Infractions Updates, New Staff, Seasons, Awards and Team Names/Aliases

So, it’s been a bit since we’ve done a post like this, but we have some updates to share. We’ll have more updates to rulesets a bit closer to the release of the Sixes and Highlander seasons, but for now, we wanted to get you up to speed as to where we are at.

Infractions Updates

Periodically we make amendments to our Infractions Ruleset to better suit the general climate of behaviour within our community. Our general philosophy is that those who follow an approach of common sense when interacting with others will never have to be introduced to our Infractions system, thus we try to take the same common sense approach.

Usage of specific words

It is the long term goal of the Behavioural Panel to, through step-by-step changes, bring down the usage of marginalising or otherwise targeted demeaning language within our community, so that governance is brought closer to the standards held by broader society. We understand that much of this language may be deeply ingrained in the community vernacular, which is why we are taking a gradual approach to implementing and enforcing these changes.

This announcement exists to state clearly that the Behaviour Panel will be adopting a new stance of intolerance towards usage of the word "retard" moving forward.

Please note that the Behavioural Panel does not use a specific definition or list of words that are deemed "always infractable" or actioned; context remains a key factor in any case that is submitted to the Behavioural Panel. We do not expect this change to be uncontroversial, however it is not the job of the Behavioural Panel to be uncontroversial. This change will be effective immediately, and will not be applied retroactively to usage of this word from before the date of this announcement (16/09/2023).

We are generally moving towards the expectation that, what wouldn't be ok in the vernacular of broader-society, is not ok within our community.

Round Ban Point Requirement Lowered

For much of the Infractions systems’ lifetime, the “3 round match ban” has required an offender to accumulate 40 infraction points before being applied, just 20 points short of a one year ban. For many, this probably hasn’t made much sense, as with only 20 more points, the ban duration can jump from three rounds to a whole year. Something else worth mentioning is what other leagues do, which is typically any behaviour similar to what would incur a Tier 3 with our system, would result in an instant match ban. With most poor behaviour resulting in a Tier 3 infraction, and poor match organisation or other League Infractions only really incurring 10 points, its meant that team captains have been able to get away with poor match organisation multiple times before ever seeing any actual penalty. So, we will be lowering the point requirement for our “3 round match ban” penalty to 30 points, from its current 40 points. This isn’t a change we make lightly, and we’ll be watching its flow-on effect closely.

We Need You!

Yup, we’re looking for staff again. If you’re interested, see our Join Us page. If you’ve applied in or around the last three months, we may not have considered your application yet, so don’t fret! If you want to ask about your application, please feel free to DM core on Discord.

New Arrivals, Somber Departures

Along with our usual “we’re looking for volunteers” pitch, we have a volunteer to welcome, and three to say goodbye to. First of all, we would like to welcome our new Sixes Admin wils! We’re excited to see what he can bring to the team, and you’ll get to know him as an admin for the Experimental Cup 2 tournament we’re currently running!

With the warm welcome out of the way, it’s time we say goodbye and wish the best of luck in the future for three of our friends. Bakes will be stepping back from his Highlander admin and Public Behavioural Panel member roles, and we would like to thank him for being one of the foundational admins who helped us bring ozfortress Highlander to life during our merge with Respawn League, well over a year ago now. Along with Bakes, two of our Sixes admins frydog and snazzy (AKA thelampshade22) will also be stepping down from their roles, both having joined us more recently, we’re sad to see them go and with them the best of luck in the future. Whilst it may be the last time you hear of snazzy, he will be taking up a Public Behavioural Panel role soon.

We would also like to congratulate (and thank) multi for stepping up to the role of Sixes Head Admin. He has a drive for the game that frankly I (core) wish I still had, and a wealth of knowledge on our history, so I’m certain he’ll be a good fit!

A Quick Reminder…

This is coming directly from myself (core), but as of the last six months, I’ve seen a rise in players unfairly targeting and attributing the actions of our team as a whole towards single volunteers, along with an uptick in pretty unfair treatment of our volunteers. I’ve been doing this for a while between ozfortress and Respawn League, and I would just like to make something abundantly clear. I, myself, will not tolerate the unjustified vitriolic behaviour that is targeted at those who volunteer their time to bring this community a free service, and who strive to actively listen to and improve on it. For the vast majority of you however, I can speak for all of us when I say we appreciate your support, it’s just always hard to not focus on those who like to be more than negative.

