Nexus Clash Rules Changes

[Fellis]

Hello! After a lot of discussion and drafting, we have decided to change and clarify many elements of the community and game rules for Nexus Clash, and our moderation process. The relevant forum posts are linked below:

The Rules

Disciplinary Process

Unintended Interations, Known Exploits, and Blocked Actions

Also this post is a short blog that I have written to discuss the changes. I have structured it into two sections: A succinct TL;DR first, and a more rambling blog post with my thoughts second.


Moderation changes:
We understand that some players have a dim view of the quality of moderation actions in the past, and we have implemented these changes to our procedures that we hope will give some confidence for the future:

• Moderation actions relating to gameplay rules are written up and viewed by a larger team than just “Administrators”. The entire development team is able to view any pending moderation action related to in-game rules, and has input on any actions taken.
• Moderation actions relating to the breaking of community rules are typically subject to the same policy, but sometimes may be confined to a smaller group depending on the context.
• With a larger team reviewing, anyone with a conflict of interest, admin or otherwise, will not be part of any final decision.
• Any player subject to gameplay moderation will be contacted for their input on the moderation, via Forum or Discord PM, prior to any action being taken.
• We are working on using a better tone for communication during moderation actions. There have been complaints in the past that moderation communication is condescending, and that does not accurately represent the attitudes of the moderation team towards players that break game rules. We want people to keep playing our game, not make them feel like criminals.
• A better tone includes changing instances of in-game text indicating a rule-blocked action to be more clear of the cause of a blocked action. This is a work-in-progress!
• We will try to communicate with players who make reports in a timely fashion indicating if action was taken on their report, although we will not be revealing the details.
• We will write up a more concise and clear version of the rules.

Community Expectations:
I want to clearly state that alt abuse in the game is typically a mistake, and a verbal reminder or short timeout on the characters involved is enough for players to be more mindful. Cases where alt abuse is intentional is typically obvious to the development team, either by the frequency, or scope of the abuse. In either case, it is the responsibility of the development team to determine the motivation and the punishment for any violation of the rules. The best thing players can do is report all suspected cases of alt abuse or other rules violations, and let the development team take over from there. If you do not feel comfortable reaching out to someone on the development team, it’s acceptable to let your faction leader or another player reach out instead. Unspoken concerns are guaranteed to go unheard. Similarly, when we get it wrong, please appeal your case and we will absolutely listen.

Do not cause drama by bringing up suspected alt abuse or rule infractions in our public discord server, nor should you vilify players you suspect of alt abuse in private servers. It’s not productive, nor healthy for the community.


Rule Changes
This is not a substitute for reading the new rules! I am just explicitly stating some bigger changes here:

• Attacking/healing a player that you have previously attacked/healed, even with an alt, now does not “auto-miss”, nor generate a zerg flag status. Instead it will generate 0 XP and provide a message regarding the lack of experience gain. Stats are still gained from attacks/kills. NPCs are exempt from this and MO shifts are unaffected. Currently not fully implemented, will remove this once it is and make additional discord announcement/post
• Coordinating with other players to open locks, flip power, flip infusion tiles, or hit/healing is no longer banned, however XP caps are still in effect from actions involving other characters.
• The cooldown on interactions with alts has been lowered from 24 hours to 22 hours. This is intended to provide for players to play their characters at roughly the same time every day without having to worry about waiting till the exact minute to be within the rules. We still would prefer at least 24 hours between alt interactions, but the strict rule is now 22 hours. This is a trial rule change, and we are open to lowering it further if this doesn’t generate excessive additional moderation actions.
• Play Reasonably Nicely (in-game) - Please read this new section of the rules!
• Treat Fellow Players with Respect - Please read this new section of the rules!
• Catchall Rule - Please read this new section of the rules!

[Fellis]

Blog part (in reverse order)

Rule changes:
First off, a goal of the rule changes is trying to improve some of the quality of life for players who are acting in good faith. The development team does not expect players to be perfect in their execution of the rules, and the player base should not expect that from their fellow players. I would consider this a core part of our community, nearly everyone learning this game for the first time will have some instance of unintentional alt abuse pointed out to them by someone who has been playing a bit longer. The development team has been looking into codifying (literally) more blocks on alt actions where appropriate, so it is easier to play the game with clear and non-accusatory indicators of when you might be crossing the line.

