I don't know. I mean - I'll leave aside wether or not someone was punished fairly or not. But as I see it about 15-20 players got punished for acts of one person. That's definitely not cool in my opinion. I've seen like four or five people talk about quitting over it. When you see not directly involved people talk about quitting, you know that things could be handled differently.
I was in a similar boat to you at one point with one of my characters from my old family. A VERY similar vote.
Aquilegia used to be exactly where Swordfell is now. Only it suddenly turned out that the founder of the realm, and two thirds of the nobles in it, were all the same multi who eventually got bored of what he considered to be "winning" Battlemaster and deleted all his characters overnight.
So I joined a realm which had like 8 nobles in it, myself included, after this mass deletion and only three regions. You could say we were screwed over by the loss of our ruler, banker, judge, general and duke all at once.
But actually it was one of the funnest experiences I had in the game. We were forced to work together and had to constantly struggle in PvE to stabilise the realm. It was only on a small scale but every last tiny thing became vitally important.
In the end we failed but that was only because (from an IC perspective) some Astroist bastards decided they'd rather have Turbul go rogue than appoint a non-Astroist lord to it, which in turn sparked off the Aquilegian civil war and left the realm with too few players to be viable.
It was a great experience and it was fun. There's no reason why Swordfell and Sol can't have the same fun experience now if the players determine to make the best of it
