I am not really interested in arguing back and forth in a mess of past experiences. The tone below is rapidly deteriorating in some cases. I'd rather focus on something more positive than the general tone below. So, with that in mind let's try a thought experiment:

You guys are responsible for running and maintaining a game that hinges on original content. Some of that content (a very small fraction) is player driven, and much is driven by volunteer contributors (staff).

You know that a significant portion of the players simply choose to recycle old content. Furthermore, when questioned, the majority of the players plead ignorance, or claim that it is their character. There's nothing to say it isn't their character, but there is nothing to say it is either.

You also know that a proportion of players are almost always going to cut corners, or cheat any system repeatedly, especially when there are not any consequences*. Please keep in mind that you have limited resources, and an extremely hands-on system will create a lot of administrative work.

How would you design a system to tackle this problem**?


*This is evidenced in the other deletions this week. Whereby people genuinely sought to abuse game mechanics for personal advantage.
**And yes, we can argue that this is not a problem, but I would not personally be happy for someone else to get Imm Xp because they copy/pasted a description which I had written.