House Rules developers are aware of the general risk involved when applying third-party modifications to games.

Stability. To the best of each developers’ abilities:

• Each rule has an unload procedure that is triggered when appropriate, reversing the changes it applied in the first place (except where it makes sense not to).
• Rules are written only after understanding enough of the underlying game code that we can be confident the rule does not introduce unwanted behavior.
• All rules are integration tested.
• We maintain sets of invariants at different stages of game start and game end to minimize the chance that a player can find a way to bug out House Rules and load a ruleset when it isn’t supposed to be.
• No procedure in House Rules intentionally fails silently or consumes exceptions without logging. Straightforward exception propagation paths exist wherever possible.
• Other relevant best practices (where reasonable) are applied throughout.
• House Rules specifically aims to require only the game host be modded. Rules that are not considered safe for multiplayer use (do not have the intended effects), or risk causing sync issues, are not tagged as multiplayer-safe, and thus will not load in non-skirmish games.

Gameplay Integrity and Transparency. House Rules aims to be transparent about the modifications it applies:

• The project is, of course, open sourced.
• Rulesets are only loaded in private (non-public) matches.
• Each rule’s effect is documented.
• Each built-in ruleset is documented and made available on the wiki. Game hosts can copy/paste ruleset descriptions, or copy links to the wiki to share with non-modded players.
• Hosts are reminded of the loaded ruleset (via in-game pop-up) at the start of each modded game.

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With that, our humble feature request of Resolution Games:

The modding community would very much love to find a way to allow House Rules’ rulesets to be loaded in public matches. At the moment, House Rules developers explicitly disallow this, as there is no reliable way to broadcast the modded nature of the game to players who happen to drop into a match.

We have briefly explored the idea of having a persistent UI element on the host’s screen, reminding them of the ruleset and to encourage sharing the ruleset description whenever a player joins. As there is no way to verify the host would do so, the idea was never implemented.

The feature request:

One adequate solution is to implement a very basic chat feature. Specifically, one wherein the host could send messages to clients to be displayed on screen (e.g., GameUI.ShowCameraMessage). House Rules would then be able to broadcast, regularly and to all players, the modded nature of the game. In turn, House Rules may enable rulesets in public matches while maintaining confidence that gameplay integrity is ensured and gameplay changes are transparent to all.