Daybreak Games is trying something cool with Everquest II: players caught breaking the rules (or just generally being terrible people) aren’t going to be suspended or banned. They’re going to be banished to a “prison server” known as Drunder.
The move, explained by Holly Longdale in this forum post (via Gamasutra), sounds a lot more like exile than mere imprisonment.
Later this week we plan to release a server we are calling “Drunder,” which is a “prison server.” What does that mean, exactly? Ultimately, players who are caught breaking our rules and disrupting EQ2 live server gameplay will be flagged for this server, and no others — ever. Characters on these accounts will be copied to Drunder (the “prison server”) and can never leave or transfer to another server.
Those in Drunder won’t get any customer service from Daybreak, but they will still be able to play the game there, and will have to keep paying their membership for the privilege.
Weirdly—or perhaps wisely, considering this amounts to a grand social experiment—there will also be a petition system for regular players to be sent to Drunder, though Longdale warns “You won’t be able to move individual characters to this server, while maintaining characters from the same account on another server. This is a ONE-WAY trip for an entire account forever.”
Sounds like Australia, only for a video game. And hey, we turned out OK *resumes gnawing on kangaroo bone, spit dripping on tattered rags*.