After much contentious discussion, we’ve settled on the following:
1. The staff team is unsatisfied by the degree of roleplay that has been happening on the server – for quite some time now, and we are in the process of reworking the rules to ensure more rigorous standards for roleplay on the server when it comes to staying in character, ensuring more immersive and realistic interactions between characters in the game, and adding some degree of in-character justification when it comes to exercising violence such that Discovery is not Murderhobo Online. This will also apply to a renewed increased standard on meta 'meme' character names referencing popular culture or anything else that does not fit within the Freelancer universe.
2. The decision to interpret existing rules that mandate roleplay in this manner is a divergence from the status quo, and requires proper communication to the community at large BEFORE enforcement can be fairly expected. The harsh penalty put on Mort was an overreaction which was, in part, due to the application of a new (or very old) standard which has not been the norm for quite some time – and so we will be scaling back the ban length from one month to one week, including the time currently served.
3. The initial sanction did not mention a point of justification involving an interaction in which Mort encountered an under-cover wild character that was carrying code weaponry – while Mort was in ZOI and had piracy/combat lines, his character instead stopped the wild ship, ignored the wild player’s attempts to roleplay and pretended it was silently running in order to justify proceeding straight to shooting. We have since received notice from the reporting player that Mort approached the reporter unprompted by anyone but his own conscience, apologized, and made efforts to make things right on his own – behavior which we want to see encouraged. Given that the reporting player accepted Mort’s apology and attempts to make it up to the reporter, we decided to factor this into the reduction of sanction duration.
We handled this sanction poorly due to a mixture of frustration surrounding what we see as a long and slow backslide of roleplay quality in Discovery and for that, I apologize. We are continuing to work on tempering emotional responses with more consideration into ensuring consistent and fair rule enforcement - and we will also work on methods to making this game a more immersive and rewarding roleplay platform than a PVP deathmatch server with a thin veneer of rp labels. I hope that the community can bear with us in this awkward phase of transition - there's going to be a period of troubleshooting and difficulty ahead that we feel is necessary to make Discovery a great place to make fun characters to tell compelling stories AND go nuts with ultra violence. We will continue to try to listen to criticism without ego or pride, and make attempts to aknowledge our mistakes and address issues as they come.
