MMO news source, but this incident has made me feel like Massively as a site could care less about the opinion of its average readers and is only interested in satisfying the vocal minority. This is a Massive disappointment for me as a (former) regular reader.

I think I should also make it perfectly clear that I did not participate in the Readers Choice awards and if I had I would not have voted for RoM, so that does not impact feelings or opinions on this matter.

Wow, I think you have some nerve calling this a "Readers Choice" Award after this. It would seem to me that the readers spoke up and made their choice, and now you are slapping them down for it. If you host a "popularity contest" (which is what any system of voting is), you just sound like an idiot when you complain about the results. I didn't even vote in this, but I am feeling betrayed by the staff of Massively for publishing the results in this opinionated manner. Sure, Frogster may have skewed the results a bit with their tactics, but their players (ie, your READERS) chose to come here and vote. Now you are telling all of those people that their opinion does not matter! Readers Choice my a**!!

Now THIS is a contest!