Acceptable Use of Chat Channels

[Dirge]

The Awakening rules will be getting some new additions and this post will serve as the unofficial announcement to some of those rules. We have made many attempts over the last several months to keep general chat a mostly friendly environment by giving players an alternative place for their smack talk and encouraging the use of /addignore and having private conversations with many of our players. We also did not get involved over every little infraction because we did not want to give the impression that we are going to rule chat with an iron fist - not to mention, we don't have time to monitor the behavior of adults 24/7 and should not be expected to. However, we feel our hand is being forced by the behavior of a handful of individuals and we are going to be drawing a hard line. There will be no pointing across the line to another player. There will be no grey area. There will be zero tolerance.

• The only public channel that smack talk will be permitted is the PvP channel, even if PvP is not the source of the discussion. On a future update this will be renamed to reflect the intent. This will include any comments made with the intention of trolling, harassing, or offending another player, group, or guild. This rule will cover both direct and indirect comments.
• Using the Awakening Discord to post any comments covered by the acceptable use for the channel will result in the immediate removal of permissions to that channel. We strongly encourage players to use the /addignore feature so they don't need to see communications from people they do not like and will continue to do so. But using Discord removes the /addignore option unless the offended user ignores the Discord bot. This is not an acceptable solution. Going forward communications posted to the linked channels from Discord will be held to a higher standard than in-game messages posted to our public channels.

Additionally, the rules will be updated to outline what is considered harassment. The founders of this server never really defined what type of behavior rose to that level. We will be. If you think you may be walking that line now... you probably are and should probably reconsider some of your decisions.

For those of you out there that are going to point to this post and claim we are becoming a "carebear server", I'm going to argue that this is not about making sure everyone gets along but demanding that there is a bit of civility and respect displayed in our public chat channels. We are going to continue to encourage PvP (where many of the issues begin) because the GCW should be an important part SWG, and the Jedi/BH game may see some changes but is not going away. There can be a mutual respect shown between opponents and would we would prefer to see more of that displayed after battles, but when discussions get heated we expect those conversations to move to the appropriate channel.

If you have any questions regarding any of this information, feel free to send me a Discord or forum PM and I will try to respond when I am available to do so.