Mon Jul 7 11:18:04 2014

At 8 o'clock PM, Day of the Bull, 1st of the Month of Winter
on the Theran calendar Grumholt perished, never to return.

Race:	fire
Class:	anti-paladin
Level:	36
Alignment:	Evil
Ethos:	Orderly
Cabal:	None, None
Age:	160
Hours:	77

.

~

Cause unlike what Ghulrat says, what we did was in no way shape or form shady, it was against Imperial Law sure, but not against the game rules in any way. Yet I get -1000 Imm exp like I got caught cheating or something. Imperials are "evil", they do not always follow the law, anyone who has ever played this MUD has seen an Imperial break Imperial law at one point or another.

In short I could have dealt with the demotion, though I think going from Magician to Oath was a bit extreme even then, especially considering no Imperial had any idea what we had done, it was some Imm in omnipotent land deciding to crack the whip just because they can.

I probably would have hit you both with anathema instead of demotions to bloodoath had I been on when this occurred. Yes, its not 'cheating' but it is incredibly awful Imperial RP and that is why you were punished for it.

How is it any more horrible Imperial RP than Imperials attacking unprovoked within the protected cities, which happens ALL the time. Still against Imperial Law, yet you don't see the Imm's stepping in to enforce that. Grumholt was an evil bastard, he joined the Empire for power, not because he was all about being a law abiding citizen, and what happened was well within "Hey, I am a greedy power hungry bastard" RP.

Just saying if the Imms are going to enforce this stuff in such a manner, it should certainly be across the board. So the next time one of my Forties gets jumped in Galadon and I pray it up, that should be an Anathema correct? Or how about the next time two or more Berserkers pile onto someone, can we get some Huts burned? We all know how often that happens with out any Imm intervention to put a stop to it.

Grumholt was being evil and devious in trying to gain a more powerful weapon, yet that's bad RP for some reason? Also what happened to just being evil at all, I cant do deceptive evil stuff without the Imm's taking my fun stick and jamming it where the sun doesn't shine?

You can certainly act as Evil as you want. You just probably don't have a spot for it in Empire if you can't do it within Imperial law.

Most breeches of Imperial law that occur where attacks a valid imperial enemy in town without being hit first do get punished. I am not going to say that all of them do, but the large majority of them do. But yes, when those occur certainly do pray about it. But I would suggest making it an IC thing, not an OOC thing when you do.

The reason that breaking the law re: attacking other citizens is a bigger deal to Destuvius(the char not the player) is that it undermines the foundation of the whole Empire. Personally I hate it because it is almost never done with a real RP purpose. If you want have a real RP purpose for it, chances are you will get a blood reckoning anyways.

I just returned to the game after a really really long break, but if your trying to say that Imperials attacking unprovoked in protected cities gets punished, gonna have to beg to differ. You can probably go back far enough to read the note about Grumholt killing an elf invoker in Galadon, no punishment, yeah.

I am seriously not trying to be an ass here, but have to call them like I see them, and it just seems to be very very selective as to what gets enforced and what doesn't. Just go read a few Battlerager PBF's and look at all the comments about parity issues, the Imm's see these guys ganging people down, and they make a neg comment in the PBF, they do not however kick them out of the Cabal, which is effectively what happened to me plus a nice -1000 Imm exp.

Also saying that there is no room in Empire for someone who doesn't toe the Emprical line absolutely is kinda funny, having played the game for 10+ years I can tell you that some of the most prominent Imperials of all times chose when and where to step over that line.
My paladin fought Emperor Ahtieli in every protected city in the game, to the point that Baer called me down on it since I was getting wanted so much. This was her attacking me as well as me attacking her first in the cities, so she would strike provoked or unprovoked. And I remember when I asked the lich about it once, "I am Imperial Law" was the response. This is how I see Empire personally, yeah they have Laws and tend to obey them, until the time comes not to obey them, and that's where the evil part comes in.

