There are too many flawed concepts in this thread to quote courtesy of OP. But one that really stood out was that it is "inherently" unfair that a group/organization that plays hours and hours each day in a sandbox game for the past several months should be overpowered vs. a small group of new players who have played for 4 weeks.
Have you completely lost your mind? Please tell me which MMO you are basing your experience off of in being able to, in a few weeks of casual play time, build yourself up to a level competitive with individuals who have spent a cumulative of upwards toward 7000 hours (estimated) in game.
Whatever your answer may be, though, you should know that the large amount of effort necessary to build up a character places value in what you do in this game. It's what keeps many players playing. You decrease build time, resource amounts, establish humour caps
, and generally make the game EASIER to play, it becomes less fun for a large percentage of players who enjoy those features just the way they are.
If you never noticed, Salem doesn't appear to want to make the attempt to attract people unwilling to: read the forums, read the wiki, invest time into progress, play in a sandbox. You appear to fit all of these categories, and while I'm glad you enjoyed yourself, I'm very sorry that it came as such a surprise that something like this happened.
Now, at the present time, your reflections and feedback I'm sure are valuable in some way to the devs, but if you quit because the rules enforced on you by the governing force of one server out of three in a SANDBOX GAME demanded a tax to protect you (or demanded payment to keep them from killing you), why are you blaming the game? You admit to being a noob but still call this an inherent flaw. A sandbox game being a sandbox game is not an "inherent flaw." It's self-defining. It's a great, large, open world in which you can make pretty cool things and, in the same hand, die like a hunted animal in the middle of nowhere and have your bones stumbled upon by some other noob 1 month from now. The only way to have the concept of perma-death plastered any harder would be to change the name to PERMA-DEATH: The Crafting MMO.
I'm sorry that I can't feel more sorry for you. You received warning, whether you feel the threat was veiled or otherwise appears to be a flaw inherent in your decision making process. There is an entire thread about individuals who similarly chose not to succumb to the Chief's tax (or what you consider extortion). But political ignorance aside, this is what you get with a sandbox game featuring perma-death. Maybe in a few months things will change and higher humour characters will somehow be provided with incentives for not raiding/murdering low humour characters. I can't say I'm against that. But to rail against a system that isn't broken by claiming it is just because you don't feel you should have to invest the same time as hardcore players is beyond ridiculous.
You are not entitled to the same benefits of someone who has logged more time than you. You are not entitled to the same benefits of coordination and material generation of a large group of informed individuals who work together as community. Tyler Durden said it best, I guess.
"You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."