Shattered Kingdoms

Shattered Kingdoms has long gotten by using the rules helpfile in conjunction with a few public announcements as the basis of punishing players and protecting the integrity of the game. Since the approach taken to rules is no longer enough to both protect the game’s integrity and maintain a healthy interaction between administrators and players, we’ve developed the role of dedicated rules manager.

The rules manager will carry out a few important functions, some of them behind the scenes. At first, and perhaps most importantly, the responsibility of this role will be to collect the varying spread-out iterations of rules and centralize their location both on the forums and on the SK help files. While it always has been and will continue to be the player’s responsibility to follow announcements and update notices, let’s all be real: it can and should be easier to see all the rules in one go. In the future, this responsibility will primarily manifest in the maintenance of these centralized locations. It is also the RM's responsibility to clarify violations and what accounts as a violation, instead of the ethereal definitions like “don’t RP badly.”

This creates a new hierarchy in how to report violations and any steps afterwards. This hierarchy will be detailed and put into help files in the future, but those files won’t be created hastily. They will go through the rigors of every immortal’s scrutiny, and will further be changed as players contribute and point things out: this will take time. I will put some of the basic information here for the sake of general visibility until the new centralized locations are finalized.

Initial Point of Contact for Rules Violations:

1) Abuse of scripts, gear, and rooms will be reported to the relevant kingdom director.
2) Violations involving factions and religions, including skills, spells and poor roleplay: the relevant faction/religion patron.
3) Violations including poor roleplay that involves multiple or no religions/factions, or anything not encompassed by the above outline (such as equipment transfer or multiplaying): rules manager.

Appeals Process:

1) The first point of appeal will be the rules manager. If your case was initially handled to or has already been passed through the rules manager, the next arbiter will be…
2) Dulrik. He is the last and final point of contact for rules violations, and his decisions are final.

This can be simplified further, thanks to the creation of two new email containers:

rules@shatteredkingdoms.org
cheating@shatteredkingdoms.org

Have no fear! If you can't or don't want to figure out who to contact, or are uncertain, these two email containers will go to the rules manager and will be appropriately routed to the first point of contact.

Rules will continue to be enforced as they have been: any assertion of violation will go through the community of administrators and be discussed before a ruling is passed. No individual is both the judge and jury, up to and including the rules manager.

To summarize, the primary points of this new role and the responsibilities it takes on are as follows: to create transparency about enforcement, create and maintain well-defined lines with the rules, and make a clear path of accountability for the visibility of and precedents behind rules. It will also act as the general representative of “rules enforcement,” including on the forums. So if something goes wrong with the rules and how little you like the clarity of a given one, you can now blame the rules manager instead of the immortal community at large.

Obviously, I will be the first whipping boy taking on this role. This was posted in Gameplay to allow for a Q&A regarding this role and anything generally regarding rules. Keep in mind the rules of the Gameplay forum when responding - I don’t think I need to illuminate just how silly it would be to break any rules in the conversation discussing rules enforcement.

Nobody's gonna do it? Okay.

Where do we send the cupcakes and brownies?

Sorry woahboy, but I already got that topped. Chocolate fudge brownies with chocolate icing. With chocolate dipping sauce.

Did I say chocolate enough in the sentence?

Would like to see a breakdown of what is 'multi playing' and what isn't, thanks. Especially considering the new faction/alt policy that would let you have a separate PC in every tribunal at once if you felt like it, and then another one in a cabal.

While I am rewriting and clarifying the rules, these definitions will undoubtedly remain undisturbed at their base (though perhaps clarified if needed when I get to them). I will use your circumstance to base my explanation off of. I will not hide punishments or the details thereof: anyone's communication with me is generally confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise, but how rules are enforced are public domain and will be so long as I have a say in the matter.

Playing multiple characters is a very fine line to walk. Having alts is not illegal and almost certainly will never be illegal, but we have to keep in mind the main concept of having our rules: to ensure that the game remains a fun, fair, and enjoyable place in which to spend time.

I offer that explanation so that I can say that it is frowned upon to use two characters to give yourself an advantage over someone who only has one. We want you to be free to express yourself, offer up varying flavor and atmosphere to the game, and take any role you might wish. We also want you to feel free to bathe in the blood of your enemies, and hear the lamentation of their women. With that in mind, it's not necessarily fair or fun for the people being 'teamed up' on if you use two characters for a similar purpose or use them interchangeably in a competitive fashion.

This is not the only reason multiplay is illegal, but if you think of that as the heart of it - fairness and fun for all involved (including fairness to those dedicated to only one character), you should be able to use common sense to get the rest of the way to why these rules are in place. I don't mean that condescendingly - I know that the reason behind multiplay being illegal is pretty muddled at best, so I'm here to illuminate it.

This means if you use two characters to fight the same faction, that's not inherently multiplay - but you put yourself in an incredibly vulnerable position. If you put in the extra effort to absolutely avoid sharing items between characters (subsection 2 of multiplaying - ANY ITEMS AT ALL - I don't care if it's a purchasable detect invis potion that your other character bought and it ended up on you), and put in the effort to keep the two character knowledge bases completely separate (subsection 3 of multiplaying), then you are walking that line well and have shown reliable in keeping the two characters separate. However, we have to keep in mind that a shared resource pool is the single largest advantage you can get from having multiple characters.

