Discovery is growing. What we experience is the result of this growth. Any large community related to an online game can experience things like that. You take any online game server, private or even commercial, and you'll encounter similar problems. Mostly, far worse than Discovery has, just because our admin team (myself included) is listening to what players have to say.
We have issues with violation reports and sanctions. And there also are certain hardly understandable rules. Both issues will be addressed soon enough. True that rules can't cover all situations, but also true that the situations that rules have to cover need to be defined as clear as possible.
Regarding the sanctions: I believe that punishing for RP violations have indeed gone much farther than it should be. A guide on how sanctions should be used was already drafted for the admins. It's not part of the rules, since admins should be free to decide in specific situations. However, it's true that RP violations that pass on without harming anybody, like occasional OOC phrase, or attacking friendly player for training purposes (when both agree to fight), or having a slight ID/tag/ship/equipment mismatch, should not be sanctioned straightaway. Same applies to violations committed by new players for the 1st time, and generally minor unintentional violations that can happen to anyone.
However, this also means that players who intentionally abuse the freedoms provided and continue to violate rules after warnings (and after being sanctioned) will not go unpunished. Same about swearing in chat, and of course cheating.
This reminds me about Keepers issue... I believe that many players have certain feedback about how the faction's being played, and it needs to be posted somewhere.
Also, it should be clear that players are allowed to report if one of the admins made a mistake (via PM or e-mail) - without being afraid that the report by itself will cause negative consequences. I can assure you that we all wish the best for the server and its players, but admins are humans not robots, and different things happen. Of course, if such report proves to be deliberately false (like any violation report)... the consequences will be negative.
And one last thing.
Of course it's sad to see people leaving. However, if admins are asked to solve any problems that happened in-game, they help if they can. Even if you believe that you have personal issues with one of the admins, you can always ask someone else. In such cases, if players quit before they try all options to resolve what was wrong, then they obviously didn't want to try. Blaming admins or all players in general hardly works.
