Welcome! This post lays out rules for the Ludeon community, and the guiding philosophy behind them. These rules apply to all official parts of the RimWorld community, including but not limited to these forums, Reddit, Steam forums, any official Discord or chat server, and Steam workshop discussions.
Philosophy:Our goals with this community are (in no particular order):- We want the Ludeon community to be enjoyable, informative, and inviting to as many people as possible, while also supporting respectful disagreement, unpopular views, the right to freedom of speech, and edgy content that is posted in good faith.
- We want each participant to have the same rights and responsibilities, and to have rules enforced the same way, regardless of identity, connections, or viewpoint.
- We want all participants to be able to predict what is allowed and what isn't instead of being subject to penalties based on standards that seem arbitrary, whimsical, personal, or invented on the spot.
In an open online community attempting to include people with wildly diverse experiences, tastes, worldviews, and cultures, creating and enforcing rules is very difficult. Moderation in such a context requires great personal maturity, a strong sense of responsibility, solid coping strategies when facing conflict and emotionally offensive material, and a dedication to introspecting one's own thought process to ensure it carefully incorporates others' views and judges evenhandedly. Nothing about this is casual. It requires emotional steadiness, a circumspect thinking style which considers different angles carefully and attempts to probe its own biases.
Moderation should be consistent. We want rules to be applied consistently over time, including by different moderators, and to be logically and philosophically consistent with each other. Moderators should enforce the rules, not make up ad-hoc judgments on the spot without reference to rules. This may mean that something apparently "bad" might not get immediately moderated, if there isn't a rule for it. That's expected and acceptable - it's better to have consistent principles and to take the time to think through how rules need to change, instead of wielding power arbitrarily, emotionally, and unpredictably. Many rules changes have second and third-order effects beyond the obvious impact, and these must be considered dispassionately.
Don't scar on the first cut. Local disturbances shouldn't get transformed into permanent, global rules changes too quickly. When there's a disturbance that might seem to need new rules, we should take our time in considering what those changes might be, wait to see how the community to adapts by itself, and let feelings cool on all sides before making permanent changes. Often, no change is necessary.
Each participant in the community has both rights and responsibilities (since rights are almost the same thing as responsibilities when seen from others' point of view). For example, while participants have a responsibility to be mature enough to not lash out destructively or post trollish, deliberately-provocative material, they also have a matching responsibility to maturely cope with challenging material or material that violates their personal moral beliefs. We must balance these responsibilities carefully.
Participants come from diverse background and have diverse interests and feelings, so many things will create a negative emotional reaction in somebody. We don't want to enforce rules against anything anyone finds disagreeable, because we'd have to ban huge swaths of discussions and much of our own games. So each person is expected to have and use coping skills when faced with challenging content. This community is an open space full of diverse people - it isn't a place to post in bad faith deliberately to provoke strong emotions, nor is it a space for mental health treatment (which we are not qualified to provide in any form). In a community of millions of players, with hundreds of thousands participating online, there will be rare individuals with extreme emotional fragility simply because of the numbers of people involved. We wish anyone suffering deep emotional issues the best and hope they will get the individual help they need. At the same time, exceptional cases like this are not by themselves accepted as reasons to lay restrictions on what the rest of those millions of people can talk about or enjoy, because the alternative leads to a sequence of perverse incentives that result in very negative outcomes over time. This community works on the principle that in general, people are anti-fragile, which means they benefit from challenges, the same way a bone grows strong over time under moderate load. We recognize that harmless contact with difficult ideas in a safe environment (like an online discussion about a video game, which unlike many of spheres of life is very easy to detach from) is healthy and generally beneficial, and support the rights of very diverse users to express themselves even if some others don't like what's being said.
Community-wide rules:1.
No personal attacks or criticism of individuals: Even oblique or implied personal attacks or criticism are disallowed. Limitation: Feel free to criticize a game, mod, idea, philosophy, viewpoint, religion, plan, social practice, company, or non-human entity. You can also criticize public figures. Discussion: We all have flaws; pointing them out may very occasionally be useful, but is so often destructive and so outside the purpose of this community that it's better to simply disallow criticism of individuals in any form.