You can try to reference whatever examples you want about battle ragers or former Emperors. The situation we are talking about right here involves your char who was within the last month and the Empire that is occurring currently.

If the Emperor wants to go nuts and start playing around with how Imperial law is enforced, that's fine. Its the Emperor's prerogative. You however were not Emperor and never received the blessings of anyone to start breaking the imperial law.

I will add one last thing though: I do agree with you that the loss of xp was unnecessary for just breaking Imperial law unless you threw up an angry pray about it afterwards or something.

Not sure how its irrelevant, if its a rule its a rule right? If I get kicked out of a Cabal for breaking their rules, shouldn't everyone who breaks the rules get kicked out? That makes it relevant. As for the -1000 Imm exp, that came first, then the demotion.

Anyway I am not gonna argue the point any further since I learned long ago what a waste of time that is on this MUD, its your game, run it how you choose, all I can do is decide if I want to invest my time or not.

I wouldn't have felt quite so dirty if I thought the transgression was viewed entirely IC, with entirely IC consequences. I RP'd remorse about breaking imperial law but my personally worry was more that I'd be dismissed as a cheat henceforth, which is what having negative immxp on your scoresheet implies.

I've had people take dives for me in order to earn charges before, i.e. 'let me kill you and I'll give you a sleek for the archmage so you can learn detect artifact', or 'let me kill you and I'll be at fire control and then we can go and rank up', or 'let me kill you and I'll hand you some gear', but I've never taken a dive before myself. I don't think it was a big deal doing it once, we got 2 and 3 charges out of it respectively, but it's easy to see how two antipaladins could abuse it to trade con for charges without really "earning" them, which is why I did suspect it was a little shady of us and wasn't that pissed when an imm came and gave us a slap for it.

Anyway. It wasn't you (Destuvius) who carried out the punishment, it was Ysaloerye, so any relevant feedback would need to come from there.

And anti-paladins have done exactly that in the past, more than once myself personally, that's why I was so angry about this time. Because basically I broke an IC Imperial Law, and was punished like I got caught cheating or something. It is not against game rules to take a dive for an A-P, even if your an A-P yourself, I can recall one stint where another A-P and I exchanged charges several times in fact.

All that being said, I know I broke Imperial Law, but Imperial Law gets broken ALOT, and it isn't typically enforced from the heavens but by the PC leadership of the cabal. That's the gripe, if the Imm's who can see everything chose to punish Grumholt that harshly for simply breaking Imperial Law, then why arnt all the other people who break Cabal rules punished as harshly from Imm land.

but it's easy to see how two antipaladins could abuse it to trade con for charges without really "earning" them, which is why I did suspect it was a little shady of us and wasn't that pissed when an imm came and gave us a slap for it.

Yes, it is shady. Shady enough that we may wish to make adjustments to Unholy Blessing.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Seriously. It's hard enough to get charges as it is. There hasn't been a guy with 50 charges in a single weapon as long as I've been playing and while 20-30 charges is nice to have it's not game changing. Given the fact that one single instance of charges for CON was picked up on immediately I can't imagine that anyone would be able to get a serious/game changing weapon doing this without someone noticing. I certainly won't be doing it again. I'm having difficulty imagining how extra coding would prevent it without cheating people who earn all their charges entirely above board. And they really are EARNED.

You don't have to be that great to get a lot of charges and I wouldn't be too disappointed if they got harder to get generally.

I mean, had about 45 in Kuul's whip, and I deleted with my whip because I was bored of my a-p experiment. So I don't think the jump from 45 to 50 would have been that extreme.

If you don't even want to count Kuul because I got two charges for killing myself and got to redo the level 36 range so I could try out d-elf a-p before I deleted, I still had over 30 on Rolfswinar and didn't find it particularly difficult to do, and I was running around with an unholy practice sword at the end there.

Getting an a-p rolling is more about meaningful risk-assessment than any amazing talent or skill.

The only person that had a real opportunity at taking my unholy was serra (who was super cool), so I mean, somebody either a little better than me or, more likely, a lot less lazy (always flying when deathblow assasins are on say) ought to be able to get 50 like it's nothing.

