World Rules

One human, one citizen

One person plays one account, and that account is one citizen. There are no second characters, no slots and no starting again. The citizen you made is the one you keep, whatever country it ends up in and whatever it ends up doing.

A second account is not allowed, whatever it is for: not to vote with, not to open cases with, not to fight with, and not to hold things you would rather were not on your own citizen.

Several people in one house, one university, one office or one network can all play. The rule is one account each, controlled by that person alone. Coming from the same address is never treated on its own as proof of anything, and nobody is asked for identity documents in order to play.

Where somebody is found running more than one account, all of them are closed permanently, not only the spare. This rule is about a person, not about a login, and closing only the second one would mean losing the thing you were never allowed to have while the account it was feeding kept everything it had been fed.

Along with automating the game, this is the wrong that closing an account for good mainly exists for. It takes real evidence, and you are told and can ask for a second look, the same as with anything else below.

What counts as cheating

Cheating is getting something the game did not mean to give you, or putting more than one person’s effort behind one citizen. These are the ones worth naming.

• Sharing an account, or playing somebody else’s. An account has to be controlled by one person and nobody else.
• Automation. Scripts, bots, macros and anything else that plays for you. Working, training, fighting, voting and opening cases automatically are not allowed at all. The public interface developers can build on reads the world and never changes it: there is no permission to be granted that lets software act for you, and every attempt is written down.
• Using a bug instead of telling us. If the game gives you something it clearly did not mean to, using it is cheating. Telling us is how it gets fixed, and the link for that is in the alpha notice at the top of the game.
• Manipulating a vote. Accounts made in order to vote, and any other arrangement where one person casts more than one ballot. Ballots stay secret from governments; staff can still investigate fraud, and a result found to be fraudulent can have those ballots struck and be certified again.

Taking somebody’s goods and not paying is not cheating the game, but it is reportable and the same people look at it. Anything a player does can be reported, not only the things a player writes.

Writing to each other

You can write in articles, in the comments under them, in messages, in chat, and in the names and descriptions you give a party, a company, a bank, a newspaper, a military unit or an organisation. All of it is somewhere another player reads, and all of it can be reported.

Gray Horizon is a political game, and politics in it is allowed to be hostile. Arguing about ideology, including about fascism and extremism as subjects, is part of what the game is for. Using the game to glorify or recruit for an extremist movement is not, and neither is targeted hate, a credible threat, publishing somebody’s real details, sexual content involving minors, or scamming somebody.

Your country cannot overrule that. A government can be as authoritarian as its players vote for, and can censor its own state spaces if that is the politics it wants, but no office and no roleplay reaches these rules. A president cannot ban somebody from Gray Horizon.

A newspaper cannot silence the argument under its own article either. The only person who can take a comment down is the person who wrote it.

You can mute somebody, which hides what they write from you, and block them, which stops them writing to you. Neither is a punishment and neither needs anybody’s permission.

Nothing you can buy makes you stronger

This one is a promise to you rather than a restriction on you. Real money can never buy power in Gray Horizon. Not currency, not energy, not experience, not production, not equipment that hits harder, not better odds from a case, not a vote and not a strategic weapon.

What money will ever be able to buy is how you look, and conveniences that do not change what you can do: a frame, a banner, a title that is clearly not an earned one, a skin on equipment that behaves exactly the same. Anything bought stays with the account that bought it, so there is no route back from money into the game’s economy.

During this alpha nothing is for sale at all. There is a tip jar, and it buys nothing, unlocks nothing and changes nothing about how the game treats you, which is the point.

If a rule is broken

Sanctions run from a warning, through having something taken down, through being stopped from commenting, messaging, publishing, trading or changing your name and banner, up to being suspended for a while and having the account closed for good.

You are told. Nobody is punished quietly here. When something is refused, the refusal says what you cannot do, why, and until when, and everything standing against you is listed on your own profile. A reason can be held back in the narrow case where giving it would help somebody get around a check, and when that happens you are told it is being held back rather than left to think there was none.

You can ask for a second look. A suspension, a closure and any restriction that stops you doing something can be appealed once, within fourteen days of the notice, and never by the person who decided it. A warning stops nothing, so there is nothing there to appeal. The sanction stays in force while the appeal is read, because an appeal that paused it would be the quickest way to carry on doing the thing you were stopped for.

Reporting somebody

There is a Report control on a citizen’s profile, on an article, on a comment, on a private message and on an organisation’s page. Using it makes the game take its own copy of what you are reporting, so deleting it afterwards does not make it go away.

A report is never shown to the person it is about, and a sanction names the rule and the conduct rather than naming you.

Who wrote this

Nikola Filić, reachable at hello@grayhorizon.world. This is a hobby project run by one person, not a company.

These rules are part of the Terms, which say what Gray Horizon is and what happens to your account. The privacy note says what is kept about you.