General My opinions on the game server rules and how they could be improved

I do agree, but

I know I'm talking possible absolute nonsence now, but i have no idea how you would be able to bypass a check that is literally every tick with no exceptions other than radius from spawn when you also have to use an exploit to even get to where you might be affected by it??.... And if it's generally impossible to bypass, why make a rule?....

It would be best to first implement the OOB check we are talking about here, and only then see if it can be bypassed and if the rule is still needed. It technially falls into "proper gameplay restrictions in place of verbal ones", so...

________________________________

Wah, it's second page!

 

people will find a way around it and it would be tedious to set them up everywhere

 

anyway
i know this but there still is the issue of it not hurting anyone
Unless out of bounds content is used to gain any meaningful gameplay advantage, it's harmless to explore as well as share it.

 

A leak can create false expectations for an upcoming update, and if the leaked content doesn't get added to an update, people become very toxic towards the devs. This toxicity is the reason why Grian went invisible on the forums.

 

Seems like very much a people problem.

I will have to do something with the whole leak information thing, but i'll do that tomorrow. Maybe just because i have no idea what to do here.
I think we are done on the topic of offmap? It's the fact of leaking information that is hurtful here, right? We just need to isolate the exact part of leaking information that causes problems and try to prevent it.

As I said, the fact of offmap exploration does not hurt anyone, but what follows could. There could be some abusable part of offmap, but chances are one will not find it, so offmap stuff should be handled on a case by case basis. And there should be SOME sort of protection from getting offmap too.

We are worrying about the leaks now. A little information doesn't hurt aynone too, but as you said, it CAN create stress and unneeded expectations or the developers. I do want to see a case of this happening somewhere.

________________________________

My head is so fucking close to exploding the whole thing makes no sence at all help

________________________________

I still don't know what to do with this. At best I'd think leaving it as is would be fine, because, well, it's a people problem, it makes sence that the contents of a leak are not guaranteed to go into production, and making a quarrel about this is nonsensical, and if someone does this and doesn't stop when asked to they should get a mute for harassment. That's all I see here. The no leaks rule is too broad to just stay as it originally is - it should be adjusted to directly adress what it's designed to prevent, or be removed altogether.

 

See my reply.
It won't be perfect. Perhaps there is a lag and the trigger doesn't work or there is an area without it (because there are ton of off-map areas used for quests) or something (actually I thought up a few ways I could in theory do it). But trust me, someone will find a way.

Either way, why not have the rule? Is it useless piece of text? No. Does it give a failsafe when someone gets past? Yes.
Also, I think this is getting more into another rule, so I will stop here.

 

hi! i'd like to say that i am not speaking on behalf of the whole team here but i thought i could try to clarify a few things
(i know a lot of this has already been said but i want to go over it all as well just in case)

the reason this is a rule is because the people creating the game don't want the things they've been working on to be revealed before the actual release of the game
it's not just about admins engineering hype for updates (which i'd argue is still a valid reason for them to disallow it), a lot of ct want people to be genuinely excited to see/play their stuff and if we let players leak it beforehand that'd make people a lot less excited to get to actually play
going off-map is disallowed mostly as an extension of that, we can't really let people explore out there freely while saying they're not allowed to show anything they find, and since it's already bannable i assume it wouldn't be a great use of effort to set up systems to teleport you back on-map for every single quest/discovery/dungeon zone in the game

putting stuff on the trade market does not count as scamming under this rule since you aren't tricking anyone, you're just putting the item there and saying how much you want for it
tricking would mean that you actively told someone that something is worth more or less than it actually is to get a better deal and then manually traded for it, not anything involving the in-game trade market
we also do try to let people undo trades if they scammed someone, we won't just ban them immediately for doing it once

the reason is like you said, unintended glitched items could mess with the economy and the admins don't want items that were never meant to exist in the game to be important to the economy rather than intended items like mythics
also, the mod team doesn't deal with glitches and it seems cruel to just take away everyone's glitched items, so it's just disallowed to trade them for the most part instead

this is kind of similar to the off-map rule, i agree that there could be better built-in restrictions on player made invasions but i don't see any reason not to punish people for doing it deliberately
and about totems, we're not going to punish you for putting one down inside a city if it's not spawning any mobs so this really just applies to edge cases like olux where i think you could understand why it's not allowed to put totems there

it's not just about out of bounds stuff, seeing inside caves (as i understand it) would essentially be a form of x-ray vision which isn't allowed because seeing into places vanilla players can't see would be a pretty clear unfair advantage (the same as entity radar and stuff)

this wouldnt really help the problem, many afk farmers arent just sitting there not moving but instead have some sort of bot set up which would make it seem like theyre not afk to any automated system, which is why we have to go out and punish for this manually
and about quest mobs i admit that one's a bit weird but as i understand there are some cases where mobs have high xp/loot rates because you're only meant to get their drops as a supplement to doing the actual quest, so grinding them specifically for those drops wouldn't be fair. if i remember right it was added quite a while ago specifically for wynnexcavation which had a fairly big grinding problem at the time, and i guess it's stuck since no one wants to encourage grinding outside of actual grind spots


hope that all makes sense, sorry if any of it was too harsh but i do think most of the rules have good reasons to be the way they are even if they seem annoying

 

Thanks so much! It all makes sence really. Though those rules still need clarification to them to adress the exact issue they are supposed to prevent/be less harsh, they are needed in some form. I'll go over the rules once i get on to my PC.

