How in-houses run

How to be here

The whole thing runs on the same few dozen people showing up again next week. Every rule below is downstream of that.

• Treat everyone in the lobby as somebody you'll be drafted alongside tomorrow, because you will be.
• Anybody in their first three games here is marked with a 🌱 in the queue and in the lobby. That mark is for you, not for them: put them somewhere sensible, say what the ping is actually for, and don't assume they know a single one of our conventions.
• No slurs, no harassment, no bigotry. None of it survives being called a joke afterwards.
• Keep DMs to people who want them. One unanswered message is a message; six is harassment.
• Staff decisions stand in the moment. Disagree in a ticket, not in the lobby and not in front of nine other people.
• Post in the channel the thing belongs in, and tag spoilers — new releases and esports results both.
• A DND channel means do not disturb. It isn't a suggestion about tone.

The queue

Ten people have to be free at the same time for any of this to happen, which makes the queue the one place where being casual about it costs everyone else their evening.

• Only queue when you can actually play a full game — draft and all, start to finish.
• The ready check gives you two and a half minutes. That's generous on purpose; answer it.
• Declining a ready check ends the lobby for the other nine, so it costs you fifteen minutes of queue. That's automatic, it goes on your record, and it isn't staff being annoyed with you.
• Declining repeatedly, or readying up and then not turning up, both cost you more than fifteen minutes — that's the point at which a person gets involved.
• Sitting in the queue for eight hours takes you out of it. Nobody waits eight hours for a game they still mean to play, and a roster full of people who won't answer is a roster that forms checks designed to fail.
• Link your highest-ranked account. Playing here on a lower one is smurfing, and it's read as such.
• Say so if an account was boosted. It changes what the rank means, and we'd rather be told than find out.
• One account per person. No alts, no account sharing, in either direction.

The draft

• Ask for a role once. A decline is an answer, and asking again is forcing.
• Off-meta picks and builds need three teammates on board first. Twitch mid, Briar top and Vayne jungle are the examples everyone already has in mind.
• Say it at least fifteen seconds before you lock. "Twitch mid" with two seconds on the clock isn't asking your team, it's telling them — nobody can answer in time, which is exactly why it gets said then. Declare it early enough to be told no.
• Declare a mispick immediately — before the next pick resolves if you possibly can.
• Stay in voice through the draft. It's the half of the game where talking actually matters.
• Some lobbies roll a modifier that changes the draft, and the map says which before you open it. Whatever it says is the mode working, not the site losing your pick.
• The three that take champions off the table — fearless, super fearless and a faction war — no longer roll on their own. Staff arm those, and you'll know before you queue: a fearless draft locks every champion picked in the last three games, super fearless does the same six games deep, and a faction war throws out the pool entirely and gives each side one region to build from.
• A lobby can also roll a captain's draft, where two of the ten pick the teams. Captains take whoever they want and roles don't come into it, so the side you land on may put you on your secondary — the lobby works that out from what everyone queued for once the sides are set, and the role swap is there if you'd rather trade. Captains: pick, don't hold court, there's a clock and it picks for you if you let it. Everybody else: you don't get to be picked last gracefully or otherwise, so don't make it a thing.

In the game

Losing is fine. Losing games is most of what everyone here does. Making the game not worth playing is the thing that isn't.

• Play to win. Deliberate feeding, trolling and sabotage are the fastest way off this site.
• Stay in your own team's voice. Don't deafen, don't wander off mid-game without a reason, and don't drop into the other team's channel.
• Pauses need a reason, and resuming needs both teams ready. Neither is a thing you decide alone.
• Surrender for a real reason only: a medical emergency, a serious technical failure, or a teammate who is deliberately ruining it.
• Forcing a remake without one of those reasons is treated as sabotage, because it is.
• Say the call once. After that, let them play it — constant backseating is its own infraction.
• Take the complaining somewhere else. There's a channel for it, and it isn't the game.

After the game

• Leave the tournament lobby when the game ends. Somebody is waiting on it.
• Report the result where you're asked to, honestly, including the ones you lost.
• Whatever happened in there ends when the game does.

Staff and tickets

Staff are the same people playing the games, and their time comes out of the same evening yours does.

• Don't ping staff for anything a channel already answers. Unwarranted @staff mentions are a severe infraction.
• One ticket per problem, and let it sit. Spam-pinging it doesn't move it up a queue that doesn't exist.
• Report it within 36 hours. Anything older than that won't be actioned — not because it didn't happen, but because by then there's nothing left to check: the VOD is gone, the chat log is gone, and the nine other people in that lobby have played four games since. Something worth a punishment is worth raising the same night.
• Troll tickets waste the exact people who run your games.
• Impersonating staff skips several rungs of the ladder at once.

How this gets enforced

Staff issue warnings and bans. A warning goes on your record and is shown to you the next time you open the queue, until you acknowledge it. A ban blocks you from queueing and pulls you out of any queue or ready check you're sitting in; it lifts when its clock runs out, or earlier if staff lift it.

One thing here isn't staff at all: declining a ready check puts a fifteen-minute cooldown on your account automatically, and writes it down. It stops you queueing and nothing else — you can still post, still comment, still be in the server. Nobody was annoyed with you, and there is nothing to appeal; a record with a dozen of them on it is a different conversation, and that one does involve a person.

The ladder below is where a sanction starts, not where it stops. A first offence and a fourth are not the same offence, and the same sentence said in a losing game and said in somebody's DMs is not the same sentence either. Staff weigh that, which is the entire reason a person issues these rather than a script.

Appeal in a ticket, once, and wait for it. Evading a ban with a second account replaces whatever you were serving with a permanent one.