I'd definitely like to say I don't want to see an overabundance of rules (some mentioned already that made me cringe are no dead people talking, having to assign pointman / rearguard, etc). Different groups are going to play it different ways, and sure we want to stick to the primer and avoid exploits and hacks and what have you, but the fact that we are playing in at most 4 person teams makes admining many of these rules all but impossible.

I'd like to speak specifically to the "no dead info" -- this isn't a rule in BF games, to the best of my knowledge. At least I've never heard of it if it is and I commonly shout things to my squaddies warning them of whatever just laid waste to me, and my squaddies do the same. Why? Because the in-game VoIP allows it. Well, the in-game VoIP allows us to communicate with the rest of our team when dead in L4D. If we're going for realism here, should we make a rule on not letting dead people out of spawn rooms because it's not realistic? If dead people can't talk, they sure shouldn't be allowed to come back to life mysteriously trapped in a room a few hundred feet away from their fresh corpse. What about if multiple party members are dead and the team lets one out at a time from the same room? Where did they come from? How did they get there? Why are these rooms creating people? Sure it doesn't make sense, and isn't realistic, but it's part of the game mechanics.

When I've been playing, and am dead, I'm usually looking behind a player to be ready to warn them if I see something coming up behind them. If it helps, think of it as heightened awareness due to just seeing a friend of yours get ripped apart by zombies?

I'll be honest here, mostly because I know I'm not alone. The main reason I stopped playing CoD4 was due to what I saw as an over-regulation of the server. I believe that our rules should foster teamwork and communication, not to encompass every possible situation where things might not be realistic and restrict a players abilities. When I first logged onto the TG 2142 server and the first two things I read said "You must join a squad" and "You must follow SL + CO orders" I was hooked. I've hardly played on any other server, I've become a SM and joined an IHS. This type of rule, to me, epitomizes why TG is appealing.

In Left4Dead, it is a quite unique style of gameplay. How many other online 4-player (or low-player) co-op games are there? Any? How many does TG support? I think we have to give it time to come into its own, see what people are up to, and most importantly encourage experimentation. Let's not get locked in to a certain way of doing things just because that's how it has been done before.

We are going to need some rules in place, clearly. But let's start small. Maybe things like "No intentional friendly fire" (but even that is up in the air -- what about when you want to blow off steam in the safe room and the rest of your team does, too?) or "Do not lone-wolf" (but then what about people who get lost? Or scared? Or run away from something mean and ugly and get turned around?)

One thing that has struck me as remarkable about Left 4 Dead is the way it requires a group of people to work as a team. If you go off by yourself, all it takes is one hunter, boomer, smoker, tank or random horde (any of which occur about once every 40 seconds) and you are dead and out. You literally can not lone wolf in this game and get anywhere. So far as rules regarding comms ago -- try playing without them! If I join a random game and am the only one with a mic, I'm out. Not worth my time. A good chunk of what I view as the beauty of Left 4 Dead comes from the fact that it already seems to embody much of what we as TG stand for. Let's not let a desire for regulation and order obstruct that.

Edit to add: Whiskey's post was written while I was written mine, I'd like to say that the examples he gives are the ideas I personally would like to see.