So I thought we might try and have a discussion about public server rules and regulations.
I will try and be as objective as I can about this. Obviously all server admins have the power to set their own rules and regulations, and they can simply ignore the rest of the community. But I think there is an opportunity here to have some discussion and possibly reach some kind of consensus or even a partial consensus.
I will start by talking about TAW’s viewpoint. We only have rules against:
-disrespecting other players (ie: racist remarks, insults, etc. We try and mute first, then kick, and finally ban if you don’t stop)
-making continuous VOIP or text disturbances (we will try and mute you first but if you quit and rejoin to clear the mute we will kick or ban)
-extreme profanity (we don’t flip out over occasional slips, but repeated offenders = mute/kick and finally ban if you don’t stop)
-glitches (ie: volcano, valley, slipgate, refinery, etc.)
-recruiting on our servers (this is a no-brainer right?)
-impersonating TAW members by wearing the TAW tags without permission (we will try and warn you/ ask you to remove them first before we kick/ban)
-disrespecting the TAW organization repeatedly (another no-brainer right?)
-continuous/intentional team-killing (another no-brainer right?)
We do kick a lot of people randomly to make room for TAW members when the server is full. Usually we choose the person with the lowest XP or the person with the highest ping. We always spam a text warning before we do it as well. However, now that we have two ranked servers, we don’t do it as much.
Other than that stuff, we don’t kick or ban people. And we NEVER do it for gameplay reasons. I must say that I disagree with the following server rules that I have seen on other servers:
kick/ban for:
-/kill (it’s part of the game… they gave us that command and a spawn timer for a reason. There is nothing wrong with trying to make a spawn timer, or trying to deprive the enemy team of kill XP to prevent them from getting unlocks and advantages over you)
-planting on North Sewer Grate, destroying strogg deployables on Volcano (I mean, come on, why have rules against these?!)
-killing too much (I still see a lot of kicks of people who are “too good” by bad admins, and lots of people that I know, it’s very sad)
-having a net_clientprediction close to 0 or even 0 itself. (This is an id game people, it was MEANT to be configurable. If you don’t like that and want a game that won’t let the user modify lots of cvars or hardly any, there is always MW2 or BC2. If people have a good internet connection, why should they be forced to play with 20-25 client prediction? That’s like forcing someone with a 42" screen to play 800X600 because it is “unfair” for them to use 1920X1080 and visdistmult 1.2)
-spawn camping (nothing wrong with this, it’s part of the game and the enemy will often hide high-value deployables inside their base, or they will snipe from inside their base/spawn. For many maps, like Outskirts, the teams spawn very close to the objective so if the GDF DON’T spawncamp on the last obj they have almost no chance of transmitting without the single-most coordinated team of medics you’ve ever seen)
I would like to invite other server admin.s and community members to weigh on this. I think it is important to discuss this stuff because if we improve the overall level of admin actions on a lot of servers, more people will stay with this game and not move onto crappy games like MoH (I verified that it’s a BC2 clone at PAX, even the devs there seemed depressed), MW2, BC2, COD7, etc.
