@Ganymede said:
If you say so. I don't need a well-written policy -- or any policy -- to alert me when a staff member is unfair. All that matters is what I think is fair, not what that policy may tell me is fair.
Alight. In the case of RfK specifically, Shavalyoth founded the game after having bad experiences with Staff on other games with more loose policies and decided to make her own game with clear policies to prevent what had happened in those other games. These included things like never staffing while drunk, never spying on the players with DARK, ensuring that the NPC's play by the rules and a commitment to a restorative system of justice.
Like @jaunt Shavalyoth originally decided that staff shouldn't play PC's at all and she herself never played any PC, however beyond her coder she didn't manage to get anyone else to help out as staff as they all wanted to keep playing so she compromised. As RfK was always intended to be a fairly PvP centric game the policy was designed to make Staff PC's be non-threatening to the rest of the PCs and this was iterated on a number of times.
Overall, my experience was that her policies were very successful in building trust. Not by the sheer fact they were written down but rather by the fact she unfailingly kept true to the promises she made to the playerbase and that the people she brought on to help her agreed to do the same thing. If those policies hadn't been written down I think it would have been harder for her to build that trust and harder to ensure that the members of staff she brought in would stay true to her vision.