Cortex Crime
Community guidelines
What's expected of everyone here, what isn't allowed, and what happens when a rule is broken.
The whole thing in a sentence. This is a game about working out who did it. Spoiling that for somebody else, or being unpleasant to them while you do, are the two ways to get thrown out.
Some sections below cover playing with other people and writing your own cases. Those parts of Cortex Crime are still being built; the rules are written now so nobody is surprised by them later, and each one is marked with when it starts to apply.
1. Don't spoil the case
Every case has exactly one thing worth protecting: the moment somebody works it out. Handing that to a person who hasn't got there yet takes the game away from them.
- Don't post the culprit, the trick, or the step that gives it away, anywhere a player might meet it before they've solved it. That includes the App Store reviews.
- Don't put a spoiler in your detective's name, a case title you've written, or anything else that shows up next to somebody's game.
- Talking about a case is fine and welcome. Saying "the timeline is doing more work than it looks like" is a conversation. Saying who did it is not.
- The daily case is the same case for everybody, on the same day. Hold off until it has rotated.
2. Be decent to the person on the other end
Nobody has to be good at this. A player who takes forty questions and asks for three hints has played the game correctly.
- No harassment, threats, slurs, or abuse directed at anyone — their race, religion, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality or age included.
- No sexual content involving children, in any form, ever. This one is reported, not warned about.
- No pile-ons, no following somebody between games to have another go at them.
- Don't share anybody's private information, yours or anyone else's. Not addresses, not workplaces, not real names that weren't theirs to give out.
- Losing well is part of it. So is winning without saying anything about it.
3. Your detective's name
It goes in front of other people, so it's held to the same standard as anything else you'd say to them. No slurs, no impersonating real people or us, no advertising, no spoilers, and nothing you'd be asked to leave a pub for.
Names that break this are changed, and repeated attempts are treated as what they are.
4. Play the game, not the system
- Don't use tools that play for you, read the game's memory, or fetch a case's solution.
- Don't exploit a bug for score or rank. If you find one, tell us — Settings, then Report a problem. We'd much rather hear it from you.
- Don't run several accounts to get around a limit, inflate a rank, or dodge a suspension.
- Don't hammer the servers or try to get past the checks that protect them.
Ranked play When competitive play arrives, deliberately losing, arranging results with an opponent, or playing on somebody else's account will cost the rank and, if it's repeated, the account.
5. Reporting a problem
The report channel goes to people, and it's small. Use it for what's wrong with the game.
- Don't use it to abuse whoever reads it.
- Don't flood it. There's a limit of twenty reports a day per player and it exists for this reason.
- Don't file reports about other players there — that channel is for the game itself. When player reporting arrives it will be its own thing, on the player.
6. Playing together
Applies when co-op arrives
- Co-op is a shared case. Racing ahead and announcing the answer isn't playing it, it's ending it for everybody in the room.
- Don't join a game to ruin it — sitting idle, deliberately misleading your own side, or leaving the moment it gets hard.
- Voice and text between players are covered by section 2, in full.
- If somebody in your game is being unpleasant, leave and report them. You don't owe them the rest of the case.
7. Cases you write
Applies when community cases arrive
A case you publish is read by strangers who are trusting you to be fair with them. That trust is the whole product.
- It has to be solvable. Every case is checked automatically before it is published — the culprit must be reachable, the reasoning must close, and no clue the player needs may be withheld. A case that fails those checks is not published, and you'll be told why.
- Write your own. Don't publish somebody else's work, real or fictional, as yours — no copyrighted characters, no lifted plots, no text you didn't write.
- Don't write about real people. A murder mystery naming a real person, living or recently dead, is not going up, whatever the disclaimer says.
- No sexual content, no gratuitous cruelty, and nothing designed to distress rather than to puzzle. This is a game rated 13+ and a published case has to fit that.
- Don't use a case as a channel for something else: no advertising, no links, no messages to individual players.
- You keep the rights to what you write. Publishing it here gives us permission to host it, show it and let people play it.
8. What happens when a rule is broken
We try to match the response to what happened. Most people who break a rule did it once and didn't mean much by it.
| Response | When |
|---|---|
| A word | A first, minor thing. You're told what it was. |
| It's removed | A name, a case or a message that breaks a rule. Usually with a word. |
| A feature is closed | Publishing, or playing with others, taken away while the rest of the game stays open. |
| Suspension | Repeating something after being told, or one serious thing. |
| The account goes | Anything involving children, credible threats, or coming back after a suspension. |
Cheating that affected a score or a rank has that score or rank removed, whatever else happens.
9. If you think we got it wrong
Write to info@rockspetre.com and say what happened. A person reads it, and a person can reverse it. Tell us the detective name on the account and roughly when.
We'd rather reverse a bad call than defend it.
10. These will change
As parts of the game arrive, the rules for them will be sharpened by what actually happens. When something material changes, the app will say so. The date below is the version you're reading.