Shattered Kingdoms

The penalize command is available to administrators and is used to punish characters for breaking the rules, poor role play or just bad behavior in general. Prior to this update, the smallest penalty would dock you 1/5 of a level while the largest penalty would dock you a full level. Your RPScore, which helps to determine whether or not you are eligible to be a Paragon, would also decrease by a small amount.

The problem is that we've noticed that the penalties are too small to be an effective deterrent, particularly to the hardcore veterans who (as a group) tend to cheat the most but also best know how to level and "work" the Paragon system. Accordingly we've upped the potential punishment from the penalize command. The smallest penalty is now one-half level while the largest penalty would dock you a full status (five levels). Your RPScore will be docked only slightly more at low penalties, but extremely docked at higher penalties. You will also instantly lose your Paragon status if you are hit by a large penalty.

Penalties are not given out often, although we should probably give them out more if we want to deter the above kinds of behavior. Regardless, we are still going to be very careful about their use. However, I wanted to make this announcement to put people on notice. If you do cheat or behave badly from now on, you are most certainly going to face a penalty that is much more difficult to recover from than before.

TL;DR: Behave, don't cheat and role-play your character to avoid new bigger penalties from the staff.

My response from another thread reposted here for easy reference:

I doubt it would have mattered, but the original announcement had a typo. The smallest penalty is now one-half level not one level. Regardless, the middle stages are all one level or higher and the top end really is five levels instead of formerly a single level.

Despite how it might have been 10 years ago, immortals can only penalize a person once per day, which is one of the reasons why the higher penalties were necessary. It's better for an admin to just get the punishment over as quickly as possible rather than having to hunt you down in subsequent days for another round.

If people are worried that this might screw them, then my first reaction is: Mission Accomplished! Don't do the crime and you won't have to do any time, so the size of the penalty is irrelevant unless you are one of those people who like to cheat, behave badly or blatantly violate the bounds of your character's racial/faction/alignment role-play.

Nobody gets a curse just for having a bad description, no matter how dumb it is. You always get a request to change it, and if you don't do it immediately, you get dragged to a non-escapable room to help you focus on writing it up. If a player got a penalty during this process, it is invariably because the player started cursing at the admin trying to enforce the rules or causing some other ruckus, both of which come under the heading of "behaving badly".

If you fly off the handle at the first sign that you aren't going to get your own way, then maybe you should be concerned. But the solution to that is to curb your own behavior or else suffer the consequences.

I'm tired of having abuse heaped on administrators who are just trying to enforce the rules when the real problem is that a player has anger management issues. It's also not fair to all the players that manage to play without causing problems that 90% of all available administration time is spent dealing with the same handful of problem players month after month.

As always, if you feel you have been treated unfairly, DO NOT throw a fit. Escalate the issue to other imms such as Achernar, Viltrax and myself. DO NOT expect an immediate reply.

Here's my process: At the very least, I will always read your complaint. I will then (90% of the time) relay your complaint to the admin email list for discussion. Resolving this discussion may take several days. When there is a resolution, if it was favorable to you, then an admin (not necessarily myself) will respond to you at the next available opportunity. If it wasn't favorable to you, you may not ever hear a response.

Regardless of what happens, move on with playing the game. Or quit. Although to quote the ruthless PK segment on the forums, if you can't HTFU, take your punishment and learn from it, maybe you weren't playing the right game to begin with.

One of the best things about SK is that it draws in all types and creates a very diverse environment, but if you are going to constantly cause problems and monopolize the time of the staff, then I'd rather you moved on. Hopefully bigger punishments will help people realize which of those two things they need to do, instead of continuing to cause more problems.