Shattered Kingdoms

Compared with the amount of time a character can be played before age death, the time to reach maximum level is trivial. This is especially true for veteran players who may have leveled 100 grandmasters over the past 20 years. As the game is becoming easier, with some effort to reduce the "grind" inherent in SK, leveling a character to grandmaster may be easier than ever.

I propose that all rules violations that currently result in deletion are instead replaced with removing the player's ability to run multiple characters. Dulrik has established precident for this punishment:

Rather than deletion, the player's character will have the retire command disabled. The most extreme punishment will be to force the player to play only this character until age death (which can be years, so use this with caution). Immortals can also have the option of hitting a character with curses or removing access to certain skills or abilities.

For example, if you are caught using a trick to get a quest reward without roleplaying the act of completing the quest, an appropriate punishment may be the removal of any unduly gained quest rewards, an XP penalty and the disabling of the retire command for 1 month. A harsher penalty could include disabling of cabal abilities, loss of a class spell or a permanent spirit disorientation.

The reason for this change is that deleting a character causes a huge impact on the entire community, especially with low player counts, and the offending player can be back in action the same day and have a new GM char in a cabal and tribunal before the week is over. By forcing the player to stick with the character they decided to break the rules with, we keep the punishment on the rules-breaker and limit the impact on the rest of the community. It also allows in-character punishments to have more teeth when an offending player cannot simply delete and start over with no penalty.

Power-players really enjoy min-maxing to make the optimal character. Instead of deleting, hit them where it hurts: force them to play a gimped character.

Of course, if the staff decides that they really don't want the PLAYER to play the game, a site-ban is still an option.

This is a pretty hilarious idea - do you also plan to chain said problem player to his desk and force them to remain logged on, so your rps aren't interrupted?

I personally think Deletion should be a rare punishment more often than not when people are getting to site ban level of cheating. There has been some very creative punishment in the past. Removing of skills, race change. All these things give a player a chance to redeem themselves. Deletion creates a much more us vs them dynamic. Limited time punishments are better than deletions. Retiring a character for 2 IC years could be a suitable punishment and some will go back for the RP and others will just go off and level up a new character and be done with it. At least then its a player decision to take the "harsher" punishment because they cant be bothered to go back to an old character. A limited item punishment can also be tailored to the crime a lot better than deletion to a vet a deletion is a week if that of play time to a newbie it can be months.

Lets look at a creative punishment for the recent Ardith issue. The ability to wear light armor removed would have been a huge curse that could be undone later if remorse is shown and an RP event for everyone. The reason would have been clear (cheating to get some of the best light armor) the goal of denying the armor gained reached and it could have spawned an interested RP situations into the future (depending in Ardith continued to play the character).

I know the limiting to one character is likely because of on going issues but hopefully my point is clear. The punishment is creative it inspires RP not subtracting from it. It gives players the agency in them taking their ball and going home (deleting) while also giving them the chance to keep playing and display great character in and out of game.