Shattered Kingdoms

Why gripe about a builder making secret nerfs to items? Understanding the situation, you should be able to make due with the game's environment or find a new one to enjoy more. Documentation is often considered optional under the pretense of keeping things "IC." After all, it's not like these people have any formal documentation systems to guide their work as builders, such as making guides for areas they build themselves. Now, this thread probably isn't going far, but it's a good place to put some things out there.

In the past we've laughed at misfortune, and I'm afraid we're just going to see people siding along party lines on this one, too. Sometimes it might be better to put aside our own stakes and look at the examples we're setting though.

Niceness isn't required, but it can help. A little bit of good manners can go a long way in trying to communicate a problem. Shouldn't we be trying to act as mature as we want others to be? Heaven forbid anyone spare a little sympathy or something. I mean, for all my talk of the Golden Rule, it is true that we just wind up with a different situation. Regression to the mean of morality makes ambiguous administration environments universally problematic. And that's all I think I want to say to put this in the perspective I think it should be in.

+1 for grep.

A little bit of good manners can go a long way.

If I wanted to sweep this under the rug, I would have also deleted your thread instead of just locking it. The fact that 'other people noticed' is quite likely due to you trolling offsite forums and/or IRC as well.

It's definitely trolling, because of these facts:
a) You used the handle of trollking instead of your much more widely known handle (yes, I know who you are).
b) No, I received zero PMs about this issue until after I locked the topic and then it came from theORplayer.
c) Your confidence doesn't matter, since you could still resort to this kind of tactic if nothing was done.

Here are some additional facts based upon the investigation of the item and person in question after I actually had names and keywords to work with:
a) The character in question has a history of other characters with no connection to any admin.
b) The item in question is supposedly 'brand new', but has actually existed undiscovered since March.
c) The character is supposedly a specific admin based on someone's pasted YIM conversation. But even if it turned out that said character is played by said admin by evading all my security checking, this wouldn't actually be against any currently existing rule. That admin did not create this item.

But since Trollking specifically re-opened this conversation after it was locked, he's getting a forum ban. I specifically won't ban trollking's real handle, but that handle won't get any warnings for further forum infractions (and I will also reveal that it was trollking if at such a time I do have to take action against that handle).

Furthermore, future attempts of anyone to publicly troll the forums in an attempt to cast the staff in a negative light with anything less than ironclad proof of an actual rule being broken will also result in forum bans and possible punishment against in-game characters. But my door is always open to email and PMs. I have punished many admins before and will continue to punish any actual rule-breaking discovered. But I won't tolerate denigration of the efforts of the volunteer staff.