Player Code of Conduct

Please talk to the staff if you have significant unresolvable difficulties with another player, or if you discover cheating or a privacy violation.

Our policies on courtesy, cheating, and privacy follow below.

Some Simple Expectations of Courtesy

Our policies for player behavior, OOC, are simple.

  • Stay PG-13 and in good taste in public, including on public channels. Many people want to remain PG-13 in private, too. Please respect other people's OOC boundaries on what they feel comfortable roleplaying.
  • Don't be a jerk. Be polite. Avoid inflammatory comments. Don't lose your cool — and if you do, log off until you can deal with things calmly. Try to keep criticism constructive.
  • Be respectful of other people's time and effort and real lives. Be forgiving of people's need to slow-scene, unexpectedly idle, or log off suddenly. Try to warn people if you're likely slow or interruptible. Follow through on your promises.
  • Try to give other people the benefit of the doubt. If there are a couple of ways to interpret something that someone's said, please try to assume that they meant it in the way that wasn't snide, mean, stupid, or crazy.
  • Don't cheat.
  • Respect people's privacy.

What We Consider to be Cheating

Cheating, in simple terms, is violating the letter or spirit of the rules of the game. Don't do it; it wrecks other people's fun and it makes the staff angry.

Cheating also includes:

  • Knowingly abusing other players' good faith, especially lying OOC (explicitly or by omission) about IC things.
  • Using OOC knowledge IC.
  • Having one of your characters directly help one of your alts.
  • Circumventing global or area code, including writing code to simulate powers or items that your character doesn't have (writing your own Trump code, spoofing RPG messages, and so forth), and exploiting bugs in other people's code. As additional protection for potential victims, just because it was possible in code doesn't mean that it happened IC — the lack of a @lock on a door doesn't mean it's unguarded IC!

Our Privacy Policy

Be polite and don't barge into people's private rooms uninvited.

Spying in-character is fine, and a part of the genre. If you want to spy on someone IC, you should talk to the player you're spying on OOCly, and negotiate the terms. The other player may choose to send you roleplay logs, allow you to place a Puppet-flagged object in his scenes, or something similar, but we encourage you to use our Handling Information guidelines. Some rooms are built to permit IC spying (see '+help Spying'); use +spying to check OOC for IC spies.

Some rooms are on the +watch/+go system. OOC rooms of that sort can be watched by anyone (see '+help Watch'). IC rooms of that sort cannot (they're set up to only permit +go). Use +watching'to check for listeners.

Some areas may be built in such a way that conversations are forwarded elsewhere — the use of Audible-set exits to allow, for example, a "stage" to be seen by the "audience", is quite commonplace. Use the @sweep or +awake commands to check what in your location might potentially be listening to you.

Other types of eavesdropping are a violation of privacy. This includes Dark-flagged listening objects, command-trappers, and a variety of other MUSHcode-based tricks. If you are watching someone — whether they're roleplaying or chatting out of character — you are OBLIGED to let them know. (The staff does not eavesdrop on players, period.)

The identity of other people is their own business. If someone tells you any personal real-life (RL) details, it doesn't entitle you to tell these details to others. Altchars are often sensitive information; if a player doesn't want his known, you are expected to respect that desire. Similarly, you should never press people for details of their real selves. If they want you to know, they'll tell you. At the same time, never assume that people are who they say they are. They may not be of the gender that you think they are, they may not live where you think they live, and they may, indeed, be nothing like what they say they're like. The staff will never give away this kind of information; don't even try to ask about it.

Descriptions, code, and other things that are part of the database are considered private. Don't copy them without the explicit permission of the original author.

Don't try MUSHcode tricks to search the database for information about other people's stuff, or attempt to circumvent the security of someone else's objects — this is against the rules, and will not be looked upon kindly by the staff. If you have reason to believe that there are problems with someone else's stuff, notify them or the staff.

Privacy Violations

We consider programmatic attempts to trawl the game for information — whether it is about RPG info, players, building, or anything else — to be an information abuse. Even if it is technically feasible to retrieve the information, people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and we want to make it clear that we consider such attempts to derive privileged information out of public data to be an abuse of both the spirit and letter of our privacy policy.

If we catch you in a privacy violation of this sort (or anything along similar lines, like exploiting a code bug in order to gain access to privileged info), we will be happy to aid you in your belief that information ought to be open by ensuring that yours is. We will post a notification of your abuse, and your characters will be added to the Public Non-Trust List; the list is a public list of offenders, and everyone on it automatically is considered to +trust the whole rest of the game. A second offense will get you banned, no questions asked. (If the first offense is sufficiently egregious, you may be immediately banned. We see no real reason to coddle people who cannot respect basic policies like this.)

What We Mean By PG-13 and Public

We do not care what people do in private, assuming that it is between two consenting adults. Please make sure that the other person involved has a comfort level that is similar to yours. Do not exceed PG-13 in public.

"Public" is considered to be "a room that other people are likely to enter", i.e., not your personal room or someplace suitably off the beaten path. Note that setting yourself Unfindable just makes the likelihood of accidentally being walked in on higher. If you feel the need to be Unfindable, you should probably be in private. Use +temproom if you want a private room off a particular location.

This should probably go without saying, but in case it is not clear, PG-13 covers three aspects — sex, violence, and language.

  • Bluntly: If it is a sex act, or particularly steamy, it is not PG-13, regardless of how tastefully you think you're posing, or how you expect to go silent if walked in on.
  • For innuendo, context matters. If players are in a gentleman's club, the expected level of innuendo is higher and players uncomfortable with this should probably keep their characters out of that location. If players are in a pleasant upscale cafe, they can rightfully expect to not see suggestive behavior (although it could certainly happen on a transient basis and can be handled with appropriate IC outrage).
  • Graphic descriptions of violence in a spattergore manner are outre' and not PG-13.
  • The occasional expletive is within the boundaries of PG-13. Being a complete potty-mouth is probably excessive and should be avoided.

Player-owned rooms are also subject to the rules set by their owners. If a room owner is uncomfortable with particular content in their room, no matter what it is, they have a right to say, OOC, "Take it elsewhere".

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