Honestly, I wouldn't call it a conspiracy like you're implying, particularly given how long ago these other trips were. Rather, I would chalk it up to changing priorities in rule enforcement. In fact I don't imagine they would let trips like I described happen now days.

What I'm saying is, I think that's a mistake, at least to some extent. It's not a good idea to work against the trends in gaming. Every MMO out there requires OOC coordination for the big events. I've never played WoW, but I know you have to coordinate to do the big raids. I did play a lot of Eve, and the scale of out-of-game coordination is enormous. Of course CF is a different game from those, and I don't think it would be good for CF to even try to be them. But the important thing is the trend that comes with those sorts of games; namely, that gamers virtually always coordinate big events OOC. And gamers are who we want to attract to CF, right? So it doesn't make sense to tighten our controls on OOC interactions while the entire community is trending the opposite direction. Not if we want to gain more players anyway.

There's another thing I would have to be cautious about in the specifics of this case. If there's one thing I learned in my years as an imm, it's that there's virtually always information the imms don't divulge in public complaints like this, even though it might better collaborate their side of the story. So to be honest my post wasn't so much meant to be "what they did to you was wrong", because I have no idea what went on. It's more to point out that a general policy that cracks down harder on OOC connections than it has in the past is a bad idea.

Aarn