From any objective standard, this character was a big success. Emperor and one of the most PK successful characters of their time.

The thing to me that's a little sad to me is that, watching the reactions of people Mel killed, what they seemed to get out of the experience was not "I just got beat by one of the toughest characters in the game" but more "I got killed, the Emperor looted a bunch of my things, and then told really bad, transparent lies about it."

To me, stereotypically, the Emperor should be more the kind of guy who takes your #### and is all "Yeah, I took your ####. I'm tougher than you and my Empire's going to keep whipping you. What are you going to do about it?", and I just couldn't find anything in this character's role that explained to me the strange combination of random kleptomania and obvious lies. That'd have been a hell of an original idea and perhaps a kind of parody of the super-touchiness about looting we often see now if I was sure it was on purpose but as-is it was just really puzzling to me. I got the impression that most of the people on the receiving end (I didn't personally interact with this character) had the same puzzlement.