Shattered Kingdoms

I was under the impression that PAR, as an OOC title, wouldn't have -required- IC interaction with the PAR character in order to be valid.

As an example, if I had a PAR and I was playing an alt where I encountered someone who had exceptional roleplay, I would think it perfectly valid to use my reward for that day as PAR for the person, even a medium reward: That should be my discretion.

It's also been a very common practice for other players who were playing PARs to ask me for someone to enlight because they wanted to use their enlight for the day, and I'd recommend someone who they would then enlight off of my recommendation. I've done this myself as well, trusting the word of the player I was asking. I would not have gathered the idea that this was against the rules according to the help file on PAR. It's an OOC title, why should rewards be hamstrung to IC interaction with the IC character?

So what was the rule being violated here? Is it illegal to reward someone you've never interacted with on the PAR character? If that's allowed, is it instead illegal to reward someone you've never met in-game at all, even if it's on the word of one of another player you know and trust? For as long as I can remember, it's been commonplace to reward someone based off of another's recommendation or maybe even off of a log you read on Lord Voldemort's website. I'd think that players of PARs in general would benefit from the answer to this question.

The hypotheticals you describe would be permissible, except for rewarding someone based on a log that you saw posted somewhere. The problem with rewarding someone based on a posted log is that someone might get multiple rewards from paragons who read it at different times and think it's reward-worthy.

Nothing you mentioned happened in this instance. All of those possibilities (and others) were investigated and ruled out. The violation was as stated. The player had minimal interaction with the character that was rewarded and gave a medium reward. Even a small reward would be suspicious when you're talking about a couple of minutes of interaction across the lifetime of the rewarded character and paragon, even if you include all of the paragon's alts, but a medium reward is quite obviously an abuse of the paragon power to give rewards. Paragons are not supposed to hand out rewards at random or for no legitimate reason. As per Rule 9, the player was asked to provide any sort of documentation or reasoning for the reward, and no log or satisfactory reasoning was supplied.

If I may ramble a moment, let me say that I would love to have had any reason to not give a penalty, because I like this player just like I like almost all of the players I've had to penalize, even the ones who have nothing good to say about me, but I don't think the staff or the players want me to just ignore rules violations when I see them or play favorites. It's like being a referee in a soccer game. No player likes getting a yellow card, the coaches and teammates sometimes get furious at a ruling, and fans think the referees are morons and question their judgment, but the game requires a referee to function properly (for now, anyway, until a computer can do it better). All I'm doing is handing out yellow and red cards here, a mandatory task that my job requires, not anything personal. The players are still the stars of the show and should dust themselves off and keep playing.

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like good reasoning, and it's good to know that rewarding someone based on a log isn't proper. Just for clarity, I wasn't trying to start a witch-hunt, in case anyone was curious. I like the player of Gilgi and Thuban both. I just wanted some public clarification on some things I had my own impressions of.

There's no reason that multiple paragons shouldn't be able to give rewards based on a single log. It's akin to magazines and other media giving out awards to things they like that they see.

Most players also do not log their experience or have their buffer log set high enough and would be unable to produce that sort of evidence. Moreover, there is very little reason to hand over a log of your play time especially to the rules manager as you run the risk of that person discovering something in the log that may not be to his/her liking and warrant further snooping.

We have a mechanic in place that prevents someone from being rewarded multiple times per day. If a few paragons read the same log on different days and all think they should reward that player, it undermines this mechanic. The mechanic is in place for multiple reasons, but one is to prevent a person from getting more than one reward for the same event. It's not like magazines and other media handing out awards, because, for instance, there is no mechanic in place that prevents someone from winning an Oscar if they've already gotten a Golden Globe for the same work or that prevents someone from winning a Hugo if they've already won a Nebula for the same piece. If that mechanic didn't exist, you might have a point. If you want to get that mechanic changed, you are welcome to make your case to Dulrik and the rest of the staff. Until then, no rewarding based on logs.


You are right that we do not have protections against "self-incrimination" here, so if you don't want to provide logs for that reason, you have that right. But, if you play Shattered Kingdoms, you do so while accepting all of the rules we have, including Rule 9. If you want to get a rule changed, you are welcome to make arguments to that end in an appropriate thread on this forum. I just enforce them as written, and if they get changed, I'll enforce them in accordance with the changes.

Yeaaaaah. I don't log anything in the game so unless it was a PK you were asking about you'd probably be SOL. I'm sure most players are this way too.

There's 0 reason for that stance. The position of Paragon has always been ooc and subjective to the player who possesses the position. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of why I think the system in its current incarnation sucks, but in a hypothetical situation if 2 paragons are witness to roleplay (physically present when it happens), and want to reward you're taking the stance that you want to punish this sort of thing. Rewards are already worthless, and an adversarial stance toward the system is not the right approach to take given in the 15 or so years that I played this game I saw only 2 instances where paragon was revoked for abuse.



Rule 9 is inherently unfair. It is upon you, as the accuser, to manufacture that proof. There's also 0 reason for players to cooperate with you given that there's no procedure to protect from gleaning extra information from a log that could be used to further punish them. With someone that believes that there can be violations of the golden rule, that's an awful big risk that a player would be taking forwarding a log.