A couple of weeks ago we held a community forum to hear players’ thoughts on the spying rules and the rules governing IC/OOC separation in game. I want to thank everyone who came to participate, sent me emails, or read the logs afterwards. We considered the options and decided to make only minor changes to the underlying rules and philosophy, but we have tried to make the written rules more clearly reflect these things.

In particular, we’ve updated the life and death rules and the spying rules, as expected. You may not respawn into the same position within your faction, as determined by Darkness. This means you may not die and become leader or 2IC, but other promotions are permitted. We rely on players to encourage “good RP” regarding new characters, but attempting to micromanage what is good and what is not is difficult to do consistently without an unambiguous standard, and it is a better use of ASim time to focus on other tasks. The rules about asset inheritance remain unchanged: you may only purchase previous assets at a fair market price.

This decision was made quickly, and Felix Goreclaw was already unbanned as he isn’t breaking the clarified rules.

The spying rules changes were less controversial, but we needed to spend time deciding what their consequences would be for previously banned players. We’ve clarified the text to state that you may not share or post a player’s OOC information without their permission.

We’ve decided to reduce Kyran’s ban to 6 months, rather than permanent, after making this clarification, as a first offense. But, let me be clear. This counts as a first offense for everyone, and should this come up again there will be no opportunity for leniency.