Well, after all though, if the rule is replaced by a gameplay restriction to the thing it was designed to prevent, can't bypassing this restriction just count as abusing an exploit and be covered by rule 3?...

 

- okay so the only way in which offmap exploration is bad is the leaks, we abstract out everything else - that means we have to make a rule for specifically leaks or clarify rule 4 to cover developer harassment. that's the top priority here.

The rule to prevent offmap exploration should in fact also stay then, but be less strict (because the fact of offmap exploration itself is harmless on its own) - something like "offmap exploration is highly discouraged and will be punished on repeat offences"

- Glitched items could still be traded through /trade, I don't see anything wrong with that. If someone puts one of the market, a moderator would just cancel the trade and return the item to the seller, i know there are ways to. That's a good compromise between those items not flooding the economy and still being able to be traded.

- PMIs have never been a problem for me, so i would assume the likelihood of one being made is really low. Even if one is done, there is no problem with strenghtening city defences and making AI tweaks to mobs to run away from safe areas (that's not diffucut to do, rightt????) There should ideally not be cases where hostile mobs spawn in safe areas. Either make them passive or remove them spawing entirely.

- I don't think cave maps are too problematic by themselves (without entity/chest radars). Seeing offmap with that is also not much of a risk (what could be leaked or gained through a minimap?)

Well, those COULD be problematic in some capacity, but i can't think of a case when they would be problematic enough to excplitly state about them in the rules instead of relying on the moderators' discretion. @ditsario could you please provide an example here? i would be very grateful if you did

- About AFK farming - there should be a system to prevent this and the rules should specify it that bypassing it with macros (see rule 2) is not allowed

The quest mobs thing is indeed really weird. There could be a counter on the player where if they kill a boss/quest mob their 2nd and 3rd etc. time they get decreased loot, or a simpler solution of just putting the boss rewards over the "safe to grind" thresold in quest rewards instead.

Finally i could summarize the whole thing into something comprehendable.

 

I have since made a lot of changes, to the better i hope. Notably, the no trading bugged items rule is back, though still way lighter than in the official rules. It's the minimum to prevent bugged items from flooding the market, but still allowing free trade of the purely cosmetic ones.

The thread itself needs a lot of cleanup, especially rule 3, and i'm also yet to do somthing with 14.

 

Yeah, rule 14 is done, well, for now... the clarification I added is that it does not belong to the game rules. Honestly, it really does not.

 

I am speaking to myself at this point. Unless more feedback is given here, the thread is obvously gonna freeze and get archived at some point.

 

The fact no one reacted for a few days doesn't mean it is dead yet.
Though tbf feedback is not the most active category

 

Yeah it is kind of an inactive category, though this thread is very on topic here.

 

I feel like the forums in general have been pretty inactive these past few days.

 

Precisely what TrapinchO said, and also as a former member of the Moderation Team(and also seeing CT/devs in action even if I'm not in their channels/groups for working) they do pay attention to all feedback threads here. While the activity may sure not look like it is active, they do pay attention and make constant changes to the rules. I can guarantee you that there are probably a lot of changes that people have wanted for some time, even from the Mods themselves on request, but the dev team is relatively small and so priorities are thus focused on said mechanics of the game that are deemed more important, so to speak.

This is why also those said rules exist: Sometimes the devs and CT just cannot fix everything in time. But they do pay attention, they do actively browse through the forums even if they do not appear to active, and they do discuss among each other of what they should do to always keep pushing forward on improving the overall quality of life and player experience.

 

I think this is actually so for every single server out there. The developers don't seem to look at the suggestion, but they do.
Maybe this should be communicated better? Could be as simple as a number of "staff member views", though that'd be an out of place approach.

 

Late, but "offmap exploration is highly discouraged and will be punished on repeat offences" is very wrong. If you engage in offmap exploration you will be permanently banned. If you intentionally go out of bounds you completely deserve it and have it coming

 

This is a compromise already. There is no gameplay advantage to be gained through offmap exploration specifically, and unless the player breaks any other rules using offmap, there no need to be so strict.

 

If you intentionally go out of bounds you are showing a willingness to exploit bugs to get out of bounds. We strictly prohibit any player going out of bounds as it poses risk for them leaking years of hard work and effort that we put into updates.
There may not be a "gameplay advantage" (in most scenarios. In some you can skip whole quest segments) to going out of bounds, but it is putting us as risk of accidentally revealing confidential information.

Regardless of what you do in this "rule rework" project, this rule is basically written in stone.