ouch, that's ridiculous, I'll no longer be playing if that's how things are going to be.

Hmm. I wonder if he doesn't have experience with running a game with PVP or something. It seems perfectly reasonable to go to war over land. In agame like that, it should be expected. Curious about their side of the story too.

I wonder if it would have ended differently if the other empire's leader hadn't been such a cry baby.

It is non sense just like this that's the reason I prefer single player games.

If you look at the log of this conversation, it doesn't in any way back up what the OP said. The admin simply asked OP to not bully people, and it seems (and was admitted by OP himself) that there was a past of bullying...

@shotgunshell
I completely agree with your points. Especially the statement about admins becoming power hungry. While it does have a tendency to occur in muds, other types of games aren't immune to this either. We've seen our fair share of this situation happening within audio games as well. This situation can drain all of the entertainment out of the game. No one wants to have to fight and argue to use features included in the game the way they should be used. People just want to play the game. I think this happens as a result of someone not being ready to handle the responsibility of adminship. The less experience someone has as an admin, the more likely they are to act this way. Honestly, I think the OP made the right decision to stop playing the game. Even though this conflict only took place with one admin, there’s no telling what they could have passed on to other admins of the game.  Even if the admin meant well and honestly thought they were doing the right thing, then they weren't very familiar with the game and how it works.

ah. another "admin upset me so I'm gonna sulk" thread? or did I miss something.

Here's the issue I have with this log. It looks to have been heavily edited... There are certain gaps in the conversation that feel weird to me, the dev asks him to stop the conversation on channels, for example and that's left in there but you don't know any of what he said on channels. You see some random lines that just don't make sense.

The OP admits that he had at some point bullied the people of that empire and caused them issues, and a dev stepping in to prevent harassment is not a problem. I've been playing for a while and I find the admins and the main dev himself helpful and have yet to see anything of this power hunger that the OP wants us to see. Basically this stinks of someone throwing a fit because they were asked to do something, the dev says he wants to flesh out the war stuff and makes a request until that is done, and that is somehow a problem. It's also worth note that this game is beta and in pretty constant development; you can follow all kinds of topics on the dev channel. This dev, as far as I can tell is engaged with his game base (having discussions with players on how things should work), for example.

How exactly do you know he's under no authority? Have you read the rules, and the logs, or did you just agree with the OP and move along?

@sorressean, the log contains the tell conversation between mea and Khufu. I did not remove any tells from it, but that is all it is. You also say I "bullied the people of that other empire". If you consider what I did to be bullying, you shouldn't be playing a mud called Empire Mud.
@griffindor, if you read the log carefully I did not threaten Khufu. I simply told him that by losing me, he would lose a lot of potential players, and if you read this topic, you will see that that's the truth.
Also, to everyone, I am not concerned that the dev is power-hungry. I do consider him to be quite reasonable in most cases, and we have had a lot of good conversations about the game. But he developed a game where the mechanics allowed us to do something. Then he forced us to not do it. He could have not enabled that mechanic until it had been thoroughly fleshed out on a test server. Instead, he turned it on when he admitted that it needed work, and then decided to stop me from using it in the way it was coded.
As I said in the topic title, the dev is "misguided" in his sense of fair play and niceness. Empires are, inherently, not nice. Empires are about taking land and assimilating it into the empire. Without the ability to take other people's land, the mud is not really Empire Mud anymore, it's more like City Building Mud. If the mud were marketed as "City building Mud" from the start, with involuntary PVP disabled, I would have had no issue. But it was not. I was playing the game in the way that it was coded, and I was punished for it in order to appease a few players who had already played through the vast majority of the game's content. and it doesn't make sense.

I would agree this is bullying if he was warring against some helpless newbie, but Knashteran is the second most powerful empire.

Since this game is called Empire Mud, it would be foolish not to expect war and territorial disputes. I wouldn't want to play if admins actively interfered in legitimate and fairly routine disagreements like this.

I agree. What a shame, I was going to return to the game, but I guess that's no longer the case.
Tell the romans they were bullies, tell the mongolians that they were bullies. Tell any empire that they were bullies, because in order to be an empire, you have to be a bully. You have to lie, and to manipulate, and to conqour and enslave.
The worst case of bullying Key_is_full did was to force Nashtaron into negotiations even if they didn't want to. And I'm sure Nashtaron have done similar things over the years, else how would they have gotten so powerful?

Misguided?
No.

If they can't handle high end pvp then  they should stop advertizing their game as one.
I think they just wanted to get rid of KeyIsFull. He probably was hurting their poor playerbase lol