2.
Sustained hostile, resentful, derisive, or angry tone: This rule isn't so much about the content of what you say, but how you say it - you must express yourself in a way that doesn't feel persistently hostile, resentful, derisive, or angry. For example, there is a difference between criticizing a game mod constructively, and criticizing it derisively; doing so derisively is against the rules. Discussion: This doesn't mean everyone has to be happy or have good opinions of everything and everyone all the time - it means that phrasing complaints in constructive ways and without a negative emotional tone leads to much better results all around. We don't want a community where anger, resentment, derision, and hostility are behavioral norms.
3.
Do not respond to rule violations: If you see behavior that seems out of line to you, report the topic/post using the report button. Don't make a fuss about it in the topic itself. Do not message or respond to people who you think are breaking rules. Simply report them, and move on.
4.
No self-promotion: No promotion of your own channel/mod/product. Limitation: You can mention your product or channel in context of other discussions, as long as it's a non-forced mention.
5.
No penalty evasion: If your account is penalized, do not create another to get around the penalty. Doing so will result in more severe penalties.
6.
No doxxing: Posting personal information about anyone is prohibited.
7.
No impersonation: No impersonating other people or forum users.
8.
No piracy: No posting of game pirate links or material. No discussions of game piracy.
9.
No porn: No posting or linking of not safe for work (NSFW), pornographic, or X-rated material. Limitation: This doesn't ban all possibly racy photos (though they will be off-topic in most forums), only specifically pornographic ones.
10.
No sexualization of minors: No sexualization of minors in any medium, or linking thereto.
The following rules affect modders only:11a.
No copying someone else's content or code into your mod without permission: You're not allowed to copy and paste code or content from any other mod, or from an expansion, into your mod without permission from the original author.
11b.
No linking code for users who don't own the product it belongs to: For technical reasons, all our code is packaged up and shipped together, but it's not allowed to make a mod that accesses expansion-specific code unless that mod requires the expansion.
- Q: What is expansion-specific code? A: Code belongs to the product that runs it. If a line of code never runs without the expansion (and without dev tools or mods), it's expansion code.
- Q: But I can see the expansion code. Does that mean I can use it? A: No, for technical reasons all the code is shipped together, as is common practice in many games. However, code belongs to the product that runs it.
- Q: There are expansion checks in the code. If a piece of code doesn't trigger one, does that mean I can use it? A: Not necessarily. These checks are just reminders - they aren't applied before every single line of expansion code because that would be impractical. The rule is as described above.
- Q: Can I use expansion content in my non-expansion mod, if it's disabled for non-expansion users? A: Yes, this is a good solution. You can disable expansion-specific content with conditional patches or code checks. For example, code can check ModLister.RoyaltyInstalled before calling any expansion-specific Ludeon code.
- Q: There's some code where I'm not sure it's part of the expansion or not. A: We're happy to resolve any ambiguities. Please just contact us with the class and method name you're interested in and we'll see whether it runs without the expansion or not.
- Q: Are there any exceptions? A: Code for gendered apparel and the class Sketch are arbitrarily excepted from this rule.
11c.
No close copying of expansion content: Don't make mods with
close design/artistic/text similarities to an expansion but which don't require the expansion. This rule applies even if you didn't copy/paste anything directly and didn't link our code.
Discussion: If you wrote a book about a wizard boy who goes to Bogwarts named Barry Lotter you'd get sued, even if you wrote all the words yourself. You can still write about a wizard boy, but it's well-established in law that there is a line when you're copying even if you didn't actually use copy/paste on your computer. I intend to be as flexible as I reasonably can, but I think everyone understands that having no rule at all about this is an invitation to problems. Just talk to us if there's any question. This rule has never been enforced and is really just a guard against bad faith copying. Unless you're acting in conscious bad faith you're almost certainly fine.12.
No hostile incompatibility: Your mod can't treat any other mod or product in a hostile way. For example, it can't deliberately break another mod's functionality, or deliberately stop the game from working if another mod is loaded.
