[prof1515]

Problems with favoritism go back much further, to a time before Kite was possibly even a player (I don't know what his player name was so I can't be sure). When I was an admin I complained to Traithe about some staff showing favoritism and violating several other policies in regard to players, namely their RL friends and/or partners/spouses. He was aware of it but didn't want to address the problem out of fear that they'd quit if he did and as they were productive he was willing to turn a blind eye to their cheating and favoritism. Quite frankly, dealing with such problems is part of leadership and failing to do so is a failure of leadership. SoI floundered without leadership for most of the time I was on staff and it caused a plethora of problems ranging from miscommunication, favoritism, conflicts of interest incidents and undermined work. I estimate that in the 10 months I was active on staff (was on staff for 12 months but spent some of my time in the hospital following my auto accident) I lost about 120 hours of work due to other staff screwing things up in ways which could have been completely preventable with stronger leadership. I wasn't the only one to suffer this fate as well. I was one of several staff to petition for the appointment of a head administrator after Haiwolfe left and Myrkkridia was fired but Traithe wouldn't do it. After I resigned, he finally appointed a head admin but I hear the favoritism got even worse meaning I'd jumped ship in time or I'd have been even more frustrated and probably unlikely to have been as courteous regarding the problems plaguing staff. As you might have noticed, I'm not one to shy away from confrontation. :-D

I can't really speak first-hand as to what all happened when Kite was in charge as that occurred long after I'd left staff. I've heard several versions of the story, none of them very flattering, and seen the aforementioned logs. I wish I could say that was the worst I've seen on MUDs but sadly it wasn't. Harshlands, for example, had and has continued to have some pretty horrible stuff happen too. As dozens of former HL players and staff have said, Blackhorde is an incompetant, dishonest "douchebag" (which is odd because in person he's actually a pretty nice guy, or at least he was when I met him). I can personally attest to the dishonesty and blatant favoritism as I witnessed that first-hand in the incidents that led me to quit the game. It was just lies on top of lies on top of lies (six in all, one after another, in the course of a short six-sentence conversation) to cover up favoritism to say nothing of the incompetence involved in letting well-known twinks repeatedly engage in twinking and player-killing (seriously, if you've punished a player three times prior for the same offense, the problem isn't just the player).

Harshlands didn't always allow its staff to engage in such behavior though. According to someone who knew him at the time and was an original staff member of SoI, while on the staff of HL Traithe was punished for twinking, ie. creating an unauthorized restricted-race character for himself and then inflating the character's stats and those of the PC's weapons. When discovered, his character's stats were nerfed as were the weapons and his character's race was changed from a restricted race to a common one which was why he left to form his own game. The point is that they took action when staff policies were violated, something which has pretty much become nonexistent since but is sorely needed. Of course, when the people violating the policies are the owners/head-admins like Kite or Blackhorde, it's an impossible problem. A head administrator should be the paradigm of staff behavior, not the biggest violator of policies.