It doesn't happen much because it's just not that interesting, not because it's ridiculously hard.

I've had a weapon with 30 charges in it before.

Kuul sucked, you straight up cheated. Rolfswinar sucked (and was terribly RP'd - one law means sacrificing my life for some dwarf I just met doesn't it?), you literally just stood still spamming sleep and fleeing. I could have walked right by you any time and you probably wouldn't have even noticed. You had Ogrot slept half a dozen times as Kuul and still couldn't seal the kill. I have to suspect that Rolf did some shady stuff or some serious selective logins because you sure as hell had no idea what you were doing with him.

Your given reason for deleting Kuul was a lack of targets. There are less targets now than when he was about. You managed to use a combination of cheating and fair weather play/"meaningful risk-assessment" to get past your one-trick pony suckitude.

People go for not-that-interesting. It's why there are tons of nexus gnome shifters and warriors. Not everybody by any means but a significant chunk of people want to have the strongest character possible.

I saw somewhere that that 80/20 rule applies to PK scores in computer games; 20% of the people doing 80% of the killing. If you're going one win for one loss you're probably already way above the median. If you're going twenty wins for one loss you're probably among the best of them but when most kills are a charge apiece you're still not going to make a 50 charge weapon that way.

We can at least agree that Serra was cool.

When I deleted Kuul (I haven't played since then despite trying to get into it) I said it was a combination of few players and the few remaining players being so conservative as people that it disgusted me, not because it made getting charges harder. That's more a matter of taste than anything to do with a-ps.

Fair weather play is obviously why I kept going up against Serra and rbws though, right? What's funny to me about this is, just going by matchup, Ogrot should have been even more dangerous to square off with and yet I never felt at risk in that uphill battle.

Anyway, if I'm as bad as you say I am and still breezed through the building phase, then it must not be very hard.

Kuul had nearly 50 charges and easy barrier. That should not have been an uphill battle. You had me dead to rights many times but failed to capitalize. I knew you'd never pull your finger out of your ass and actually take my advice and seal the kill. Oh, and bloodlust improving defenses? Confirmed by Daevryn on the newbie board a while back.

You were clearly doing something right, but all I ever saw from you was sleep/flee. I can only conclude that what you were doing right was being incredibly conservative yourself.

Or maybe you actually do have more than one tactic and were just too ####scared of my characters to do anything else.

A lot of the time we (I use the term very broadly) can't tell that we're knocking down the walls in your very nice maze... It's hard enough to figure out where the secret doors you put in on purpose are.

Gosh, I just can't tell if my obvious gaming of the system is considered cheating!

At what point am I gaming the game too hard? How do I game games? Can you game my game for me? Please?

There used to be a time when convincing someone to go/come to their death via roleplay would get you rewarded. This case obviously isn't that, but I don't know all the details as I wasn't involved.

The point of my post is that I would rather not see being a sneaky, deceptive or preachy AP not be possible. If I can convince someone to sacrifice themselves to me through roleplay, that should be legitimate.

I just hope whatever change to Unholy Blessing is made, it only negates the possibility of cabalmates sacrificing themselves to eachothers weapons or whatever situation is too risk free... For example you're Dread Lord, and you have someone you can order around in your range. Ordering them to feed your weapon probably shouldn't be legitimate.

He got a quest form for getting people to suicide!

As for some future change to rules/code, I am not a mind reader, as it stands right now there is not a single rule nor line of code that says A-P's cant do exactly what we did. And exactly what A-P's have done for at least the last decade since I started playing. So, if somethings not against the rules and theres no code to get around to do it, how is it in any way "shady".

I'm glad that you've reached that conclusion.

It's basically a recipe for abuse if allowed. It's also a tacit admission of failure (to gather the charges from enemies).

I can see why it could be tempting, but I think it right that the imms stamp it out when they see it.

I mostly went along with it because I had nothing else to do.

