Why are there infraction changes?

For a while, many players within our community, including ourselves, felt that clauses in the infractions ruleset were not where they needed to be, or did not fully reflect what we intended to cover under each clause. With the introduction of an easier way to make changes to documents on the ozfortress website, we’ve also brought updates to the infractions ruleset. Since many people don't read much, if not any of our news posts, we just wanted to state for the record that going forward we will be making a much stronger push towards ensuring our community is one where players can always feel free of harassment, toxicity and bigotry, a community where each players experience is treated as most valuable to ozfortress continued success and survival.

Infractions changes:

Tier 3

The Tier 3 category has seen the bulk of the changes and additions.

• “Serious or repeated abuse and/or harassment of any kind, including but not limited to” is a combination of the existing abuse and harassment infractions and has been combined under a Tier 3.

• Our previous “Sharing of sensitive or personal information without permission” has been expanded significantly, the updated clause along with an explanation can be seen below;

  • “Sharing personal, identifiable information without permission/consent from that individual. Sharing of personal/identifiable information sourced from outside of what is considered our community and/or the Team Fortress space.
    • An individual’s personal social media is under assumed privacy and anonymity; and therefore is something we consider outside of our community unless voluntarily shared by the individual."
  • There is a bit to unpack there, but what has commonly been referred to as our "doxing" infraction has been heavily expanded. This has been done in an attempt to better protect potential victims of this behaviour in the future and isn't too far off of what we had, but now makes a clear distinction as to what and where is protected when it comes to a person's personal information. While we feel this is pretty self-explanatory, feel free to reach out if you have any questions regarding this clause.

• "Threats of violence/harm" has been extended to cover an individual or group. The same addition has been made to our "General bigotry/use of derogatory slurs" clause.

• Our "Discrimination of any kind" clause has seen some expansion to indicate some of what is covered by it,

Tier 2

You’ll notice that the Tier 2 category has been trimmed down, with many of them now residing in the Tier 3 category. Infractions that apply affiliation with or impersonation of staff members have been moved entirely to Tier 3. There were no instances of this behaviour to back this change, but we feel as two-thirds of them were already Tier 3 infractions, that consolidating them into just Tier 3’s would make our stance on that clearer. Along with the Tier 2 evictions, any behavioural infractions that we felt belonged in Tier 3 now reside there. This change was also made to make our stance clearer, and we found typically cases of this behaviour were egregious enough to end up there anyway.

Tier 1

We've only made one addition to the Tier 1 category, namely our aliasing clause. This has been added to make it clear where this infraction sits. Aliases should be correct prior to the cast starting, or prior to connecting to the server. Approved Casting Organisations will no longer need to ask specifically for aliases to be changed but still may do so as a courtesy.

• "Failure to run proper alias / fake nicking in a cast of an official match by an approved casting organisation."

General infraction ruleset changes

In the past, lower severity infractions would sometimes incur a discretionary warning, but this introduced an unintentional double warning system, where we feel by giving the warning and then on a repeat of that behaviour, awarding a lower-tier infraction, we would essentially be issuing another warning when infractions in themselves are warnings and are meant to dissuade players from reoffending. This has never been the case for Tier 3 infractions, but we felt with the clarification and expansion of the infractions ruleset, the removal of warnings from our infractions would not only make the process clearer for players but would allow repeat offenders less opportunity to "correct" their behaviour. This change will not affect those who rarely if ever accrue infractions.

ozfortress x Qixalite & Behaviour

As some of you may already be aware, Qixalite shares any behaviour violations on their platform with league runners like ozfortress. Part of this process involves reports made to us, and from time to time we'll ask them to perform a check for us. While they are working on tools to enhance this process, it currently is not a large part of our behavioural report process, and the bulk of our actions come from player reports.

Usage of specific words

While we do not have a specific list of words (slurs or derogatory names), we feel players can typically infer what is right and wrong. Regardless, we have added "jew" and "jewing" when referencing a play or positioning as something we will infract. We have done this in a further push to support those who are marginalized by these terms. This will be effective immediately, and will not cover any case prior to this post.

