This article is currently only a proposal

The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It has not been evaluated or accepted by the core development team yet. Feel free to add your personal opinion about them or make counter proposals.

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Being a GM (game master) is a responsible job. In part, your actions affect what the community will be like. Hence, here are some basic guidelines to help you make decisions.

General guidelines

1. Use your own common sense. You are a GM because we have trust in your judgment.
2. Keep your influence on the game and game play at a minimum.
3. You can't favor your friends, just as you can't disfavor your enemies, as a GM.
4. GM commands must only be used to enforce the game rules and for neutral announcements for player events.

Enforcing the rules

Rules and punishment for breaking them

The primary job of a GM is to keep people happy with the game by enforcing The Rules. The rules below are suggested and may differ case-by-case. Standard punishment for each rule varies:

1. Do not abuse other players (insults, swearing, and the like directed to a particular person or persons)

Punishment: Request the player(s) ignore each other or an hour ban for excessive abuse. Punishment may increase should abuse continue. Reason for punishment: To encourage a player to not use derogatory language against other players or directed at groups of people (such as racist, sexist, homophobic language). Punish extreme cases only.

2. No bots (and botting means ANY unauthorized activity while away from keyboard, automated activity with one or more players or multi-boxing)

Punishment: Permanent ban. Reason for punishment: To encourage a social environment in the game. AFK killing takes up an area where monsters typically spawn and prevents players that are actively playing the game from having access to the monsters. It creates an unfair advantage over other players that play the game without botting. It discourages social interaction and the party system. It grants monster drop scavengers an advantage of growing in wealth without having killed monsters to receive it.

3. No game abuse (this includes, but is not limited to spamming, flooding, lagging and bug abuse)

Punishment: Talk spam: automatic ban, 1 hour. Other similar effects can be punished by warping, kicking, or banning the offender for an hour. Continued offenses can result in longer punishments, including a permanent ban. What constitutes lagging is decided on a per-case basis; GMs should use their best judgment in cases without precedent. Other GMs may challenge new precedents in the forums and are otherwise bound to adhere to them. Reason for punishment: Game abuse, like deliberately lagging other players, can cause clients to slow or crash and log out of the server.

4. No begging

Punishment: Kicking the offender or an hour ban. Continued offenses can result in longer punishments. Reason for Punishment: Primarily an annoyance, it can also grant a player an unfair advantage without fighting the monsters. Begging sometimes can be considered chat spam, but not always. It also causes players that might otherwise be good natured to become less social in the game and resent players that might need actual assistance in the game.

5. Speak English on public chat

Punishment: Request players whisper privately in public spaces or move to another area to talk. Not speaking English may not be an automatic offense if a player is unfamiliar with English and is requesting assistance. Refusing to speak English can result in kicking, an hour ban or longer punishment should the offender continue. Reason for Punishment: Social interaction, understanding the rules and other problems that may occur in the game may not be understood, so players are usually encouraged to understand some English in order to interact with the game. Without understanding this rule, some players may abuse the rules and then claim to not understand the GM when the GM is attempting to enforce the rules.

Keeping track of who is banned, why and when

The GM Log and the Court House helps to keep track of who was banned and why. GMs are are expected to explain the reason for a ban for the GM Log and announce bans longer than an hour in the Court House for the sake of transparency.

Once a player is banned, a player often comes to the Court House to ask to be unbanned. In the case of some permanent bans (typically first time botting) the player's character may be reset, at the GM's discretion.

Command reference

There are many command commands GMs use. All of them are logged. Here is a selection of the more important ones:

• @ban <player name> — Ban temporarily an account

  Where is a numerical value and an unit of time (s, mn, h, d, m, y), eg. 1h or 3d

• @unban <player name> — Unban an account
• @block <player name> — Used for permanent bans for botting and hacking
• @charreset <player name> — Reset stats and skills of a character
• @charbaselvl <#> <player name> — Adjust a character's base level, a number of 1 adds a level and -1 takes a level
• @spawn <monster> [<number to spawn>] — Spawn a number of monsters (default is one monster)

  Where <monster> is either the ID or label, eg. the Alizarin Plant can be given as 1032 or AlizarinPlant

• @hide — Make yourself invisible to monsters and on the list of users online
• @warp <map> <x> <y> — Warps yourself to map at location, eg. @warp new_3-1 30 30
• @charwarp <map> <x> <y> <player name> — Same as above, but warps the given player instead of yourself
• @recall <player name> — Warps the player to you
• @goto <player name> — Warps you to the player
• @die — Kills your own character
• @log <text> — Write some text to the GM log; can also use @l
• @tee <text> — Same as @log, but also sends the text to normal chat; can also use @t
• @invisible — Makes you completely invisible
• @visible — Turns off invisibility

The information above is based on the conf/help.txt and conf/atcommand_local.conf files.