This post will probably seem blunt, but I'd like to address some things straight forwardly.
The answer "Kill Stealing" will not work, you're correct. The very reason for this is stated as the last thing you see before you actually get asked the quiz questions.
Quote:[heRO Guardian]
Don't forget to type all your answers in lower case only.
(UPPER CASE) vs (lower case)
Be ready!
Then he goes directly into the quiz. As the K and S in your answer are upper case letters, they won't be accepted.
The text inputs do accept multiple answers, and the kill stealing one especially leaves room for at least one misspelling that I can think of.
Shikari bought up Ice Wall. Again, it contains upper case letters when the guardian specifically states NOT to use them.
As for the questions about things such as WoE that you feel don't resonate with the everyday player; we don't sort each player into whether they intend to WoE, PvP or be social. We sort them by one standard: their desire to play heRO. As a heROer, we expect them to have read all the rules, and to know them if they should ever one day apply to them. We have a great many players who never came here with the express intent of WOEing, but as time has gone on, they have, and as such they know the rules.
The majority of players would claim that the botting, AFKmisting and macroing rules do not apply to them, as they have no intent to do it anyway, but they are still required to be aware of the existence those rules, too.
The rules are intended to be, as you put them, "dry". They are rules. They are not a happy chat about the weather, or a topic to be joked over and taken lightly. They are to be taken seriously, as are the consequences of breaking them.
Contracts with businesses, ToS, even the laws of one's own country are never put down in a joking way. In the land of heRO, our rules are all of the above to us, and we take them seriously. In essence, they are commands, as you put it.
As for the language of the rules.
heRO has many international players who do not speak English as a first language. For this reason, we have written the rules to be as basically understandable as possible. It may sound like a bunch of "preachy" Do Nots, but we place understandability over nicety in them.
As friendly as "We'd really rather prefer that one was not so personally inclined to engage the use of third party programs to bypass the manual labor of mouseclicking, pretty please" sounds, it would be lost on a portion of the server when compared with "Do not bot/macro or you will be permanently banned"
The language/grammar in some of the menu choices is a little awkward too, I'll admit. Rearranging/rewriting those fell in to my domain with only two intentions on my mind.
1) Making sure all the important parts were in them, and
2) Making them actually fit into the menu.
In essence, the room for text in a menu is very small, and not calculated by a set amount of characters before it cuts off, but rather, by the space taken my characters. If the menu option is filled with is and ls, it will fit a lot more text than one filled with ms, ws and ys.
Making sure they fit was a cycle of changing them in the script, jumping ingame on a test server to see if they were cut off, then reditting it in the script again, and retesting until they fit, and were understandable, even if a bit awkward sounding.
I think the only thing left is to address why the NPC was changed.
Firstly, he was due for an update. Rules that were listed on the forums/site needed to be added to him.
Players in the past had brought up the concern that players could enter spam through the quiz, and pass it without actually reading the rules, or understanding English in the first place.
They also brought up the concern that the previous menu options for the entire two menus were easy for someone who would not understand English ("yes/no" and "yes/???")
The staff had seen this reflected in the amount of times they'd had to tell a player the rules, and got told that the player had never looked at those on the site, and when the issue that they had to agree to them at an NPC before they could even reach the game was brought up, we frequently got told that they had not read those. They'd simply spammed through the text.
So, we set out to fix that, to make sure that players had read the rules, and had actually paid full heed to them.
What you see now is the result, though I'm not too sure it is stopping the spam entering, if quite a few people are missing the UPPERCASE vs lowercase part of the dialogue, even though it appears as the last thing before the quiz starts. :/