Yeah I laid down the sanctions. I saw it going down, it was discussed by several online Imms, as I'm not an Empire imm and normally I won't sanction other cabal members for doing shady stuff, but just history it and note the patron imm. The consensus was that it was pretty crap for RP for two Imperials (lets throw the Codex out the window for now), for two AP's (souls are power, here have some of mine!) so the penalty was what the group thought reasonable. Not Character ending, but significant enough to make the point that it was major cheese. Dest when I gave him the background, as he mentioned above, said he would have dropped the Anathema hammer.

One char rolled with it and was back up to sect very quickly, though I know he got bumped down and tasked with some other things to get back on track. The other threw a minor hissyfit and deleted. To say -1kimmp is character ending is complete overreaction, RPing your way back and some decent role entries would have garnered that back easily. It just seemed that despite the fact you BOTH knew you were doing something that if you were caught you would get punished for, by either the Dreadlord, or Emperor, or High Priest, you got upset. You rolled the dice and it came up snake-eyes. It was done in an RP way and with appropriate punishment, nothing that 'ruined' your characters. If we had thought it out and out cheating it would have been handled very differently.

As one of the two guys. I did go on to delete later, but for different reasons. In fact, I wasn't even upset. I hope I haven't been giving off the impression that I was/am, or that I think it ruined my character.

Being made to level an A-P to 40 with no charges simply in order to get promoted past Bloodoath didn't ruin your character? I understand not wanting to piss the Imm's off, but it certainly adversely affected your character, even if I wont go so far as to say ruined.
And I interacted with you on another char after this happened, you were certainly a different guy sitting at 40 with no charges than you were at 36 steamrolling.

The imms had nothing to do with it. I could just as well have told him to stick it and rebuilt off the Imperials making up the majority of my range.

Personally I find it highly amusing that it was you that laid it on so hard, since the Cabal your supposed to police is the worst case scenario of selective application of the rules in the game. How many Villagers have negative Imm comments about ganging in their PBF's (Jerrokrar anyone) yet somehow they remain in the Village ganging down noobs and hell even getting leaderized.

And your right, I knew if anyone IN the Empire found out about what I did I would be punished for it, but guess what no one IN the Empire had any idea I had broken Imperial Law. This is my whole argument in a nutshell, yes I broke the IC rules of my Cabal, but I was punished OOC'ly by some random Imm who just happened to be snooping. And while this is fine if that's your stance, how do you justify then not doing the same with the myriad other situations that arise of Cabal's doing things not exactly within their dogma. Anyone gonna sit here and argue that Forties don't kill neutral mobs for gear/rods etc? That's the point and I know its a huge waste of time to even continue talking about it, so this is my last post.

YOU did something shady. You knew it was shady. Everyone knew it was on the dirty, and has a little whiff of abuse of game mechanics to me.

If someone ELSE is doing something dirty and doesn't get busted, that doesn't make what you did acceptable. Squealing about getting punished for it just looks like a temper tantrum.

If you would just play the game and not use every available angle to advantagize your character, you'd see that it's a good game and things don't have to be this way.

I suck at this game and love the #### out of it. That sounded oddly gay.

Being punished by a NPC (e.g., an inner guardian) is not being "punished OOC'ly by some random Imm". Get right with that fact here and now and your CF experience will be much easier.

A couple points:

1) It has always been allowed for people to role play dirty Tribunal or otherwise bad cabal members, deliberately kill racial kin (in cases one shouldn't), etc. The flip side is that the staff is more than welcome to get involved in that IC narrative as well and act as the DM of sorts and play back at you. That is RP and its why there is almost always some IC encounter in between the questionable behavior and any real punishment. We try to approach things like that in a way that keeps in fun for everyone, especially when the person is obviously making an effort to integrate this behavior into their role. If you go into CF with the expectation that the staff is only here to effect RP when you want it and will put on blinders when you don't, you're going to have a bad time.