Player Profile Content & Items

Over the past few years, we've seen a slow but steady increase in the amount of Steam groups and in-game item names/descriptions that violate our infractions ruleset. We will be giving players some time to clear these contents from their account. Content that violates our infractions ruleset after 01/06/2022 may leave that player subject to punishment.

ozfortress players are in many forms representatives of ozfortress, and that reflection of their behaviour reflects onto this community, making it less appealing and inviting to new players.

Community Behaviour Panel composition

This is something we've never really told anyone about in the past, and in terms of individuals on or not on the team, we will continue not to. But, we do not currently have any active league administrators on the panel beyond the current Head of Behaviour Panel samson. We endeavour to ensure that the composition of the panel will always be majority community members. While we feel that there isn't a need for the community to know that, we understand that you as the player place a lot of trust in us to moderate community behaviour in a fair, consistent manner whilst also considering views outside of the administration.

As for input on behavioural reports, the panel works independently and very rarely will ask for assistance from a league administrator. Administrators act as somewhat an arbitrator, with decisions on more complex issues typically being unanimous. Again, this was likely assumed, but we hope this helps ease concerns regarding the process. The process as it currently satisfies the needs we have seen since its inception, and we feel it will continue to serve to protect the experiences of each and every player.

"Community Behaviour Panel" & Reporting

We've updated the inconsistent team name of the Behaviour panel team / Infractions team across the entire website to better reflect what it is, a Community Behaviour Panel. Whilst we are making an effort, in general, to clear up the documentation and our news posts, this is an important first step.

An important second step - is the reporting system. Nothing will change beyond the template when making a report, and the area to make said reports are still the same, but there have been a few crucial changes you need to know about.

1. The template for reporting behaviour has been moved to the Infractions page (the same has been done with the new Anti-Cheat & You page, but you'll hear more about that later), this has been done to have everything in a central location, and support reporting via our new #ticket-support channel in our Discord.
2. The link to make a report on ozfortress.com has now been moved to the updated Infraction page, and can be found using the Table of Contents at the top of the page.

We hope these changes represent the players' expectations when managing behaviour, and more properly reflect our intentions for this system. The infractions ruleset will be something that sees updates in the future, and if you have any questions or concerns regarding anything that has been changed, feel free to chuck a DM to core#6440 on discord.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23vjWtUpItk

While we do not have a specific list of words we have added specific words to our unspecific list of words.

feel/felt count: 14
think: 0

how grossly emasculated does a man have to be to write this sort of shit

e: the silver lining being that doge can now play !add5 in peace

we will be mirroring these rules on ethan mge aswell

Drinking soy milk caused me to stop saying slurs

ethan

1: https://i.imgur.com/lYL5M2D.png

we will be mirroring these rules on ethan mge aswell
god speed son

valen

ethan

1: https://i.imgur.com/lYL5M2D.png

we will be mirroring these rules on ethan mge aswell
god speed son

1: https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/949958574858178630.webp?size=4096&quality=lossless

valen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23vjWtUpItk

krollic

While we do not have a specific list of words we have added specific words to our unspecific list of words.

feel/felt count: 14
think: 0

how grossly emasculated does a man have to be to write this sort of shit

e: the silver lining being that doge can now play !add5 in peace

ethan

1: https://i.imgur.com/lYL5M2D.png

we will be mirroring these rules on ethan mge aswell

*Maid *
Drinking soy milk caused me to stop saying slurs

valen

ethan

1: https://i.imgur.com/lYL5M2D.png

we will be mirroring these rules on ethan mge aswell
god speed son

1: https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/949958574858178630.webp?size=4096&quality=lossless

Pipelin12

valen

ethan

1: https://i.imgur.com/lYL5M2D.png

we will be mirroring these rules on ethan mge aswell
god speed son

1: https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/949958574858178630.webp?size=4096&quality=lossless

1: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/847533745249714216/958954617444655114/jf0b0vfbxiq81.gif