So I had the bad luck of running into becoming a victim of a bit of meta. Intentionally or not, once I was able to stop the scene with quick XHELP, but on another occasion, my character was killed before I could even think of xhelping. It happens, it's RP game, meta will occur for one reason or another. Nothing new there.
The question is - once it's found that what happened is meta - how to undo the damage? There is also a matter of how to deal with the person who did the meta, but that's not something I will be getting into here, really not my area of interest.
Also please correct me, as most of you have been playing this a lot longer than I am, so my perspective and view is highly limited.
There are generally two main ways of handling this situation that I know off:
1. Roll with it.
The current sindome approach of the victim just having to deal with it, especially if your PC was killed as a result (code doesn't allow resurrection). I was offered grace in the form of a corpse clone.
This approach has a massive downside; as while the offender (I use offender and vic [the victim] strictly in technical terms, not trying to assign blame and assume that all meta is intentional, etc.) may get punished, they still achieved their goal and the victim has to deal with it. This is extremely frustrating if as a result, you lose not only gear/flash/whatever but also some critical RP, and not because you were killed fair and square, or you've made a mistake or anything like that. But because of someone else OOC mistake, you are being punished, and that outright sucks.
2. Rollback.
Now, this is IMO the ideal solution from the perspective of the vic. The situation should've have happened, so it gets unrolled. It still will leave a bit of bad taste in your mouth; dealing with meta always does, no matter of how it gets handled or resolved. But unlike the "roll with it" approach, the victim does not get any punishment for what was not his fault.
Rollback has a significant issue - sindome is a fast-paced game, and usually, right after killing someone SIC goes off to announce/taunt/whatever, the loot gets distributed, etc. A lot of stuff happens quickly, so unroll is problematic. It would require doing OOC shouts, system messages, notes I don't know what else. It's a lot of work!
But I am going to say that it's way worth it. Not only because it sends a visible message across the player base that this is what happened, and then players can pass along the message through "OOC" if someone missed it initially, but mentions said RP event. Which generally will be a small number, as everyone can receive a system message, even if only at login, to ignore said fact as it was reverted.
It is noisy, it is a bit obstructive, but it prevents one vital thing - double punishing the victim. There is very little that is as determinantal to the spirit of players to have to deal with results of someone's actions that were not kosher. And it also lights a little bulb in your brain that, well, sure, they maybe got punished, but for me, this result is just awful. Way worse than what they got (more so as we don't know if/what they got) so maybe I will do that myself, to get even.
By similar note, the offender may feel bad about it, accidental or intentional meta, but in the end, this achieved their character goal. May have consequences, may have not, but you were successful. The vic knows it too, and that is some extremely disgusting taste to have in the mouth when going out to RP with those players again.
So in closing maybe this is something to reconsider. Perhaps even the offender, if not 100% sure, help before spreading the news to everyone who will listen. To be sure that it's all up-to-par, and if not so, it can be swiftly rolled back, with minimal impact on everyone. I believe that this would lead to a better experience for everyone, especially in the long run.