Netiquette - The Brettspielwelt Code of Conduct

How to become unpopular?

As you might have guessed, there is a whole range of possibilities. To make your choice easier, we listed some ideas, how to reach your goal of decreasing poularity sooner or later (with some things it might work really quickly). Of course the list is far from being complete, we're not going to make things too easy for you.

Of course, some of the things mentioned are depending on the situation. Someone logging in as "AdolfHitler" and screaming around insults against Jewish people... well surely no one will get offended if you kicked that guy.

Things working wherever you are:

  • You /beam or /summon other users without their agreement
  • You /kick other users or puppets
  • You use commands given to you by rank to show others who's the boss, e.g. /masterreset
  • You as well can simply threat to do something of those
  • You insult other users or shout at them
  • You come into or leave gaming rooms without any word
  • You ignore people talking to you
  • You try all means to get someone losing his or her position (e.g. guild master) and try to grab it yourself
  • If you cannot get it yourself, just get the other guy losing his job

Things working only while you're playing:

  • You enter a room with other users in it and join without being asked to, even better, you immediately start the game.
  • Top score performance: before that you chose one of the options offered
  • You realize you cannot win a game anymore and quit playing on
  • If you lose, you call your opponents cheaters.
  • You have to leave the net for some important reason, but do not explain and leave without a word
  • You know that you do not have the time to play a game until it's finished, but start it anyway
  • If you have to leave, you let your mates do the job of finding a replacement instead of trying to do so yourself (after all: it's none of your business whether the game gets completed, is it?)
  • You permanently moan because the game isn't proceeding as quickly as you want it to (or your co players are not playing tactically as you expected them to)
  • You want to use special (non-implemented) rules in a game (e.g. playing Carcassonne without placing tiles so that certain structures canot be completed anymore), but do not consider it necessary to talk about it beforehand.
  • Better: if your mates do not comply to those rules (and how were they supposed to know?), you throw abuse at them and quit the game.
  • You play intentionally bad and make deliberate mistakes to make a certain other player win
  • Why offer your congratulations to the successful winner? Ain't it enough that you had lost?
  • You ask for players via SPV or /gameyell every other second until you finally got your game started, thus effectively killing any other request or chat window.
  • You always insist on playing in your town and your town only, at last, it's only you who needs the ressources for the metagame.

Things working really well while using the BSW bulletin boards:

  • You provoke with posts full of aggression and/or void of content
  • You don't care about constructive discussions and prefer to attack others directly and personally
  • Still better: you post anonymously
  • If you are angry at someone, you put it onto the bulletin board immediately, so anyone can read about it
  • Still better: you add a chat log to your post, so that others can beat that guy (privacy? Never heard of)
  • Your posts are filled with irony and sarcasm at a very subtle level, the others will know what you really wanted to say (or won't they?)
  • You expect from the programmers of BSW, that they will comply to your each and every wish and request. You know, they are only here to serve you
  • Du schreibst Beiträge mit kommerziellem Hintergrund

What do I have to do to become known as a cheater?

There is a shipload of possibilities in this as well:

  • You can log in a second time and play against yourself - of course you take the Talers and ressources with you, they're for free (to test strategies with yourself, there's the command /startnosave)
  • You can talk with your partner in a tell window about your strategies to raise your chances of winning
  • There's no trouble caused by plaing with the same IP - but to deny or shade this fact gets you way closer to become known as a cheater.

Do I have to take all this trouble or is there any easier way?

Of course there is. It's really simple:

  • Hand your password to any funny guy and let him fool around in BSW. If he's good enough and you put forward the line "It wasn't me" as an excuse (which is of course believable enough to everyone), you're quite good already.
  • You're really close, if one of the Mediators asks you for a quick chat about your behaviour.
  • You've made it, if your Talers or Medals are taken away from you or some commands get blocked for you.
  • You're way up the charts, when your name is known all through BSW as a lout or a cheater.
  • You reached immortality, if your nick gets deleted from BSW.

Getting unpopular seems far too easy to me, I need some harder task. How do I get the most popular player at BSW?

Things working everywhere:

  • Avoid all the things above.
  • You are always friendly and polite and strike the right note when talking to others
  • You're keen to help, especially when meeting newbies
  • If someone really drove you 'round the bend, you try to keep calm and wait for a day, then reconsider whether everything was as bad as it seemed at that moment
  • If that doesn't help, you wait for another day and reconsider again
  • If you're still convinced, that the incident begs consequences, you turn to your Stadtvogt (reeve) or directly towards the Mediatoren
  • In doing so, you have objective proof of what happened (e.g. a chat log)
  • If you make a mistake yourself, you take a stand, admit it and excuse yourself.
  • On the other side, you accept apologies for mistakes (and do not always insist on one)

Things working best while playing:

  • Before you join a game, you ask those present whether they would object.
  • You play fair and avoid using technical loopholes to your advantage
  • If not everything in the rules should be allowed (e.g. placing tiles at Carcassonne so that certain structures cannot be completed), you talk about this beforehand, preferrably already when calling for other players
  • If your computer crashes or your network breaks down, you still come back; if this just is not possible, you try to reach your co-players and explain the situation as soon as possible - /tell or the bulletin board would be ways to do this.
  • If you're a first-timer to a game (or played it only a very few times before), you tell the others and ask, whether that would be all right.
  • Before you play a game the first time, you at least read the rules, even if it gets explained to you.

Things working on the bulletin boards:

  • First, tune your brain to working mode before writing anything
  • Don't trouble others with purely personal affairs and private issues
  • You know that posts may be misunderstood and try to avoid this or clear up any misunderstandings if they happened (in writing posts as well as in reading them)
  • You sometimes pass a side remark directed at you without escalating the issue
  • Before you open a new thread, you look (via the "search" (Suche) option), whether the problem has been handled already.