Rules:CvC Gentlemen's Agreement

Player Guidelines

Player guidelines aren't official rules, and don't have formal punishments for breaking them, but they are community guidelines accepted and followed by the community of players. Team View on Player Guidelines

CvC Gentlemen's Agreement

The Gentlemen's Agreement is a set of rules created and enforced by players governing behavior in CvC combat. The most likely consequence of breaking any of these rules is that your own character wouldn't be covered by them either, specially by the no looting rule.

Gentlemen's Agreement:

1. No looting of items except for consumables/replaceables: A weapon, a helm or a magical wand are examples of things that can't be looted under general circumstances. Items that can be looted include but are not limited to magical potions, healing kits, ammunition, crafting components, gems and scrolls.
2. Withdrawal upon defeat: If you are defeated in CvC you must not attack the enemy who defeated you until twenty four real time hours have passed. Leaving the area where you were defeated is the best way to achieve this. The purpose of this rule is to give some meaning to victories achieved in CvC.
3. No use of "banned" spells: Bigby's Forceful Hand is the only spell that at this time of writing has been considered "broken" for CvC purposes. No other spells are forbidden by the Gentlemen's Agreement even though some players might frown upon certain other spells. Regardless, everything else can be used.

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The Meaning of "The Team Frowns Upon It"

What does "The Team frowns upon it" mean?

The best way to illustrate this is with an example:

Bob the player has been an upstanding member of the community. He has never broken the rules, and he has never powergamed or generally pissed off the other players. One day, Bob stumbles upon a bug that duplicates his most expensive item. For some reason, Bob does not report this to the Team. Someone finds out about it and reports Bob. The Team gives Bob a Watchlist entry and talks about whether they should ban him or not. Seeing as he's generally a good guy, the Team settles on taking the duplicated item away from Bob, vault jailing him for a few days, and then letting him go free to continue to play here.

Now look at Jane. Jane is a bit of an addict and went from level 1 to 20 in 2 months. Most of the time, the Team notices that she's playing alone and soloing the Lost River Caverns. For the most part Jane's addiction is allowed to continue. The Team frowns upon it, but is not going to penalize her. The other players may not like her for being a powergamer, but that's not the Team's problem. Then one day, Jane breaks into a player's private house and steals the entire contents of a persistent chest just as the owner of the house walks in on her. Jane's been caught stealing. The player reports Jane. Jane gets a Watchlist entry. The Team may have originally vault jailed her for a few weeks for the offense, but Jane is known to have a powergaming addiction, which is frowned upon. Because Jane broke the rules AND is also a powergamer, Jane gets banned.

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Powergaming

Note on Powergaming

Powergaming is one of those things where there is an official rule that says one thing, and a player-driven rule that says something else. Often, the players here will build a fence around the official rules so they become harder to break. This is one of those cases.

As it says in the rules forum, the official Team stance on powergaming is that we frown upon it and ignore those those who do it.

The player-driven rule generally says that powergaming is likely to get you a bad reputation in the community. Unfortunately, we sometimes have players that are quick to accuse people of powergaming. The term gets thrown around in this community much like the term "RP'er" gets thrown around like a curse in the Ultima Online or other MMOG communities. Please understand that this is a cultural thing and that you should take the accusation with a grain of salt.

"Officially" you should do what makes you happy in this server, so long as you don't disrupt other or break the official rules. If you choose to care about what names other people call you, that is ok too, but please do not take that as a reflection of our entire world. As a world, we try to welcome everyone, and we try not to wrongly accuse people of doing things that are not welcome here.