Here's me pulling another topic off the Battlefield to further comment on it.

There's perenially someone complaining that the staff isn't being consistent to something that's happened before.

My revelation to you is this:

You're never going to get true consistency, and if you really think about it, you don't actually want it.

Consider that, over the lifespan of CF (which is not a short thing), there have been probably over a hundred of Immortals. Even if you limit it to only counting each player once, and counting only the immortals to make it out of the hero/avatar stage, you're still talking about dozens and dozens of people, many of which were never imms together. Why would you expect people who never met and may never have even heard of Nighthawk to hand down decisions that are consistent with his? Yet players do seem to expect that.

Consider also that, over the lifespan of CF, standards of what is or isn't acceptable/praiseworthy have changed. Sometimes this has been a more or less steady evolution in a direction -- when I started playing CF, people talked about their dates and homework on cabal channel. Sometimes it's more that we as administrators or as a game community realize we need to go in a direction and may overshoot what's best. Level-sitting is a good example of this -- when I started playing CF, a majority of characters were intended to permanently sit at a particular sub-hero level and never level again. We didn't think that extreme was great for the game, so we tried in various ways to discourage that mindset. Now we're at a point where some players freak out if you don't hero as fast as you possibly can. That's gone way too far, so now you're more likely to see me exert pressure in the opposite direction. These are just two examples; the culture of the game has changed in a lot more ways.

Consider also that, even within the staff of a certain time period, there are a lot of disagreements about which characters are cool and what behavior is acceptable. Really there you can only fault the others for not agreeing with me.

Consider the kinds of behaviors of past staff that you don't want to see again and don't typically see now. We're inconsistent there, too.

I thought I had more to say there, but I got distracted mid-posting and ran of steam. Anyway: consistency is good up to a point, but don't expect me to slap a guy who's level-sitting with a demeaning title because someone who isn't on staff anymore did it five years ago and I disagreed with it even then. We try to make the best decisions we can about what's good for the game at the time.

I agree with what you're saying here, and I'm glad you can get some steam off about it... however (as you're probably aware), you're fighting a loosing battle. People LOVE the "but that's not fair!" argument when things don't go their way. Hell, it's an argument staple for anyone who grew up with one or more siblings.

"But Jimmy got more ice cream, so why can't I!" *pout*

On this vein, game suffers from a serious lack of the f-word. Please bring back more consistency with Cador.

Aarn

And I've heard you comment in the past that you felt that sometimes the stick got dropped on a char too fast and sometimes too slow.

It's just frustrating to see a char that you know is doing something other chars have been punished (and a bad title is that, though not nearly as bad as alignment change/cabal boot) for without reprimand. I totally agree with you here (on the level-sitting), but I wonder why Daurwyn or the players of those characters who did get some flak for it wondered when they saw Susubienko's timeline.

I mostly got disturbed by the fact that Susu should have booted herself from the village, if you catch my drift.