2) I was one of the Immortals that Ysal mentioned being part of a larger dialog. It was pretty unanimous that what you were doing reeked of OOC power-gaming (you were discussing hard numbers and game mechanics in a very casual, player-to-player tone) and were not really backing it up with any substantial RP. That is largely what led to someone not only responding appropriately IC as far as the Empire stuff was concerned but with the negative XP as well.

lmao, getting -1000 Imm xp and demoted to Oath, then having some Inner say one sentence, and I quote "I don't need idiots in my sect" was an appropriate IC response? I will also say your either lying or just being extremely vague about the supposed OOC power gaming, because it was pretty much a discussion about how many charges we were getting per foe, and how many charges we thought we would each be worth considering how many kills/deaths each character had, all of which is readily discussable in an IC manner.

BUT all that being said, its fine, you guys are right, you never do wrong, every decision the Imms make here are divinely inspired and there isn't even a whiff of favoritism or selective application of the rules. Just call me recently re-retired and we can all agree on something at least.

Trading charges for con was a dumb move.

Removing 1000 IMMxp was a dumb move.

This is really a break even.

I wouldn't re-retire, I'd just take a second to reflect on what it's like to see two characters wantingly kill each other like this(AP or not AP) and see if you as a game administrator wouldn't have done the same thing. As against as I am about the negative IMMexp, I'm really convinced I would have done the same exact thing(though harsh and wrong) just because something about two AP's killing each other(or two any players killing each other just because) seems OOC to me too. I would have regretted it and tossed you a bone a day later, but well we are all human and you should have figured out a way to(no sarcasm intended here) play on and get forceduel.

2 AP's purposely charging each others weapons. C'mon man!!

There were several thing said by the Warlock, which was pretty funny since he sounded like Ysal at the time.
So LYAO all you want. If you hadn't put yourself in the position, there would have been nothing to discuss here. For you to send the prays up you did and then promptly delete just seemed a very juvenile reaction. Several imms spent time discussing this back and forth to agree on an appropriate sanction, both from an RP side and a game mechanics side, since those were what we saw as the aspects you were engaging in infractions.

Also you pointing out the the village is the worst offender just smacks of redirection from the actual topic of what you did.
I have lost count of the people I have dinged for shady things in the village, and I go out of my way to do it in a manner that is somewhat engaging and completely reversible if their willing to put some work in.

With that I am pretty much done with this topic.

On my ap Victoria you can see an imm comment about handling someone's suicidak stupidity well. That's because I refused to let then feed my weapon by saying their wily was unworthy of it if they gave their life so cheaply.

Also it is a myth that you have to have controls to play an ap. That same ap went into hero range with no controls. As have a couple of others of mine.

This is one thing where I will say I agree and don't see a middle ground.

I get the impression we might not see eye to eye if it were a shadow who assassinated another imperial without being seen. But I don't think blacks should ever have any business pulling that sort of deal so directly.

But quiet breaches of imperial law should be treated as the same as normal yes. Killing each other without a blood reckoning (which is clearly put there to facilitate a situation where you can kill each other) isn't really a reasonable gray area regardless of your interpretation of what Empire should be, I think.

My range was nothing but Imperials. Niji understood this.

Ghulrat on the other hand didn't want to be anathema'd and I went with his preference over mine.

Same here, and as I said I could have even dealt with the demotion thing, even if I felt getting put all the way down to an Oath was a bit harsh. It was the -1000 Imm XP that pushed me over the edge and made me delete.

Grumholt made a conscious decision to break Imperial Law, he then RP'ed with Ghulrat and convinced him to go along with it, even though Ghulrat didn't want to at first. To me this was just being a devious evil guy, breaking Imperial Law for gain, which Imperials do at the drop of a hat every day. Now, had it played out that someone found out about in IC and it was RP'ed out for Grumholt to be punished in some manner I could have rolled with the punches. The massive punishment coming from Imm land was uncalled for in my opinion, and if it was called for and that's your stance, then there are tons of other situations where the same should be done but never is. That's all I am saying.