Hi guys! I have just noticed that while we do have rules in place for our clans, teamspeak and servers we don’t have our general community guidelines posted up anywhere official so I figured that I would do this now in case anyone new wanted to read them. They are mostly common sense and easy to follow without even having to think about them but I just wanted to type them up so that they are clear for everyone to see should we need to refer to them. 🙂
1] Be friendly, pleasant and respectful to other community members. Bullying, rudeness and harassment will not be tolerated.
2] Don’t encourage others to break rules on any of our servers/clans/services.
3] Refrain from spamming chat, this goes for on the forum, discord, TeamSpeak or in-game and applies to spamming over the microphone as well as text chat.
4] Do not impersonate other community/staff members or claim to be a member of Staff.
5] Respect our staff members and their instructions/decisions.
6] Do not cheat, steal or scam. Using software that gives you an unfair advantage when playing games with us will end in immediate exclusion this also applies to any attempts to steal or scam other players.
7] Report any issues or bugs you encounter on our servers to the relevant support sections on our forum so that we can try to resolve them.
8] If you have a complaint about any other member of the community, (including staff) please file a player complaint at the appropriate forum.
9] Don’t link to or post offensive or harmful material, such as pornography, “shock sites”, viruses, phishing sites and hate groups.
10] Advertising is not allowed. We feel it is a bit rude. We ask that you don’t link to Communities or Groups, Youtube Channels, Twitch Channels and Discord Servers while using our services unless given permission from the Community Manager.
11] No offensive usernames. This applies to Discord, Teamspeak, Forum and in-game usernames. You may be asked to use a different account if your username is found to be inappropriate. If you refuse to change your username you will be banned.
12] Not knowing the rules is not a valid excuse for breaking them.
13] Staff Members reserve the right to exclude anyone from any and/or all services for any infraction of the rules or situations deemed necessary.
By using our services, you hereby agree to abide by our community’s rules, guidelines, terms and conditions.
If you have been promoted to staff you should only use your powers to keep the peace, expel trouble makers and to help grow and support our community. If you abuse the authority and power entrusted to you in order to bully, silence or exclude anyone who is abiding by community rules you will quickly lose your staff position. Being staff doesn’t elevate you above our other community members, it just gives you the tools needed to better help and support the community.
2) Reprimanding Community Members Must Be Fair and Unbiased.
If a community member has broken the rules the punishments must fit the infraction. Warn a community member first if what they are doing breaks our rules. If they continue further action can be taken and the community member can be excluded if necessary. Furthermore, if you have a personal problem with another community member (for example if they annoy you or don’t agree with you) that doesn’t give you the right to impose bans on them (as long as they aren’t breaking the community rules) in this case you can mute/ignore them. Banning the player would be a breach of professional conduct and as such an abuse of your position.
3) Represent the Community Positively.
As a staff member you are the face of our community. You are still held to the standard rules our regular members are subject to, being a staff member doesn’t mean our regular rules don’t apply to you. Be friendly, welcome new community members, answer questions and do your best to calmly resolve altercations between members should they arise.
4) Having an Outbreak Gaming Forum Account is Required for a Staff Position.
The forum isn’t used much but it is a useful communication tool for staff and it gives other community members a point of contact for every staff member in the community. It is important that you have a registered account on the Outbreak Gaming forum so that this is the case. (Most of you may be reading this from the forum but this may also be posted to new staff members so I wanted to include it as one of our rules.) In addition to this I want us to get into the habit of posting bans to the ban reports section on our staff forum so that we have a log of when, where and why bans are issued.
5) All Bans Must Be Logged on The Ban Reports Staff Sub Forum.
I would like all further bans as from 07/09/2018 onwards to be recorded on our Ban Reports staff sub forum. As mentioned before this is to speed up the unban process, to make the whole bans process easier and so we have an accurate log of any serious breach of the rules that has resulted in a ban. We don’t have to ban community members often so I’m hoping that having to write up a ban report on the odd occasion that we do have to ban someone won’t add too much hardship to the job. The benefits of this system outweigh the 5 minutes it would take to type up a ban report so please make sure we use this system going forward.
6) All Staff Should be aware of the General Community Rules. (Listed Above.)
It stands to reason that you should know our community’s rules if you are going to be a staff member, there’s a good chance you already know them inside out, they are kind of common sense really and chances are that as a staff member you already know them but if you don’t please familiarize yourself with our rules so you know when someone is breaking them and can sanction offending players accordingly.