[Eru]

Think of it as a player standpoint though with these factors

-staff have player accounts (not implying anyone in doom is a GM....but who knows)
-doom guildmaster is a good donator, told me himself hes donated over $300
-guild member loots guild chest (not exploiting any mechanics or anything...but i guess against carebear rules)
-member gets jailed

Was this rule set in place to cater to donators and/or playing staff members? Does their word mean more than the average, non donating player? Was there ever a thread/vote to make it illegal in the first place?

No, the rule was not put in place to cater to anyone in particular, their word means exactly the same as anyone else's word, and no there was not a vote to put this rule into place.

Feel free to read the whole thread here: http://in-uo.net/forums/showthread.php?7...ld-looting

If you're interested, it was put into place after a string of guild lootings where a few guilds were recruiting large numbers of players, then were looted for massive amounts of items. Granted, leaving lots of loot out in the open then inviting complete strangers to come paw at it makes me shake my head in disbelief.

However, large guilds such as these *do* help young players get started and that was the main reason behind the rule. To help young players, to protect people who are trying to contribute to the community, and to punish the griefers.

If this shard is not a democracy and players have no say.....WHY IN THE **** IS THERE A VOTING BOOTH with the words 'let your voice be heard' in the description

There's a voting booth to let your voice be heard, but just because you can hear someone doesn't mean that what they're saying is necessarily good. Staff can decide if it's a voice worth listening to. If you don't think that we listen to players, then you haven't been around very long.

We had a 20 player playerbase, it stayed like that for a long time, THEN this rule was made, and we shot up to 200.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. I think a more reasonable explanation would be that we took out advertising on Top200 and were #1 via votes on Top100 at the same time that a lot of MMOs started to get stale and SW:TOR had a huge fallout of max-levels with nothing to do.