Recently there has been an increase in the number of users reporting issues such as suspected drop-hacking, intentional team killing, griefing and abusive language / personal insults both in the public chat lobbies and using the in-game chat feature during matches.



Abusive language



Unfortunately, the nature of playing auto-generated matches with random people from across the world means that you will invariably be pitted against individuals who can be antagonistic, abusive or otherwise incapable of enjoying a video game for what it is and learning from a defeat rather than refusing to accept it. However, please remember that there is a difference between casual competitive banter during or after a game, and someone who is consistently abusive to the detriment of other players.



Team killing



Team killing is a potentially serious issue in any game which involves damage/killing and friendly fire. Weapons in CoH2 can all inflict damage on the units of all players, and so it is possible to be hit by your or your ally's artillery, mortar fire and tank shells by accident. Whilst using heavy artillery on your ally's HQ can be amusing in a custom game with a friend, it is certainly not a recommended or acceptable tactic. People hop into automatch to have fun - and ideally to win - not to have their units and structures intentionally destroyed before the enemy gets a chance to try.



'Griefing' is an old gaming term for intentionally misusing or otherwise exploiting a game's assets (so in the case of CoH2, units and abilities) to piss people off. Often griefing and team killing go hand-in-hand, but that is not always the case. Either way, both are unacceptable and repeated offences can result in a ban.



Drop-hacking



Drop-hacking is loosely defined as one or more players intentionally terminating their connection so as to avoid registering a loss; this is commonly done either by unplugging the router or using third-party software to achieve the same result. Losing your connection during a CoH2 match will not necessarily register you a win as opposed to a loss, and so aside from being extremely unsportsmanlike and carrying a heavy risk of being banned from the Relic servers, it is not at all a sound method of securing cheap victories.



Please bear in mind that it is not uncommon for players to lag during a match, or even get disconnected altogether; people have a wide array of PC and internet setups, and Steam will occasionally boot you off their servers for routine maintenance and so forth. Thus, do not assume that all problems you encounter are the result of malicious intent, as they are more than likely not -- only a very small segment of any game's multiplayer community will attempt to intentionally defraud their win/loss stats .



That said, if you are quite certain that a particular user (or users) has abused the game rules in some way then please send an e-mail containing your Steam ID and an attached replay/screenshots to enforcement@relic.com



Thank you.



Supplemental by Relic Entertainment:



If you decide to report a certain player at enforcement@relic.com then please obtain that specific players Steam ID right after you witnessed his or her violation of the game rules and include it in your violation report. You can find out the SteamID using the Steam WebApp that can be found here: http://steamcommunity.com The reason for this is the fact that every player can change his ingame name which makes it hard for us to track down the accused player even after his or her misconduct has been proven via replay or screenshot. We therefore need the SteamID to ensure that every player who provably violated the game rules can get penalized by us.