About the "New Player Test"

[Thorny]

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.

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.

I only capitalized the words on the forums - I did actually read the lower-case instructions. I'm sorry that I missed adding that.

Clarification:
All answers which I input were in lower case.

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.

The fact that you feel that you need to "sort" your players at all is disturbing to me. This is an extremely elitist attitude.

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.

I'm going to further break this one down:

They are to be taken seriously, as are the consequences of breaking them.

It's RO. There are an insurmountable number of servers. There are no lasting consequences that anyone - staff or player - can affect. This hard-line approach is only going to serve to alienate the server from its players - particularly prospective players. You write as if these rules are sacred words. I agree that they are important, but the weight which you assign to them is far too great.

And maybe dry wasn't the right word. Maybe the word should have been "Cold". The way you explain them sure is.

It may sound like a bunch of "preachy" Do Nots, but we place understandability over nicety in them.

An understatement, but continue.

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...

That's just silly. Nobody expects anything to be written like that. This whole sentence reeks of cynicism.

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...

Then why on earth is everything written the way it is? The whole of the rules could be chopped down, easily understandable, and get the point across in just a couple of paragraphs.

Consider point form. It makes it easier to reference and remember at a glance, and you aren't forcing a bunch of filler down with it. If anything, your rules right now are less effective, because of how intrusive and overbearing they are.

In the end, bad players will find their way in regardless of what you do to "sort" or even filter them. If someone is hellbent on raising a commotion or causing trouble for the staff, then they are going to do just that.

On the other hand, it is less likely that a good player will stay and commit time and commit themselves to a community if they are immediately (first log-in!) treated like they have immigrated to a locked-down police state. And that's what it seems like.

And besides, we all know that GMs share a common fault. Every single GM on every single private server has an ego which needs to be fed. And kick/banning foolish rule breakers will satisfy that urge while simultaneously heartening the community.

In summary, punishment should come after breaking the rules, not before. Give your new players the benefit of the doubt. Punish those who need to be punished.