Wyvern Player Warning System

Wyvern allows players to warn each other. Before you start issuing warnings, read this page carefully. Abusing the warning system is grounds for punishment.

Contents

What's It For?

Warnings allow you to influence players who are abusing the game rules or annoying others. If a player receives enough warnings, he or she will start getting punished.

You must have a valid reason to issue a warning. All warnings will be logged and reviewed by the Wizards. If you abuse the warning system, you may be punished for it.

Rules

You should only use warnings if someone is harassing or severely annoying you, or you see someone breaking the game rules. Examples include:

  • Someone is sending you inappropriate or obscene messages. Keep in mind that you can use the ignore command to ignore another player, so you might not want to spend your warning points in this situation.

  • A player is spamming everyone by shouting inappropriate things repeatedly.

  • Someone is intentionally following you around and stealing your kills.

  • Someone is spamming you in the Post Office, or sending you annoying/unwelcome messages.

  • A player stole something from you, or scammed you somehow.

Basically you should only warn someone if they have severely upset you, by creating an unfriendly environment in the game.

Retaliation

If someone issues a warning to you, you may NOT warn them back simply to retaliate. The other player has to have committed a real offense against you.

Someone warning you doesn't count as a real offense. If you feel very strongly that someone issued you a bogus warning, then you can Appeal the warning to a Wizard. If the warning turned out to be valid, then we may opt to double the warning you received.

Previous Offenses

You are allowed to warn a player who committed an offense against you before the warning system was implemented.

Multiple Warnings

You are allowed to warn someone multiple times for the same offense, if you so desire. You can only issue a new warning once per reset, though.

Don't try to use multiple characters to warn someone for the same offense. The offense has to have been committed against all the characters participating in the warning (which is unlikely, since you're not allowed to have multiple characters online at the same time!)

Restrictions

You can only warn a particular player once per game reset. You can, however, issue warnings to multiple people in the same game session.

So, for example, if you want to warn Bob, you can only do it once every 4 hours or so - however long it takes for the game to reboot. But you can warn Jim, Joe and Jeff once each.

You can't warn Guests.

You can't warn your own characters.

Currently, you can only issue warnings to players who are online. We will fix this in the near future.

You can warn Wizards, but Wizards are not automatically punished, so you may be wasting your warning points. We will investigate Wizards who receive warnings from many players. However, if you think a Wizard is abusing his or her powers, you should send email to wyvern@cabochon.com, rather than spending your warning points.

Giving Warnings

You can issue a warning to any logged-in Player using the following command:

warn <player> <points> <reason>

You can issue up to 10 points in a warning; for example:

warn bob 5 he's stolen 7 of my kills, deliberately

Make sure you include the reason you're warning the other player, and be specific. The reason can be up to 255 characters long. If we find that you're warning players without good reason, then you'll be subject to administrative punishment.

Warnings cannot be retracted or undone. Before you warn someone, make absolutely sure you want to take this step. Check that you typed the command correctly before pressing "Enter."

Do not abuse the warning system:

  • Don't retaliate for a warning you received. If you feel you received a warning you didn't deserve, appeal it.

  • Don't get your friends to warn people, or shout for a posse to warn someone. Only warn someone for what they did to you.

  • Don't warn for things that aren't against the rules. Don't warn someone just because you disagree with what they say or which sports team or anime character they like.

Players who abuse the warning system will have their ability to warn revoked, permanently. They may also be subject to other administrative punishments.

Receiving Warnings

When you receive a warning, it impacts you in two ways:

  1. It adds to your warning level. Your warning level never goes down. Once you are issued 10,000 warning points, your character will be permanently banished. Before this, you will have received many punishments (see the list below). So don't say we didn't warn you!

  2. It adds to your sentencing weight. For every 100 warning points you are issued from other players, your punishment will be higher than it was before.

You can view your current warning level by using the score command. You'll receive a punishment each time your warning level passes a multiple of 100 points.

Punishments

When your warning level reaches 100 points, you will be silenced for one hour. When your warning level reaches 200 points, you will be silenced for two additional hours, and so on. Each time you cross a multiple of 100 warning points, you will receive that multiple in hours of silence.

Example: if you currently have 10 minutes of silence left on your sentence, and your warning level reaches 200 points, you'll wind up with 2 hours and 10 minutes of silence left.

When you're silenced, you're not allowed to shout. At higher punishment levels, you may not be allowed to talk to other players at all.

When your warning level reaches 5000 points, the game will automatically take away half of your XP and all of your gold, in addition to the penalty of 50 hours of silence.

When your warning level reaches 10000 points, the game will banish you permanently.

Appeals

You are allowed to appeal your warnings to a Wizard. Wizards can lower your total warning level, or reduce your sentence, but they are only allowed to do this if there was a bug, or a genuine error on the part of the player who warned you.

If no Wizards are online, you can use the complain command to send in your complaint, and we will review it as soon as possible.

Suggestions

Wyvern's Player Warning System is an unusual experiment. We're basically allowing the player population to be somewhat self-policing. We're not sure yet how successful it will be, and we will probably make a lot of changes to the system as we fine-tune it.

In particular, we may decide to change the punishments, the levels at which you receive the punishments, and/or the number of warning points you receive per level.

If you have suggestions for ways to improve the warning system, please use the idea command to send us your idea.

Studies

A researcher from the University of Washington is studying this system and its use, as part of a class project. Use and reactions to the warning system will be used in a report for the project.

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