The fief management system behind the scenes basically never worked and barely existed, it was a bunch of spreadsheets plus a lot of handwaving, whilst also being ridiculously detailed and needing updating by hand. It was both not fit for purpose and contributed hugely to staff burnout given the huge amount of manual work required to update things even every couple of months. Stuff like mass combat, economy stuff, even equipment lists, were thrown together on the fly without any testing at all, at the point the game launched there was not even really a solid idea about what the demographics of the setting looked like.
I seem to remember that the idea was that the best way to keep staff engagement and focus was to have a game to be on - but once the game opened the influx of players was absolutely insane, for the first months I was basically reviewing character applications for 5 hours a day and everything kept being pushed back or rushed resulting in the flash in the pan and recrimination filled mess that was Star Crusade.
The degree of staff favouritism is being hugely overstated though (Though not the degree of railroading), it seems that EVERYONE decided that their IC rivals were being ICly unfairly favoured by staff and themselves punished. Literally every Count level player ended up spending more time complaining about how the other three count level players had unfair advantages over them than they did anything else as far as I could see while I was staffing. Custodius' character, Renaud, had the richest County (I still do not know WTF Paulus was thinking giving him that position, it was well known what he was like at that point). But his character also sucked at being a Count, he was a really big guy who was kind of decent at hitting people and riding a horse along with knowing about Kurgans but had very minimal management or political skills. Obviously the player then tried to play him as some kind of cunning mastermind showing the face everyone wanted to see to each individual. Also he kept getting sent incriminating letters from the Kurgans and answering them and nobody ever took advantage of that.
Antonio was +sheet wise competent at ruling, a good if not the best battlefield commander and almost certainly the single most personally dangerous character on the game, he also had like twice the forces of any other count through his playing up to Crusader sentiment and collecting hordes of frothing maniacs, though he had also the most 'at risk' territory. Then again he also had that assault lander full of elite murder fanatics. He then proceeded to have an OOC meltdown at staff after finding out that Sans had a Melee skill 1 higher than his, as one example.
Amber was kind of middle of the road? She was pretty good at ruling and politicing and stuff +sheet wise, had moderate lands that were moderately at risk (she did have some hardcore raiding going on against her if she did not bribe certain Kurgans away, which she did).
Lyov did have to deal with Chiaka which I can only sympathize with but I seem to remember he had psi powers that allowed him to remotely spy on pretty much anyone anywhere and never used these for blackmail, reconnaissance or intelligence purposes? I am afraid that I did approve the traitor baron who turned that fortress over to the Kurgans but I had assumed Lyov would unmask him sooner rather than later and the player was apparently okay with the character being at severe risk of being caught by the Decados.
A lot of the character who were commonly being accused of being 'staff friends' really were not though. Amber, Hugh, Caelwyn, (Or Antonio) they were nobody known to anyone on staff before applying for their characters, I mentioned before but it was this weird lottery where you had to luck into the secret of asking for the world if you wanted to get a lot of stuff. (Stuff being big numbers on your +sheet, private armies, etc).
