I only made it down to Satan once, but that trip included me, Macheath, Zulg, Nep, Gareth, Gareth's real-life friend, and a few non-imm but better-known players. Granted this was years ago, but the standards were pretty similar then, I thought. And to top it all off, Gareth (who was leading the group with his Emperor character) sacrificed another Imperial instead of either me or Nep, even though me and Nep were the only two non-Imperials in the group.

I can hardly attest to what may have gone on with this current event, and maybe there was more involved that isn't public (which is understandable), but I have a really hard time believing that the standard is now denials for OOC coordination of Hell groups. In the aforementioned trip of mine, it was obviously known what players were in the group, because Scarab came down and had a pit fiend chase us around the seventh. That seems like a far more fitting response to a group you suspect of too much overt OOC coordination than handing out a bunch of denials to otherwise good characters.

Also, really cracking the whip hard on OOC coordination seems like possibly the worst marketing strategy ever. People like to play with their friends. And for that matter, I bet the percentage of veteran players who know each other OOC now, but strictly through the game, is huge. When CF started up in the 90's, OOC coordination virtually always meant you were sitting in a computer lab next to your groupmates. Now days, with the ease and prevalence of IM, and the growth of MMOs, we're not going to attract players at all by being MORE strict on OOC connections than we were a decade or more ago, when it was so much less common.

Calling this cheating and busting those involved with the heavy hammer of denial seems like a really unfortunate standard to set.

Aarn