An Unpleasant Subject - Regarding Banned Players

[Howlando]

One of the things that has pleased the DM Team about EFU over the years has been the basic maturity of the player-base and the DM staff. We've generally avoided a lot of internet drama or the squabbling common in other internet communities.

I've always personally been particularly gratified by the friendships I've made through EFU and have really enjoyed working with my colleagues on the DM staff to try to entertain ourselves and those who choose to play here.

Unfortunately, our record is not entirely blemish-free.

Mid-September of last autumn I was approached with a "confession" by DMs Johannes and core that a lot of completely inappropriate behavior had been going on without the knowledge of myself and other members of the staff during the course of mid-late EFU:M.

During this period Johannes and Core did the following:

1. Found subtle and difficult to detect ways to cheat with their own PCs.
2. Revealed various EFU secrets to three players (perroy, Tarrell, Balop) in exchange for money.
3. Provided access to EFU/DM systems to three players in exchange for money.
4. Provided these players with advantages to their PCs in exchange for money.

At the time an investigation was conducted and everyone involved was banned. After some internal debate we decided not to go public with this whole mess in order to spare the community some drama.

My personal response to what I consider to have been a very significant and saddening betrayal and breach of trust was to step away from the game for a long time, and only in the past month or two have I felt enthusiastic enough to return to active DM'ing.

Unfortunately, recently I have learned that two of those involved (core and perroy) have not been respecting their ban and have been popping up on #efu (IRC is notoriously bad at perma-bans) and making allusions to the incident. I therefore find it necessary to come public and ask -

1) Please do not speak with them, but merely contact a DM so their ban can be re-applied.
2) If you are aware of any banned player who has managed to return to EFU, please contact myself immediately.
3) Please respect the right of myself and the active DM team to decide when someone does not belong in our community anymore. Bans are serious and the proper way to seek becoming unbanned is to contact us through email to discuss the issue.

Additionally, in late fall of last year, we became aware of another player (Deception/ValRoyeaux) who contacted a banned player in order to attempt to learn server secrets and then lied to us about it. He also was banned.

Regarding the temptation to "learn" server secrets from those who had forum access in the past, we wish to make two points very clear. First, attempting to solicit server secrets in this way is a bannable offense. Second, EFU's storyline tends to be run from the minds of a few key DMs from our private IRC channel with a handful of scattered brainstorming notes on the forums. A lot of what we do is improvisation, and we respond a great deal to player feedback and creativity. EFU is a collaborative story told together with DMs and players, and so whatever conceivable, garbled, inaccurate spoilers that could be provided out of context are likely going to appear flat and uninteresting. EFU's narrative can be appreciated best from the perspective of a player; its secrets enjoyed only when learned in the proper time through IC accomplishment.

The DM Team would like to formally apologize to the community as a whole for this mess. There are very strong standards for DM characters and DM'ing on EFU, and as soon as we found out what had happened we took action immediately. We believe very strongly that our server must be run fairly and that mistakes like this should not happen again.

Despite NWN being a ten year old game, I don't believe that the server numbers have ever been as high as they have been recently. This is in large part due to the fact that the EFU community is a very strong one and the vast majority of the people who play here just want to get along on an OOC basis and have fun (even as we murder each other in game). I am confident that EFU can continue to prosper for a long time yet and I really look forward to forgetting this ugly incident and focusing on positive additions to the server.

I am going to lock this thread as I do not believe any public discussion is necessary, if you have any questions at all do not hesitate to contact myself or another DM.