Our Criteria for Intentional Cooperative Play (Teaming)

Greetings, this is Shadow Arena.

Shadow Arena’s main formats are a “Solo” mode where you fight alone and a “Team” mode where you party up with a team member to overcome your foes. As a result, intentionally teaming up/cooperating with another player in Solo mode or another team in Team mode can impact the experience of other players by disrupting the fairness of the game and even result in “match-fixing”.

Shadow Arena recognizes the importance of “Fair Combat” and took aggressive action in accordance with our Terms of Service whenever such behavior was discovered during the Beta Season Round 1 after the start of Early Access. Nevertheless, due to a lack of a point of reference to the criteria and action we apply for such behavior, we understand players may feel some confusion regarding the results of our actions.

We understand with the number of experienced players increasing during 2 months of Beta Season Round 1, there may be more commonly/tacitly accepted gameplay strategies and unique circumstances that occur. As a result, we came to the conclusion that we needed to also change our internal criteria for determining “match-fixing” behavior, and we want to give you clearer guidelines on our criteria and scope for defining such behavior for the 2nd round of the Beta Season.


1. Continually playing in a cooperative manner with the same player from the start of a match

Unlike just trying to take down a dangerous player when a small number of players are left, playing together and cooperating from the beginning of the game can be seen as intentional “match-fixing” behavior.


2. Continually playing in a cooperative manner with the same player over multiple matches

Even if it’s a game-specific strategy, playing in a cooperative manner with the same player over multiple matches can be seen as intentional “match-fixing” behavior.


3. Encouraging cooperative play through chat, pre-agreed social actions, etc.

Behavior such as pointing out a specific player for cooperative play can be seen as hampering the fairness of a match.


Of course, beyond just the criteria we’ve described so far, there may be other cases of “match-fixing” and hampering the fairness of a match, so the scope of our guidelines that we’ve set internally for violations may change depending on the future accepted game strategies, match flow, and new content. Also, please note that the guidelines above apply to general game matches, and our guidelines for competitive events may differ as intentional cooperative play will be determined by a separate set of competitive rules and the decision of the admins/event organizers.

We are also considering reverting the June 18th update that “removed other players’ nicknames from being displayed during a match”, so you can more easily identify players and report inappropriate behavior such as intentionally teaming/cooperating.

If you ever encounter or see intentional/consistent cooperative play during a match, please report the player through the in-game Report feature in the results screen and provide details such as the time and circumstances. Along with this, if you send us the corresponding video evidence through our Customer Support or official Discord channel, it’ll help us investigate more quickly, so we hope you will provide us with all the information you have.

The Shadow Arena team will strive to check your reports quickly and root out any violations of the Terms of Service with our 24/7 monitoring. We ask everyone for your cooperation in creating a healthy and fair gaming community by refraining from any acts that may interfere with this goal.

Then, we will look forward to everyone’s amazing battles in the 2nd round of the Beta Season, thank you.