Server Rules

Don't attack, shoot, injure, or kill another player without a clear roleplay reason and a proper verbal initiation that they actually had a chance to hear and understand. Initiation has to be direct, in person, and clear. Shouting across a street, making a demand through a car window at speed, or threatening someone who physically couldn't have heard you does not count. Trash talk, insults, and general disrespect are never a valid reason to start shooting. Initiation expires after 30 minutes if nothing hostile happens, so you can't initiate on someone and then shoot them an hour later and call it valid. One person initiating does not hand kill rights to their whole group unless that group was already an active part of the conflict through prior roleplay. Killing someone right after EMS revives them is also RDM, since NLR applies.

Vehicles are not weapons. Don't use one to intentionally injure, kill, or knock down players. That covers driving into people at speed, pinning someone against a wall, running over someone who's already downed, driving into water to drown your passengers, and ramming another car to kill the people inside rather than to stop it. In a pursuit you can try to disable a fleeing vehicle with a controlled manoeuvre, as long as it stays proportional to the situation. If you hit someone by accident, follow it up with roleplay straight away: stop, check on everyone involved, and treat it like a real crash. Driving off after an accidental collision with no roleplay is treated as intentional VDM. Ramming a player because you're losing a fight is VDM, even if you had initiation on them.

Hospitals, police stations, and every location in the full safe zone list are safe zones. Inside them you can't rob, shoot, kidnap, threaten, or initiate on anyone. You also can't run into a safe zone while you're being chased to reset or escape the situation. If you went in while already being pursued, the people chasing you can hold their position outside and pick the roleplay back up when you leave. A chase doesn't end just because you passed through a safe zone entrance. Don't shoot or throw anything from outside a safe zone at someone inside it, or from inside at someone outside. Hanging around in a safe zone with no reason to be there isn't allowed.

All in-character communication has to happen through in-game mechanics: in-person voice, in-game phones, or in-game radio. Using Discord, texts, Snapchat, or any other outside platform to pass in-character information to someone else in the city is banned, no matter how small the information seems. Sitting in a Discord call with other players while you're in the city is also banned, even if you say you're not sharing anything in-character, because the risk of leaking information is too high. Watching another player's stream while you're in the city and acting on anything you see or hear breaks this rule and the metagaming rule.

Disconnecting during active roleplay is a bannable offence. That includes leaving during a police interaction, a hostile situation, while downed, in custody, or as a hostage. Any moment where you leaving damages someone else's roleplay counts. It also covers freezing your game in the pause menu to avoid being downed, tabbing out during a gunfight, and crashing your game on purpose. Combat storing counts too: stashing weapons, drugs, or valuables in a property or vehicle mid-scene just so they can't be found or taken. If your game genuinely crashes, message the people involved in the Metro Networks Discord straight away, explain what happened, and get back to the scene as fast as you can. The server logs every disconnect, so if you can't show it was a real crash, it's treated as combat logging.

Metagaming is using information you picked up outside the game to influence what your character does. That includes watching other players' streams to find or track them, being told about city events over Discord while you're offline and then acting on it when you log in, using what one of your own characters knows to benefit another, recognising someone's real voice and acting on it when your character has no reason to know them, reading player name tags on screen when your character has no reason to know that name, and using your knowledge of the map or scripted locations to find things your character realistically wouldn't. Leaking police information from a law enforcement character to a criminal one, whether it's your own character or someone else's, is a serious form of metagaming and is punished harder than the standard.

If a scene has nothing to do with your character and you have no in-character reason to be there, stay out of it. This applies to police scenes, EMS scenes, gang conflicts, and any other active roleplay you're not part of. Driving past a scene over and over to watch it, scouting from a distance and feeding information to others, or forcing your way in on a thin excuse all break this rule. Pushing into someone else's scene with no real reason is treated as trolling.

Powergaming is doing things in roleplay that are physically or logically impossible, that give you an unrealistic advantage, or that force an outcome on someone without giving them a chance to respond. Examples: pulling a gun while handcuffed, claiming to see or hear something your character couldn't from where they are, doing things to yourself that would be impossible alone, using /me to force a result on another player without letting them contest it, claiming injuries healed faster than they realistically would, and using game mechanics to pull off things your character couldn't actually do. The test is simple: if a real person couldn't physically do it in that situation, it's powergaming.

Shift-punch spamming, cancelling emotes to get a combat advantage, using macros or autoclickers to get any edge over other players, or abusing any mechanic in a way it wasn't designed for will get you a 24 hour ban on a first offence and longer for repeats. This isn't limited to the examples above. Any deliberate mechanical abuse counts, even if it isn't named here.

Don't join the server to disrupt, annoy, or ruin other people's experience. The word intent matters here: if your behaviour clearly ruins other players' experience, staff will treat it as trolling no matter what you claim you meant. Doing five minutes of fake roleplay before you start trolling doesn't get you off the hook. Repeatedly going after the same player or group across sessions with no real in-character reason is griefing, and it's taken just as seriously.

If EMS or police don't revive you on the scene and you respawn at hospital instead, whether manually or automatically, you've triggered NLR. You have to forget everything from the roleplay leading up to your death: the events, the people, the locations, all of it. You can't return to where you died for 15 minutes. You can't contact anyone or tell them what happened before you died. You can't use NLR selectively by forgetting the parts that hurt you and keeping the parts that help. If EMS was actively treating you on scene and you respawned anyway, that breaks NLR and counts as FailRP. NLR doesn't apply if you're fully revived on scene and taken to hospital while staying in active roleplay. In that case you keep your memory, but you still have to fully roleplay your injuries.