[TOC]

### General Rules
Bot authors must ensure that their creations are not harming the ladder system in any way, including but not limited to:

- Slowing down the system on purpose
- Generating huge amounts of data on the disc without purpose
- Tampering with the filesystem or memory
- Network access of any kind besides connecting to the local sc2api process or the aiarena api is strictly forbidden
- Uploading identical copies (clones) of another bot is forbidden (see below for more info)

### More on: Using existing bots as a reference or starting point

It is generally useful and accepted to use existing bots as reference in order to see how certain problems are solved by other authors, or to utilize these bots as a starting point in order to not have to solve these problems at all.  


**If you use an existing bot as a starting off point, please follow these rules:**

- make sure you have the original bot author's permission
- make attempts to modify/improve the bot in some way **before uploading it to AI Arena**.
- (optional) It's also polite to note the origin of the bot in your new bot's biography on the AI Arena website.