Okay, we've talked it through and a decision has been reached.
Leeching is bad. Nobody with any kind of sense in their head can dispute that, and it's forbidden in the official rules.
How do you define leeching? That's less clear. But because admins are here to enforce the rules, the burden of making the decisions falls on them. There can never be a one-size-fits-all rule that clearly defines all cases, it will always come down to an individual admin making the call based on the particulars of a specific case. We'll do our best to standardize procedure, but it'll never be perfect, because that's how people work and there will always be new kinds of situations to deal with. Bottom line is that somebody has to draw the line somewhere, and that somebody is us. You don't have to like it (we certainly don't), but that's what chadz has specifically told us to do. Deciding when to kick, when to ban and when to warn is part of the same package.
Vicious, since it seems there was a reasonable possibility that you really didn't realize what you were doing was leeching in the eyes of admins, we're letting you off the hook, but you have to understand that this really is your last chance. It's up to you to decide how to play the game, it's not possible for us to tell you that. Lots of people play with crap gear to make more gold, and that's their call. However, you need to really understand that if you ever find yourself doing anything that any admin might decide is leeching, you're taking a risk. Now, that applies to everybody, but I'm specifically saying it to Vicious because he's really managed to wear out the collective patience of the admins over the past months, which I think he knows by now. You can only be banned for the same thing so many times, and chadz himself said that after the next one, you'll never be able to play cRPG again.
Like I said, decisions are case-by-case. Sometimes leeching is totally obvious, sometimes it's less so. However, even getting a few kills every now and then isn't enough if anybody can tell just by looking at you that you're not really trying to play the game at all, and are only interested in dying as quickly as possible. If you're genuinely not interested in playing properly, as a real member of the team, then you shouldn't be on the server. Being reckless isn't disallowed -- hell, a lot of people would call my playing reckless a lot of the time. But I've never had a death wish, and neither should anybody else. Risk-taking isn't the same as suiciding, so if you're playing, play to win, not to die; anything less essentially means you're deliberately hurting your team's performance, and that's not cool.
I've done my best to explain what this is all about. Maybe it's not good enough, but for now, it'll have to do. In the end it comes down to common sense, and the problem with that is obvious: a given player's idea of it may not be the same as a given admin's. However, the admins have to decide what's what, and everyone has to live with those decisions. If you don't want to have to worry, then try to make sure there's no room for doubt. If that doesn't seem fair, then it's too bad, but nobody's perfect.
