Yes. Of course. The problem is that on some level, people expect some level of fairness, fairness here being defined as similarly situated people being treated similarly, and dis-similarly situated people being treat dis-similarly.

Nobody (or nobody rational, and I'll accept that some on the edge will claim to be within that bound when they are not) is suggesting that only with some bright line, line in the sand, by-the-numbers procedure should there be some action taken toward a character. It will always reflect some level of judgment.

What people - or maybe just me - are suggesting though is that some number of times (more than once, enough to raise it as an issue and be worthy of comment and change) something like a title for level sitting has happened that is just beyond what someone should expect, given past or near-future (hindsight) staff behavior. I was a good case in point. When I complained about my negative title, I was told by Zulgh that yeah, it wasn't so bad compared to a lot of others who went title-less before, but that they (the staff) were now going to crack down on it, intimating that some policy change had happened and collectively (again, within some bound of judgment) the staff was going to dis-incentivise level sitting with titles like mine.

I was still bitter, of course, but am capable of understanding that any change has to start somewhere, and so I went along. As we all know, that change never actually happened. So, when actions are taken like this - or not, in the case of Vargraye - people get upset because it just seems so randomly and inconsistently applied.

Resolution? Maybe you really should have some guidelines. Not rules, guidelines. And yes, I think you need more guidelines for giving punishment than for giving rewards - it's a game, people are here to have fun, being more liberal with nice things than with mean things is an ok situation. And I know you do have such guidelines for negative actions to a character. In this regard, if you want to slap a negative title on someone for level sitting, consider who else has stayed at a level for a long time recently. Is this person really different? Are they getting your negative attention for some other reason? What is the real number? Level sitting for 30 hours enough? 60? 100? What are they doing with the time?

I'm sure some of these and other considerations go through your mind, but perhaps not everyone's on the staff, and perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if they really focused on the comparison to the rest of the playerbase in the last six months. It's a small playerbase. There is a LOT of institutional memory. People will notice and immediately know if someone is getting hit when the past 7 guys who did the same thing did not. And that's what causes problems.

Greater consistency is the key. In my opinion. Maybe not so easy, but there you have it.