Relic - a word about DLCs : Our Rules and Guidelines

A Word About Game Development: CoH2.org's Guidelines and Rules


Dear Relic,

Since the inception of Company of Heroes franchise in Company of Heroes 1, we have seen a lot of great developer created content. Your intention with this feature was to give your players the tools they want in order to enjoy the CoH universe, empower them to express their creativity directly within the game, and to encourage the further creation of exciting strategies and metagames for your franchise. In short, you wanted a way to help put your fans in the driver’s seat.

We’ve been blown away by the results so far, and by our passionate developer community! Several people have come to us recently to either report questionable business practices or to seek more detailed direction regarding what meta they are allowed to play. With these requests in mind, we wanted to give the developers some guidelines regarding what is and is not acceptable within our gaming community.

First we want to remind you of the following, which we encourage you to read carefully:

If you create, sell or distribute the Game, or create DLC for use in the Game, you are agreeing to adhere to the global rules of Our (i) Community Guidelines About What Constitutes a Relatively Bug-Free And Potentially Even Balanced Game, (ii) Basic Respect for the Customers, and (iii) The Thou Shall Not Try To Squeeze Every Last Penny With Subpar Content Policy (collectively, “CoH community Rules”). By creating a game for use in Company of Heroes universe, you agree to all parts of the CoH Rules. If you do not accept these terms, do not develop the game to be sold in the Steam Store.

While we want to encourage your creativity and allow as restriction-free work as possible, we are also required as consumers to meet certain targets. This means that we are putting some DLC-related restrictions in place. Namely:

Developer created game "expansion" cannot include all pay-for DLC content.

DLCs cannot grant an entire list of buffs within one specific category (e.g. a DLC cannot grant all USF buffs, or all OKW buffs).

DLC that grants game content must also change the CoH2 game in some way. The sole intent of a DLC cannot be to provide users with pay to win content for cash.

The game or DLC you release must be free of any bugs, errors, or other operational defects that could materially affect CoH2 or the Company of Heroes community at large.

In addition to concerns surrounding DLC, we have also received concerns surrounding the intent behind certain business practices. It goes without saying that game modes and DLCs should be fun for your players, and offer something that benefits the Company of Heroes community at large. We want to also offer some detailed guidelines to help players with this:

DLCs and Commanders should not be created with the intent to troll or abuse other community members.

Balance patches should not be created to give players an unfair advantage over orhters.

DLCs should not be used to encourage cheating or exploits in any way.

DLCs cannot include imagery that is banned or illegal in various forums (e.g. things such as fanboi imagery and glorification of blobsare not allowed).

DLCs cannot include imagery or material that is offensive to players of the game or the Company of Heroes fans as determined in our sole discretion.


Aside from these rules, we reserve the right to not purchase DLCs that we feel violate the positive spirit and intent behind what our playing community sets out to do. We will review forum threadson a case by case basis, and if it does not obviously fall within the violations above, we will ask ourselves the following:

What does this DLC offer to our community?
Does this DLC offer a negative experience to those that use it?
Does this DLC potentially damage Sega or Relic business interests?
Does this DLC go against the spirit of our gaming community?

When not purchasing violating content, we reserve the right to outright abandon the franchise immediately. In some cases we may try to contact the creator of the franchise and work with them to have the game revised – this will be entirely at our discretion. We recognize that developing a game requires a level of time and dedication on the part of game developers.

We also encourage you to think of the content you will be building as something that will not just belong to Relic (and players), but also to the overall community. If someone approaches you with a forum thread or suggestion or a request for collaboration, we encourage you to consider sharing your own knowledge and files. We’d love to see our developer continue to strive towards furthering collective knowledge – something that everyone will benefit from!

If as a developer you have questions regarding something you are working to create – please reach out to us on our coh2.org forums. We will be happy to answer any questions you have!

As a player, if you’ve found a DLC that you feel violates our rules or goes against the spirit and intent behind the game development program, you can report it to us by creating a forum thread on coh2.org.

lol

nice one.

Nice.

Community 1 - Relic 0

give the OP a beer on me.

ololol

touche

I wish I could see Cynthia face expression when she will be doing her community report about that haha

I was like, didn't we have already a thread about this.
:takes a minute to read:

Clever.

agreed and commited!

I was like, didn't we have already a thread about this.
:takes a minute to read:

Clever.

Haha I did the same thing

Seriously, give this man a badge (writer idk) he deserved it!

Lol