Season Branding changes

So, some of you may have noticed on our most recent schedule that we have swapped from our usual seasonal naming convention to “Format Spring 2023 Season #”. Whilst it's mostly a spunky branding change, it does serve more than one purpose. Ever found it incredibly hard to remember which season you played a map or class over a year ago, and you go to check, but you remember what time of the year it was? Maybe not, but I know I have, and so have a few others. That’s something we hope to address with this change, now if you remember what time of the year, you’ll know it was our Spring season of 2023! We won't be dropping the season number, just shortening it to "S#" instead. It’s a small change, but we figured we’d explain some of our reasoning behind it. If you were curious what it may look like for our upcoming seasons, here are the names:

Sixes Spring 2023 S38
Highlander Spring 2023 S5

Overall, it ends up being a bit shorter, and will work better on cast coverage as well, which is a plus.

Winners Posts, Award Nominations & Voting Updates

Don’t worry, our usual Winners' posts are coming very soon! In the meantime though, we wanted to update you on some of our thoughts, as well as address some of your feedback from the Voting form in particular.

One thing that was made very clear, is that in any division above four teams, captains vastly preferred just being able to copy-paste a template and fill in the nominee’s name, and after adding 40+ names multiple times throughout the form, we wholeheartedly agree. Even if the process on our end was automated further, this solution will always end up being significantly more work, for something we feel most were fine with already, but we’re happy we tried a new method.

With that in mind, we’re going to look to add better checks and automate more of the process on our end to save quite a lot of time on what is always a big time sink. But the Awards process is only one of two parts, the other being the Winners Posts writeups. These are something we’ve debated internally as many of us don’t feel it’s worth writing them, as so few read them. Going forward, we will be looking at other forms of content to replace these writeups, hopefully, something we can all enjoy a little more.

We want to be able to do more with our awards, and it’s something we’ve had in the back of our minds for a while. So, we hope you may be looking forward to some of what we may have in store, perhaps some user profile award displays, highlight videos, new awards and more.

Ruleset Updates

Before seasons, especially before signups release, we try to get our ruleset updates released - but the astute among you will have noticed the post-season polls aren’t out yet. We’ve made some changes to these polls to better gauge what players want, and we’ll continue to change these polls each season because they have been frankly terrible in the past, so it’s something we hope to do better with. You’ll see our post-season polls very soon, with a heavy focus on Sixes changes this time around. Something that we will be exploring is varied map pools for different divisions, with a question specifically focused on this for lower divisions like Open, and Main if we reach five divisions again. Whilst it won’t be included in the poll, we will be reaching out to our Premier players to discuss potential variations to the map pool for Premier as well. We’ll have more information on this for everyone once we’ve had those discussions and are happy to move forward with changes.

We can give you something now, however, and that’s to do with naming.

Team Names & Player Aliases on ozfortress.com

We know there are a select few who were waiting for the other shoe to drop - that shoe is team names and player aliases. We don’t want to be restrictive on what names you can and cannot use, but we wanted to update our guidelines around both to make it clear what will not be allowed, and what we want to change.

Team Names and Player Aliases can no longer include profanity. It’s rare, but it happens, and makes it incredibly difficult to advertise to the world via casts, or to engage with sponsors when we have team names or player aliases that contain profanity.
Excessive emojis or special characters. We’re just putting our foot down because the reality is, it’s not funny, and it's only people within the team that find it funny, other players don’t. We’ve previously stated in our guidelines we wouldn’t allow any, but we’ll be revising this. So a tasteful amount of emojis is okay, but there’s a point where it's entirely unfunny, especially when it’s not creative.
Player Aliases should be recognizable to everyone. This is the biggest and likely most controversial change here. Whilst we could improve search functionality on our website to better handle past aliases, which we will eventually aim to do anyway, we feel it's fairly unreasonable to expect someone to have to search for “MrShidenfard” for example, when everyone knows him by down. We allow players to alias however they want in matches, provided it doesn’t breach our rules or just general etiquette, even during casts now. But player aliases that aren’t your recognizable alias make it incredibly difficult for us, for your fellow players, and especially for anyone new to find you.
- Q: How will we accomplish this?
- A: Slowly. For now, it will include knocking back obvious, less serious aliases. Those who have a genuine intention to change their alias will be able to, but we will no longer be allowing non-serious aliases. Those who already have difficult-to-remember aliases will be getting a message from us as we find them, with a chance to choose a new long-term alias or to go by their recognizable alias.
  - We won’t be committing to any in-writing restrictions, terms or conditions for this as of now, but just know we will be making an effort to move the line of what we deem acceptable to be more in line with common sense.

Post Length

We understand there is a bit to unpack here, and we have been making genuine attempts to minimize how often we do these types of posts, as well as minimizing the size of these posts, but we had a bit to catch you all up on, and with two Winners' posts coming, two polls for the seasons we just wrapped up and a third poll to come sometime after our Experimental Cup 2 tournament, along with a post dedicated entirely to ruleset changes, we felt there was a more urgent need to get all of this out of the way sooner rather than later. By the way, if you've made it this far and have an interest in news or documentation writing, please submit an application, we need you!