FWIW - I'm no Magistrate, but I think that Dante Silverfire, ^ban^, and BardicNerd's take on the situation is a reasonable read of the situation. We always tell people to "play through the bug". Sometimes that bug screws you, like when all our walls on Dwilight got dropped a level. We had 3 cities and a stronghold that had to have walls rebuilt, costing us multiple thousands of gold. Sometimes it's a windfall, like that militia payment bug that ended up giving the region lords 3K-4K extra gold in his pocket on tax day. But in all cases, you *have* to play through the bug. Unless it is some serious game-balance altering bug, Tom simply does not interfere or "fix" it.
You also combine this with the "RP cannot trump game mechanics" policy. If the game says the guy is the lord, then he is the lord, plain and simple. You must adjust your RP to comply with game mechanics, not the other way around. The player could have said "WTF, that makes no sense, I'm just gonna step down and go back to LE on my own". But as far as I can see, he is under no obligation to do so.
Abusing a bug for personal gain would be if the guy knew how to reproduce this and cause the situation to repeat itself, and willingly did so in order to exploit it. But a one-off situation that the game puts the guy in, through no action or fault of his own... I don't see how you can call playing through it to be exploiting a bug. Maybe not the smartest/friendliest action he could have taken. But I don't see it as outright, intentional abuse.
How does all of this fit in with the social contract? The player's actions suggest to me that they didn't care much at all about fair play.
That would be part of the bug. Cleanup scripts would have silently 'corrected' his allegiance to your realm when they ran (haven't yet checked whether they did or not, but my guess is yes).
So they were technically a member of Summerdale, but the game still assumed he was a member of Libero for everything?