Another goal was increased clarity of the rules, and creating a “common situations” primer for Alt rules. I don’t expect these new rules to be perfect, but we are trying to update, improve, and change things as the game moves forward. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns. I’ve had the largest hand in the rules re-write, but many other developers and some community members have helped me with edits and general thoughts on them.

Community Expectations:
Nexus Clash is a unique game and we have some complex rules to abide by because of it. Nexus Clash also has a long (15 years including Nexus War!) history. It has gone from being a game that other established communities on various forums engaged in, to being its own community of very dedicated players. In the past it was a lot easier to not be mindful of other players, especially as the game was so big that running into multiple characters of the same player was rare. Now it is common and can feel like an awkward twisty dance to make sure your character interactions are clean.

The rules of the game would be much simpler if players were confined to one character, however the time-based cooldown on play of the game would make it much less engaging with only that single character. There’s also the aspect of Nexus Clash that with a community of our size (small), a volunteer development team, and our general sandbox nature, there is some burden on the playerbase to engage in more respectful metagame play. While PvP conflict is a centerpiece of the game, we don’t have tight design and limitations on player actions that many other PvP games do, nor do we currently have great design space for catch-up mechanics or secrecy (like retreating to a hidden corner of the map to rebuild).

I have discussed this with other players many times, and I’ve frequently seen respectful metagame play referred to as a “carebear” mentality and a nostalgic desire for times past where you could raid someone “into the ground”. What I’ve never seen is any good argument for taking that mentality to its logical endpoint, where one faction has dominated all the rest and nobody wants to play the game anymore. Sure, other factions could band together and defeat the dominant faction, but what would really happen is that it would become a complete meta-conflict where players would be split on the actions of everyone involved and would generate a huge amount of drama as both sides worked to vilify and belittle the other. I don’t think the game is interesting enough to keep people’s attention through something like that.

As an aside, what’s the solution? Make the game more interesting and engaging on a casual level without needing to follow 4+ discord servers. Grow the game, get us back to 1000+ active characters and regain some of that old time feeling where the pool of active raiding folks isn’t the same 50 people on 200 characters. It’s not going to be easy, and there’s so much to do before I feel comfortable spending resources on advertising the game. There will be attrition as breath 5 drags a little in its second year, but I’m not worried. Take a break if you have to! We’ll still be here.

I find it better to think of the game currently as a large shared tabletop roleplaying experience (because that’s basically what it is). Heavy conflict between player characters (or factions) can happen, but it needs to be pretty mature and anyone is allowed to call a time-out if they need to be. You don’t get to harass others so much that they want to leave, you will be asked to leave instead. Instead, work towards creating interesting conflict with other folks and see how it plays out. Write up some informal rules of engagement and have it out with another faction. Heck, if you and another faction want to put up a wager of renown or something, with some defined victory conditions, let us know! We’re trying our best to figure out some more interesting conflict mechanics, but there’s a lot on the plate to figure out. In the meantime, we will require a measure of metagame respect to be enforced in our rules.

Moderation Changes:
As mentioned, we have already implemented a lot of the bullet points listed above. I think this has generated some very good outcomes already and avoided some drama that could have happened otherwise. It’s been said a million times, but nobody joined the Dev Team to be a community manager or rules adjudicator. It’s the most painful and demoralizing part of my responsibility to the community, especially dealing with the fallout of decisions we make. I’m aware of bad decisions in the past, and I’m never going to have interest in re-litigating those, especially things from before I became an admin. I’m hoping that we can regain some trust with our approach going forward, and feel free to reach out to me if you would like to discuss any aspect of the changes I’ve laid out above.

Thanks for reading if you made it to the end!
Fellis

[Fellis]

Anyone is welcome to post feedback on rule changes here. We will likely use another google doc questionnaire for anonymous feedback, but that might be a few weeks.

[Alkasyn]

Interesting to read the reasoning behind these changes, so thank you for sharing.

I'll think if I have anything else to add later

[Violet Ultra]

[*]Coordinating with other players to open locks, flip power, flip infusion tiles, or hit/healing is no longer banned, however XP caps are still in effect from actions involving other characters.

That was banned before?
I never thought I'd feel lucky to be so poorly coordinated that I couldn't even get a simple door repair/lockpicking loop going with somebody