>Now let us add something constructive. Remove empowerment
>from the game or make it automatic.
>
>No.

You've broken my heart.

>It's quality control on priests. We want the personal touch.
>Automated quests don't measure roleplay.

Automated quests supposed to urge a person to know basic stuff, their roleplay should be estimated during their life. 10 minutes of an empowerment interview at 5th rank isn't enough to measure roleplay anyway. Insert any different approach without involing a certain imm to be online at a certain time instead of "automated quests", it is just an example.

I understand what you want, but you can see many flaws in the current system. I agree that would be much better to have personal touch over every priest. It is obvious. However it is also obvious that on practice this scheme doesn't work well. Immortals can't cover playing times of all players, even more, many immortals are inactive ( or become inactive in certain periods ). It's life. Moreover, I don't see average quality of priests at hero level being much higher compared with other characters. Stupid characters usually die and delete at middle ranks. I believe there should found a compromise. I know many examples when people ( with quality roles and serious intentions ) just give up on empowerment and I don't think that ignoring this problem is good. Often, many ot them choose one immortal over another just because they don't have a hope to catch a certain immortal online ( on a regular basis ), they adapt their roles towards another immortal and that isn't good also.
When a first thought of player is not "What role I want to follow" but "Which of immortals I would be able to approach", something is broken.

>Immortals can watch their followers and if they do
>something bad, just punish them.
>
>Can you imagine the complaining if this was remotely
>common? Unempowerment is a lot worse than Anathema status
> which is basically 'uncaballed plus enemy cabal'), and people
>throw fits over that. If we were catching mid-level
>characters and busting them back down, we wouldn't be doing
>bad RPers any favors.

There is always place for combined schemes. You can give the first empowerment for "free" and the second one can be still done manually. At least imms would have more time to estimate the player and they player would actually play his char, not just shrine-sit at low ranks. Perhaps it is not politically correct to say this, but most of players do not enjoy shrine-sitting, though in their farewells most of them, of course, write that they had multiple orgasms. On the other side, for many immortals those empowerments become a routine also, eventually they give up. For example, YOU've given up already
I beleive there can be a good solution, we just have to admit that the problem exists and start to work on decision.