Issue of Legality: The legal question involved is whether the visitor debuff should imply perfect safety for any walled and claimed compound, and whether the Wizards have committed a foul by thusly circumventing the visitor debuff.
Reasoning: The intention of the visitor debuff is not to guarantee the safety of any walled and claimed compound, but rather to make it possible to create safe spaces. The real life analogy to the visitor debuff could perhaps be something akin to gaining access to an area by first agreeing to abide by its rules by unhanding weapons and the like. While a safe area is necessarily walled and claimed, the opposite is however not necessarily true, i.e. walled-and-claimedness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a compound to be secure by the visitor debuff. For example, we do not mind a village being raided by using subterfuge to gain the village's trust, and by such means circumventing the visitor debuff. To some reasonable extent it must be the architect's responsibility to ensure and verify that his claim and wall setups are in fact as secure as he imagines them.
In the particular case Olympus considers that Tartarus has made at least three sub-optimal safety decisions. Forensic photo.
- Tartarus has left public spawning enabled on the charter stone.
- Tartarus has not walled off the charter stone area.
- Tartarus has left virtually all external and internal gates open.
Is there a bug involved? One "solution" to build this problem away would be to make it so that Hearthing home to a claim which is not yours, implies gaining a visitor debuff. This is consistent with the pattern that teleportation implies a visitor debuff (see charter stones), but it has too many potential problems to be worth considering. (Hearthfires being offensively claimed and walled-in, for example). Hearthing home should not imply gaining a visitor debuff. Another solution is to make it so that spawning by a Charter stone does not place a Hearthfire, which is problematic as any slip-up on the part of a newly spawned character, before constructing a hearthfire, would then imply a forced wilderness spawn due to inability to log in on the village claim again if logged out. On the other hand we have previously considered even making newly charter stone spawned characters members of the village immediately. On the third hand one could argue that wilderness beacons make charter stone spawning superfluous.
It is obvious that there exists an edge case in the mechanics here which is perhaps not obvious, but it is also not obvious that the possible fixes are clear and strict upgrades which should as a matter-of-course be implemented. It could perhaps be said that the charter stone mechanic can be confusing to an architect -- and that it perhaps for that reason could be clarified -- but that it as such nevertheless does work as intended.
Verdict: In light of the fact that three separate, unnecessary, and in some sense obviously accident-prone decisions on part of the architect left Tartarus vulnerable, Olympus has with some reluctance decided to exonerate Willy's Wizards of game-foul in the case of Willy Potter vs. Tartarus. This is not to say that any and all attempts to circumvent the visitor debuff would be considered kosher, but at some point we have to draw a line where mechanical problem ends, and reasonable user error begins. From the point of view of the public interest we have also considered the incentives we wish to present to Hearthlings, in part by this precedent, as regards bug reporting and abusing. While we do believe that obvious abuses of game mechanics should imply a punishment, we also do not wish to create a draconian climate where experimentation is outlawed by nature, and where mechanical problems are never discovered on account of never being explored or reported.
While we are going to exonerate the Wizards of foul as such, we also think that there is a good case to be made that this interaction should have been reported before used, and that a climate where people seek more or less gamely ways to circumvent the visitor debuff should be discouraged, hence we have in our infinite, Salomonic wisdom, decided to for some time lift our protective hand from the Wizards -- who, I am sure, are more than capable of protecting themselves with their powerful magics -- and that any exploitative behavior leveraged against them will for the foreseeable future be left unpunished, provided that an accurate report of it is provided Olympus after the fact.
This concludes proceedings.
FIAT JUSTITIA RUAT CAELUM