Rules
From StarWiki
StarMUD is a service provided free of charge. You have been granted the privilege to use it, provided you follow the rules in this document. It is the player's responsibility to read and understand these rules before making use of StarMUD in any way.
If you violate the rules, either knowingly or unknowingly, we may ask you to stop. If you persist or become abusive, belligerent, or argumentative with a member of the MUD's wizard staff, we have the right and the ability to remove you from the MUD. Our staff are here to code new features and enjoy themselves; being abused is not part of the job. No one pays us to put up with abusive and rude people, or cheaters - and we have no interest in wasting time dealing with said people, so the fastest solution is usually the one taken - immediate removal from the game.
That being said...
If StarMUD were a movie, it would be rated NC17. We expect a certain level of maturity in our players. It is not uncommon to have topics of an adult or offensive nature on public channels. If you are easily offended by such things, perhaps StarMUD is not right for you.
The most important thing to remember when spending time on StarMUD is to exercise your common sense. If you find doing this difficult, please read on to discover the guidelines to be followed while spending your time here. These rules are a mashed collection of things the StarMUD admin staff has decided it should try to police to keep things fair for everyone. It is largely comprised of things learned through over ten years of experience we have accumulated in the life of StarMUD. This document, like the entire MUD, is constantly changing. You, as the player, are responsible for knowing and understanding its contents at all times. If you are unclear about something here, ask an admin for clarification.
Contents |
Harassment
Harassment is defined as doing anything to intentionally annoy, insult, or otherwise hinder someone else's enjoyment of the game. We do expect StarMUD's players to be mature enough to handle jokes, adult language and adult topics of various natures, but blatant attacks on other users will not be tolerated. This includes creating a character with a similar name as another user, or looting other players kills repeatedly. Since there is such a fine line between joking or 'playing an evil character' and harassment, each incident must be dealt with on a case by case basis. All we ask is that you show a small amount of respect for the other players.
Bug Abuse
As StarMUD is an ever developing and changing game, quite frequently there are parts of the code that do not work properly. Recognizing any error in the MUD code and not reporting it immediately will be dealt with swiftly and harshly - whether such bugs were taken advantage of or not. This place does not work unless everyone works together to keep it fair, and in some cases, it may not work at all if the code is erroring. There are many ways provided to report bugs; the 'gen.bugs' newsgroup (help news), the 'report' command, and there almost always is an admin logged in which you are welcome to speak directly to.
Multiple Login
On StarMUD, each player is permitted to have as many characters as they so choose, but they may only have one single character logged into the MUD at any given time. Any more than one, and all offending characters will be removed. This includes logging in of Guest, or one character going netdead (disconnecting without actually typing 'quit') and another logging in.
A wizard and his/her test character may be double logged in, or a wizard of Archwizard rank or higher may remain logged in with his/her wizard while playing. If there are two players who wish to play from the same IP address, they must mail admin and notify them BEFORE logging both characters into the MUD, or ALL characters from the offending IP can and will be removed at the admin's discretion.
Sharing characters is not permitted. Each character is linked to a single account, and only the owner of that account may play that character.
Botting
The use of client automation, including the built-in StarMUD triggers, alarms, and aliases, to improve your character in a continuous loop without interactive play is illegal, regardless of your presence at the keyboard. Interactive play is defined as you, the player, giving continuous direction to the actions of your character. This also prohibits the use of your client as an anti-idle mechanism; your character should not be performing actions when you are not at the keyboard. Continuation of an already-started passive action, such as researching, is permissible.
The use of clients to send commands to the MUD at unnecessary speeds (more than three or four commands a second) is not permitted.
We cannot tolerate people who don't actually want to play the MUD but instead prefer to use resources available to them to pump up their character with as little effort as possible so they can boost their own fragile egos.
Transfers
It is greatly frowned upon for high eval characters to transfer any amount of money or equipment to low eval players which severely affect their game play. This will be judged on a case by case basis, but one should use their common sense. If you want to help a newbie, try 'help team'.
This rule extends to the logging in of one character to transfer money or equipment to another character belonging to the same person in any way, including using another player to hold items and give them to your other character. At the very least, the offending character's equipment could be removed, but if you are caught frequently doing this, most likely all offending characters will be removed from the MUD.
Further, this rule extends to assisting any of your other characters in any way. For example, killing a difficult monster or removing an obstacle with one character and then logging on another character to take advantage of the situation thus created.
Giving out any information on quests is illegal. Explaining that a quest exists, or pointing to help files is permitted. For example: "The Highlander Rings quest is on Milliways."
This rule extends to any information acquired by one character, may not be used to benefit another character belonging to the same player. Which means, you may not learn of someone going unconscious as a paramedic and then log in an outlaw to go murder them. Nor may you use find commands to locate someone and then log in another character to track them.
This extends to the logging in as Guest to see if there are outlaws on, etc. Guest is ONLY for for Guests of the MUD. It is not your personal, anonymous login toy.
Spam
Sending an unreasonable, or annoying amount of text over public or private channels. This includes having any alias or trigger to send pre-written text over a chatline. If you feel you can't control your urge to do this, use the 'spam' channel, which is intended for such usage.
Player Killing
Player killing, more commonly known as pking, is perfectly legal on StarMUD - for those who decide to be outlaws. Some character types on StarMUD will fall unconscious before actually dying.
Non-outlaws generally may not be PKed. There are certain specific circumstances in which they may be; attacking them outside these circumstances is illegal. Attempting to lure them unawares into a situation where they may be PKed is generally a bad idea.
Repeatedly killing any player to attempt to gain benefit, such as changing your pk stats, is considered illegal. If you can't manage to raise your pk stats in the proper way, maybe you shouldn't be playing an outlaw.
This also extends to repeatedly attacking and dying to someone in an effort to alter pkstats, or perhaps get them in trouble.
Killing a character with more than two characters linked to your account in one reboot is also a violation of this rule, unless you can prove they were attacking you first.
Veterans & Superplayers
Veterans and superplayers are considered to be experienced and have common sense. This means that they will be held to a higher standard regarding the rules.
A person may have only one superplayer.
Email Addresses
The email address on your account must be valid. You may have only ONE account.
