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uSyn Omerta (Code of Conduct)
The Following is the Unholy Syndicate Omerta (A.K.A. What do we expect from our members?)
Our Code of Conduct is a set of guidelines that strive to address most situations that occur while playing. However, it is impossible to draft a line item for every possible thing that could ever occur while gaming and such things as "attitude" will likely never properly be addressed directly.
Therefore, this first section of the Omerta is to serve as an umbrella statement for our Famiglia’s goals and expectations for members. Where there is no specific guideline to follow, this mission statement should suffice to explain our Famiglia’s stand on issues that arise.
The Unholy Syndicate exists as a Famiglia of mutually supportive members who play in a spirit of friendship and camaraderie. Our members are generous to a fault, promote the well-being of the Famiglia as a whole, and are among the nicest members of any game the Unholy Syndicate plays. Exploitation, selfishness, constant self-important boasting, and rude or offensive behavior have no place in our Famiglia.
Code of Conduct (CoC)
All of our members are asked to comply with this simple request, and we place shame upon those who do not. We maintain our unity, our friendship, in this way, and without this unity all we have built would crumble. Although an enforced code of conduct has seldom seemed a necessity, we have adopted one for our own protection.
In all things, act with honor.
In all things, act with reason.
In all things, act with courage.
The enemy of one is the enemy of all.
A loss to one is a loss to all; a gain for one is a gain for all.
Above all, respect thy leaders, respect thy fellows, respect thy friends, and respect thyself.
A) Our Position on Bug Exploitation, Griefing, and Hacking
It is often asked: What constitutes as an exploit? As far as we are concerned, it is the use or abuse of a programming bug that allows you to gain an advantage or create a situation not intended to be had by the games developers.
Some bugs enter games which may skew the intended gain of XP / Cash. As the game was designed with a set rate of gaining XP or Cash from each specific enemy or objective completion, this is clearly an exploit. Other exploits may simply disrupt game play and be used to intentionally cause grief to others on the server. Posting and abusing exploits such as these is definitely frowned upon.
Our bottom line on this issue is as follows: If you can do it over and over and over, gaining an unfair advantage over others through means not intended by the game’s developers, it's probably an exploit and should be avoided as an honorable member of this guild. Intentional griefing will be dealt with in a harsh manner. The use of hacks/cheats of any kind in an online multiplayer game will result in an immediate ban from the Unholy Syndicate, including removal from our rosters, closure of your forum account, and possibly even a complete ban from our website in its entirety.
Minor and first offenses with otherwise known upright guild members will be handled with a chat and a request to reaffirm your support of our guild CoC.
Continued abuse of bug exploits by practicing the exploit will result in removal from the roster of any game in which you are/were a member of the Unholy Syndicate and most likely bar you from future membership. The last thing we want is to be associated with exploiting, as this reflects badly on our community as a whole. The following may help prevent such a situation.
Post tips/strategies you’ve found all you like. If they aren’t your original idea, post a link to its origins if possible. We do not want to see anything copied from any site offering multiplayer hacks whatever your good intentions may be. If you think you may have uncovered an easily exploitable function/quest/bug, feel free to report it on our forum so we may discuss the issue and determine if it is indeed an exploit, in which case we would immediately inform the games creators so they may take action to correct it. Do not post on our forums about actually using a possible exploit in an attempt to gloat over your secret godly powers. Above all use common sense!
B) Forum Guidelines
Why worry about a forum CoC as well as our Omerta? Unlike many clans who simply form a group of players for a single game and do not run their own website/forum, the goal of the Unholy Syndicate has always been to provide an online community for our members and our forums are the social hub of our community. We feel this helps bring members closer together and feel like a part of the ‘family’, or in our case, ‘La Famiglia’.
A member’s conduct on our forums is equally important as their conduct in an online multiplayer game because it is often our forum which greets those who may be seeing us for the first time and as we all know, first impressions can be difficult to change afterwards. If a potential member visits our forum and sees a bunch of garbage and people acting like complete asshats, then they will most likely go elsewhere. With that in mind, those who do not like our ways of doing things in an upfront and open minded manner have the right to simply enter http://www.teletubbies.com into their address bars.
This section covers what we expect from our members concerning our forums.
1) Always be respectful of others.
2) Moderate swearing is allowed, but please refrain from using racial, ethnic, or religious slurs.
3) Be mindful of our policy on exploits, as shown above.
4) You are encouraged to speak your mind openly, so long as it is done tastefully.
5) Post new topics in the correct board, and stay on topic in other threads.
6) Personal attacks (or otherwise flaming) will not be tolerated. If you have an argument with someone, use the PM system.
