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.

[Former-GM-Circe]

Rankin, I'd hope by this stage you'd have no problem answering 5 random rule questions completely.
You are a mod afterall, dear.


I pulled up the script when writing my first post, and "kill stealing" is in the possible answers. In case the script had been changed between when I last had my hands on it, and server implementation, I personally jumped ingame and went through the NPC until I got the question. Upon inputting "kill stealing" he marked it as correct, and moved me onto the next question.

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

What I said was we do NOT sort players. Any player who joins heRO has the desire to join heRO. Does it count as sorting if every single heRO player is automatically in the group of "heRO players"?
We will not be sorting, as I stated. This is why all players must read ALL the rules.
You stated you do not see the reason for the WoE rules in the Guardian, as you do not WoE. As we do not sort, you get to see them all. There is no "No WoE rules" group that you desire.

I hardly find the refusal to make only some rules viewable to only some players elitist.

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.

There are a decent amount of RO servers out there. However, the large majority of those will have rules that players are required to follow.
If the rule breaking happens in heRO, the consequences are going to happen in heRO.
If rules are broken on the heRO forums, then the consequences happen on the heRO forums.

We don't pretend to employ "lasting consequences" outside of our domain: heRO.
You may compare them to the outside world when you say that the weight we assign them is too great. But this ISN'T the outside world. this is heRO. You stay in Pandora's place, you follow Pandora's rules. Unlike in the real world, it's easy to move on to another server if you don't see yourself being able to uphold them.

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

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.

Of course not.
Which is exactly why they're not written like that. This is why they are a simple, clear list of Do Nots with explanations.


This is also why they are not listed as a simple point form list. Rules like "Respect other players" are open to the players' interpretation of what respect is. And so, we try to clarify that line by explaining that insults, flaming and the such come under this.
Not to mention, that if you don't want to read the explanations, then don't. Just about every rule has a title/top line that says the rule in short form; "Do not bot", "Do not macro", "Respect other players".
If you so wish to skip the longer parts and read just the top lines, then do so, but the rest will remain there for the players who actually want it there.


Once again, how is saying that every person who joins heRO has the desire to join heRO "sorting"? It's not.
We're not sorting rule breaks and non-rule breakers via this NPC. The NPC has no ability to "see" who failed the test. He'll let everyone try again.
The rules are there to educate and inform the player base, both established and incoming.

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.

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.

Yes, deliberate rule breakers will still try and break rules. However, not every player IS a deliberate rule breaker. Many times we've had players unsure, or even PM asking us what specific rules are. So now, we make sure they know.
If players have a problem with being expected to know the rules before they enter our server (or view having to know the rules as "punishment"), and think that the rules NPC is too much for a server to have, then they'll very likely have problems with other areas of the server (especially if they want a homunculus. )
The NPC is exactly as he appears. He states the rules, and then he tests you on them. If we wanted to punish players, I'm sure we could make him disconnect, jail or even ban players if they got answers incorrect.
But we don't, nor will we ever do that.

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.

Anyone who believes that all GMs, or even the majority of GMs, from any server, are on staff to feed their ego are sorely misinformed. While some GMs are known for such (and these are usually the very public cases seen on places like RMS' Hall Of Shame), for the majority, it is a near thankless task that consists of many, many hours and a lot of stress.
We don't LIKE banning and punishing people. It's not a hobby. We'd be delighted if everyone followed the rules so that we'd never have to punish someone again.
But we have standards for our community, and we expect them to be held. If a player is to break them, then so be it. But we do not enjoy it.
We don't like having to wake up our senior staff, or in their case, being woken up by the younger staff members at 3am, because the server is being attacked.
We don't like being accused of bias or corruption because someone didn't like the fact that they got caught rule breaking.

There is very little when it comes to working on staff that feeds one's ego, and what little there is, isn't a common occurrence.
Most of what does "ego feed" is when our own work goes well, and everyone should have some sort of pride in their own work, whether it be at school, a company, or working for an RO server.

[Child of Bodom]

What your saying is "All you GM's are doing it wrong, STFU and listen to me cause I know how to run your server." If the GM's decide they want players to run through a test to get on the server, all power to them. It is Their server after all. Sure the test is hard, but theres no time limit so if you really are stuck on a question, go look it up. And its not like redoing the test takes 14 hours its like maybe 5 minutes out of your life of playing a game.

/edit not directed at circes post but thornys one above it

[Rankin]

As much as I find it annoying i don't MIND having the test there, actually I like it, hopefully people will stop going "is it ok if I duel client!?" "No." "WTF WHY THATS SO STOOPID OMGWTFUX." And as to what Bodom and Circe say, if you don't like how the GMs run here then well don't play.

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.

Dumbest thing i've read. If you think GMs enjoying getting rid of people, then wow. Just wow. You've got my vote as a GM to see what it's like, as I see GMs having to wake up at 3am due to complete MORONS, see them have to stop what they're doing on their legits, move to their GM, waste their time on some nutbag ruebreaker, who turns out didnt bother to read the rules, but instead spammed enter, I feel bad for them because idiots can't read the rules. Guardians test is a good thing, helps the server over all.

[Aaronock]

I do agree changing it to account wide for doing the test makes a lot more sense than making you do it on every single character you make. >.>

About all I care to say on this topic.

[Shikari]

Circe, you are forgetting the most important rule of anything:

1) The boss is always right.
2) If the boss is wrong check rule 1.

Now to break both rules.

We sort them by one standard: their desire to play heRO.

Unless of course you mean that the standard is:

You pass the test-> you have desire to play HeRO.
You don't pass the test-> you have no desire to play HeRO.


Thorny, most of the bans in the ban list are for botting lol.

Rankin-> Guardian SEMI-helps the server, at most it clears out people who dont know squat english. Botters can still bot, flamers can still flame, ect. They're just aware they can get banned ._.

[Rankin]

Well I meant towards the people who bitch about being banned and not knowing it. ;o

[Shikari]

Oh, well then, yea lol.

[Former-GM-Circe]

We sort them by one standard: their desire to play heRO.

Unless of course you mean that the standard is:

You pass the test-> you have desire to play HeRO.
You don't pass the test-> you have no desire to play HeRO.

I didn't mean it like that.
I meant it like "Downloaded the heRO client and logged on." Desire to play heRO. So, you're in the heRO players "group" and as such, you go through the rules NPC. Like every other player.

You never download heRO, and you never log into the server. Then, you don't really have a desire to play heRO. In which case, you don't go through the rules NPC, because... you don't exist on the server.



Aaronock; Unless I'm a complete noob at scripting (possible ), the only way to tell if an existing player had other characters on their account without having to go through the rules NPC test again would be a direct DB call, and I'm not sure I like coupling that right next to text input areas. (But hey, possible scripting noob here. )



The bottom line is, here on heRO, we expect 1 (or 2 depending on how you read it) thing(s) of the players:

Read the rules, and follow them.

If making sure that at least the first half of that is definitely done is considered too much work in players eyes, then sigh.

[Thorny]

I just wanted to let you know that i've left the server. Not because of the Rules NPC hubbub.

But still, that NPC is a complete farce. I have never seen the likes of it before, and I hope to never see it again.

It really is just a great big annoyance, and nothing more. I passed the test at least 3 times with the characters I made, and I can tell you right now that I haven't committed any of the (forced, unnecessarily repeated) information to memory. Except for the memories of... exasperation and irritation.

I am no longer affected by the existence of the thing, but for gods sake rethink it. I will forever remember heRO as a server run by cops and elitists.