Administrative ethics

As alluded to in other posts, there have been many people without integrity that have risen to the ranks of Immortal on the mud. Many started out fine and then strayed because of the temptation or boredom or frustration.

These people often go a bit before they are caught, but they are always caught. I won’t go into the ways they are caught or what they have been caught doing, but what I would like to discuss is how the administrators of the mud have continually dealt with them over the past eight years of my involvement.

There’s no formula and there’s no script, but it generally turns out fair. The person is generally is given a warning for a first minor offense as long as they have contributed something. Second offenses usually result in dismissal. The sad thing is the majority of people caught the first time are caught a second time, but we are a lenient, if not downright sappy bunch.

When push comes to shove though, I’ve seen some pretty difficult decisions made assure me this is a good group of people. For example, one of the “silly rules” we have for people who have positions of power (any level of Immortal) is that the normal characters that they play may not steal from other players. The reason this is enforced is that a person in a position of power, influence and has additional access to information. Surely if they used these things it would be unethical, so we could write a rule that forbidding just that. This stance wouldn’t fully engender the trust of the rest of the players so we have taken the stance that is often taken in the US Judicial System: not only impropriety must be removed, but the appearance of possible impropriety must also be removed.

I’ve seen this in the extreme at one point when Jake wiped a character that his real life brother was playing because he basically just cheated. This wasn’t and easy decision for him at the time and probably wouldn’t be an easy decision for him again. I’m sure I would be full of angst in the same situation. But, in the long run, if he can make that decision, then it is an easy one to remove relatively unknown people who cheated (despite their contributions) to maintain our integrity. Maybe I'm just old school.