Rico was an immortal who had built I think 7 or 8 areas and had progressed up to doing some coding as well. He was our most active immortal and, overall, had done more for the MUD than anyone else. He had brought so many people to the MUD and was on it so often to encourage people to come. I think he was around for something like 2 years.
But then there was a suspicion by not just some, but all of the other immortals that Rico was cheating. He hadn't cheated while an immortal but once he had coding access, some of the things that he had written he did in a way to grant his own character supreme powers. Most notably, how he designed the tailed beast code was in such a way that it required secret knowledge and only his character could get the tails. Nobody else could, no matter how hard they tried.
I had a fairly big investigation into it and had to conclude that they were right, that he had cheated.
I had to delete the tailed beast code and all relevant mobs and also there was the prospect of taking levels and equipment (etc) off his character that had benefitted from the cheating. The conclusion was that there was no certainty when the cheating started or how much it was fair to take off. So, after much discussion, his main character, then a 4th time remort, was deleted, losing all equipment, levels, everything. At the same time, his immortal character Rico was also deleted and the passwords were changed so that he no longer had coding access.
Rico was pretty upset and almost immediately went to our rival Naruto MUD, taking all of his friends with him. I don't know what he told them but he basically did for them what he had previously been doing for us.
At the same time, I lost basically all internet access for a considerable period of time and hence I wasn't able to get people together to rise up from it, and all of the remaining immortals got idle and quit. Some of them left to our rival MUD, in spite of them previously complaining that Rico was cheating.
