In my opinion, the admin should NEVER interfere with any issues regarding players unless there is a blatant and proven case of bug abuse and/or cheating. All admin intervention does is make people afraid to create any kind of conflict for fear of getting ridded, punished, or warned by admin to stop because of the possible chance the person they were going after was friends with an admin. If there is no conflict on a pk mud (yes, this IS a pk mud), the mud in general becomes very repetitive and eventually boring. This causes players to stop playing over time and in the long run hurts our pbase. Sometimes there may be a period of peacetime within the mud when no ones doing any mass killing, but the possibility of conflict brewing at any given time for any given reason keeps players on their toes. If you take that possibility away, what is everyone really playing for anyway?

Now some players may have the argument of a group of HMs killing and looting everyone off the mud and making the game unplayable for innocent players. Those players argue that if the admin didnt step in, that group of killers would be the only players left and everyone would quit. I feel that is nonsense, ive seen that situation occur more than once on both here and when i was on dbr, and i can tell you that in ALL the situations the admin stepped in to end the conflict, the mud became very slate and devoid of any conflict for a long long time and caused a lot of players to become bored and leave (and in dbrs case it pretty much killed the mud when i saw it done). Conversely, in the situations where the admin allowed the conflict to continue, it actually caused a lot of players to bond together in ways youd never see otherwise to fight back or protect themselves, and in the long run helped the muds growth. Yes, a situation can occur where the killers are just too powerful to anyone to do anything about, but i can assure you those killers will get bored after they realize theres no challenges left for them and eventually slow down, feeling they have 'won'.

If a player is clearly abusing a bug though or is flagrantly violating the 'help policy' rules, that is something completely out of the hands of players who are using fair means and not breaking the rules. In that case, the admin should step in and deliver the appropriate punishment to ensure no one is getting an unfair advantage. But for anything else, the players themselves should deal with any issues regarding pk and/or looting. Just my two cents.