7) Just use your head and don’t be an asshat.
Forum administrators reserve the right to delete or modify any post which they see as being detrimental to our community. Those who are repeatedly causing a problem will be dealt with accordingly. We also reserve the right to ban anyone from our community that we see fit to ban. We do not like censorship in the real world, thus we do our best to not censor our discussions on our forums. Do not abuse this.
To sum up this section, do your part to make our forums be a good representative of our community, and all should be OK.
C) The bottom line: What it means to be a member of the Unholy Syndicate
Yes, the Unholy Syndicate is more a social group of friends than your traditional guild/clan of hardcore gamers. However, you can't just be on one of our rosters and not be an active part of that section of our community or park inactive characters in La Famiglia and assume that you are part of the Unholy Syndicate. You will be required to make a couple posts on our forums each week before you are either demoted or made inactive. We have a defined chain of command leading to the Don, and promotions (with Caporegime being the highest attainable rank) must be earned through participation and conduct. Similarly as stated already, inactivity will have the opposite effect. Should you know that you will be away for an extended period, let us know on our AFK forum so that you will not be busted down in rank/status.
We also very strongly oppose to what is known as ‘double guilding’, or in the FPS world, ‘smurfing’. This only applies to games for which you are on the roster of and are a member of the Unholy Syndicate. If you play a specific game for uSyn, you play that game ONLY for uSyn. You are certainly free to join other clans/guilds/communities for games you do not play with uSyn, including those we have a roster for. However, if we have a roster in Half Life 2 (for example) we'd love if you played with us and not someone else. Also if there is a game you want to see the Unholy Syndicate open an active chapter in then let us know and we'll let you know where we stand on that particular game. Those caught ‘double guilding’ or ‘smurfing’ will be removed from that games roster, and possibly the roster for any other game which they may be on. We do this because we feel guild/clan loyalty is necessary to have a fun, enjoyable, strong community for all of our members, especially in the case of games involving competition for which we have a roster. The same could be said for an FPS game if we were to take part in a league such as TWL, CAL, etc. For example, we were at one time ranked #1 and undefeated champions of Global Operations 6v6 on TWL with a record of 12-0, and our founding members feel strongly that loyalty and togetherness helped make this possible. Without loyalty, there is no cohesion as a team. Without cohesion as a team, there is only failure.
For Age of Conan there will be a per-basis assessment of the above statement. If you are in another clan before you join with us, let us know. We'll speak with you about it and determine how we feel about your particular situation.
D) Voluntary termination of membership
There have been many times when folks have felt the need to take their lines elsewhere for one reason or another, and there have been as many others that have felt the desire to bring their lines in. The only constant in a large Famiglia like this one is change.
We're happy to see new folks come in, and we'll shake hands and give well wishes to those that feel the need to go - but they must realize that they are *breaking* their lines from La Famiglia when they go. Friends and allies, yes - Unholy Syndicate members, no.
Just remember that there are more worlds to come, and our goals are to maintain bonds of friendship that are mutual in and out of game. There will be short term gains and losses as we go, but as long as we work hard and play hard at being a community, none of it will shake our resolve to maintain and grow this great Famiglia of ours.
Footnote on 'Censorship'
The Unholy Syndicate is not a democracy, and it's not a "free country". When you are here, you are in the home of the founding members of this Famiglia, and as such you agree to abide by the guidelines set by those members just as you would for anybody's home in which you were a guest. We do everything we can to give uSyn the latitude to tolerate many different types of personalities, and welcome people from anywhere in the world to join us. It's important to us that you enjoy expressing yourself in a way that's fun for you, and as such you are free to speak your mind as a member of this community. We do not discriminate by color, creed, religion, or anything else for that matter, nor will we censor discussion of such things so long as it is done in a civilized manner.
However, there must be limits to our tolerance to keep the community from becoming a chaotic free-for-all mess and when guidelines are set forth to protect the community from harm, we expect those guidelines to be followed. It is a perfectly acceptable thing if you find any of our guidelines too restrictive, though in all honesty we are relatively relaxed on most issues. In that case, the Unholy Syndicate is probably not the gaming Famiglia for you, and we will be happy to wish you luck wherever your path may take you.
You can call it whatever you like, but the only thing that separates order from chaos is outlining what we find proper and acceptable and then living within those guidelines. Everybody has their own personal limits, and generally gravitate towards others with similar values. The Unholy Syndicate is no different and will always seek to enforce our own CoC. Above all else, we do our best to keep an open mind, and expect our members to do the same.
Let it be written, let it be done.
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