The moment you cross either of those lines and start having items from one character show up on another: you have multiplayed. You have shown that you will align two of your characters competitively against someone else and are unwilling to police yourself in keeping their resource pools separate (and by separate, I mean completely absolutely allergic to items with even the same description that another of your characters has lost in PK). That's when we have to come in and police you.

There are varying degrees of resource pool sharing, context of the situation, and obvious intentional behavior. Because of your given circumstance, instead of deleting both of your characters and starting you from scratch, I (and we as a staff) chose the avenue of deleting one of the shared resource pools and asking you to select the one to keep. It was not an attempt to be punitive or vindictive, and I hope you don't see it as an attempt to drive you from playing. I know going through this may be frustrating, and I'm sorry for that, but I have to look out for the integrity of the game as a whole and use the head-on-a-pike-at-the-front-gates approach with those I catch. I hope this is clear and concise for you, and diminishes the uncertainty and some of the frustration that comes with going through a character deletion.

Something else I'd like to kind of put up as writing on the wall: this resource pool can also be a knowledge resource pool. The "recent" code update that gave us behind the scenes tools to hunt people will be getting fully flexed, and this includes (yet is not limited to) people who feel compelled to have a 'locate object' character and then retrieve items with another main character. These characters will be among the next ones you see up on the list.

Thank you for the response. And it's fine, as long as I can expect this to be applied game-wide going forward. This is hardly the first time somebody's lost something on one char and gotten it back on another through actual rp'd conflict, it is however the first time I've ever heard of the circumstances getting a multiplay slap.

This does create an awkward spot, I think. Where, and I will use my own circumstance as an example..

If you play a lightie and a greybie, with the lightie being at war with darkies. When the darkies pick a fight with your greybie, you suddenly have to watch out for getting accused of multiplaying and use kid gloves in conflict they started and you have been rp'ing actively trying to end? Seems a little silly and easily abused, but as long as it's going to get applied everywhere.

Countdown until punishments start popping up for baiting people into mp'ing.

A quick preface, and let me be clear about why woahboy was punished: it was the transfer of items, not the sharing of PK targets between characters.The reports of woahboy 'conveniently' starting to PK the given faction with Dakken when Katlia was killed was summarily and cleanly dismissed and proven untrue. Using an alt for revenge is also multiplay, but this is not the case here with woahboy.

As far as I am empowered to and have hard proof, the rules will be applied like this. This was an issue for a very long time, and a few prominent cases were slapped for multiplay - but they are ancient, before time was time, when the staff had hard-nosed rule enforcers. Only really recently, unfortunately, were the tools in place to effectively and easily enforce it.

This is the problem with having two characters, however: the onus is really on you as the person with two characters to separate the resource pools. If you can be that easily baited into it, then it might not be best to have them both in the positions they're in. If it comes to pass that that's the case, it'll end up like this situation did: I'll only ask you to pick which resource pool you want, and take the other one away. We won't severely try to wreck you or treat you like a trashy criminal for it. I only do that with people who won't stop being brats - we're all adults here, and we can act like it.

My personal suggestion is indiscriminately junk-loot the people who try to bait you, but that's just me as a player. There's no risk of multiplaying, so long as you don't fetch something you junked on another character (within reason), and yet the kid gloves are effectively off. Your mileage may vary.

Thanks for the replies, see you in game.

Removing dual membership would cause this to be less of an issue and also cause a lot less of the character hopping we are seeing currently. Another conversation for another thread.

Regardless, it's nice to see this stuff in writing. Good work.

So this is just my opinion but, throughout the past 2 years, SK has been getting stricter and stricter with rules, and I've been feeling more and more paranoid about crossing this line or breaking that rule unintentionally. I'm not saying rules are bad, I'm saying that there is such a thing as too many rules.

The horde code. Its a great addition all in all and it really helps keep those playing enjoy the game more, but at the same time it creates silly situations such as: Game crashes while your eq is in your hands. Someone gives you a bunch of stuff you didn't notice and you log out. You forgot to wear XYZ gear you took off for whatever reason.

Multiplay. I've never played more than 1 character at a time in MuD's and yeah I do feel where these rules are coming from, but I think a much better chance to police this sort of behavior is to allow only 1 character in a faction. Playing a cabal + tribunal char is fine, but if you play 1 cabal char, and 1 tribunal char, you are going to start being scared of your own shadow.

TLDR: I'm starting to think more about the rules and their OOC impact than about playing the game lately. That can't be good.

Suggestions:
-Re-examine the rules and see if the same game concepts can't be protected with less draconian measures. For example instead of outright deleting characters because 1 or 2 insignificant items seem to have moved from 1 char to another, put said characters on freeze for a while with a warning.

-GIve IC repercussions for certain types of rules breakage. Esp. the golden rule. For example, X pk's Y without RP reason, such as X has a piece of gear Y wants. A certain group of NPC vigillantes might take note of X's actions and attack him at some point. Or, a friendlier group of npcs might approach Y and help him recover. Things that engage people and add to their experience of the game instead of nothing being done any direction, or just outright OOC helling and penalties.

-Reward people who put extra effort to observe the rules. I'm not saying you should say 'Hey, congratulations! You didn't go to jail this year! I'm so proud of you son!', following the rules should be expected, but since some times, since imms are not omiscient, someone will get away with cheating while another guy will get the full punishment for a lesser 'crime', having a carrot on a stick for people who show long term following of rules might steer people in the right direction.