Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of personal information that we gather when you are on our website and when you use our services. This policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that we do not own or control, or to individuals that we do not employ or manage. We reserve the right to revise this policy at any time without notification to you.

Our Privacy Principles

We know that you care how information about you is used and shared, and we appreciate your trust. We hate spam e-mail as much as you do, and we won't have anything to do with it.

We will not share your e-mail address with any third party company (no external spam).
We will not send spam to your e-mail address.
We will make our best possible effort to protect your personal information.
We may contact you via e-mail for administrative reasons, or if you opt-in to certain mailings such as newsletters or event notifications.

Personally Identifiable Information

We collect the following types of information from our users:

Information You Provide to Us:
We receive and store any information you enter on our website or provide to us in any other way. You can choose not to provide us with certain information, but then you may not be able to take advantage of some features of our services.
Website Registration: In order for you to use many features of our website, you must complete a registration form. As part of this registration form, we require select personal information (including your date of birth and e-mail address).
Website User Profile: To allow you to express yourself beyond just the information collected during registration, we enable you to provide additional information, such as instant messaging IDs, your location, etc.
Other Data You Submit to Us: Any other data you submit to us in any form, such as on our our website discussion boards, in text chat, in a game server, or elsewhere in our services may be collected.
Information Automatically Provided:
Website: We automatically receive and record certain "traffic data" on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, cookie information for our website, and the page you requested. We use this traffic data to help diagnose problems with our servers, analyze trends, and administer the website.
Game Servers: If you join one of our game servers, your game will automatically send to us information about you, such as your game account name, IP address, and other identifying data such as a globally-unique identifier (GUID). The scope of this information is generally limited to data that the game needs in order to function. Furthermore, our game servers log any data you may send to the server, including text chat.
Game Server Screenshots and Recordings: Some of our game servers may take screenshots of what you see on your computer screen and send them to us. The purpose of this is to help our administrators find players who are cheating in the game so we can remove them. Similarly, some game servers may record a video or demo of what you see on your computer screen while you are on the server and send it to us. In both of these cases, it is possible that personal information not involving the operation of the game may be provided to us (for example, the content of text chat you may be having with another player or even somebody outside of the game).
Voice Recordings: On any server that has a voice communication function, it is possible that a recording of your voice may be recorded by us or by other users of the service. Some users may not warn you at all and record your voice without your consent. We will always try to warn you if a recording of your voice is being made by us. One exception to this is a game server demo. Usually, when a demo is recorded, the voice traffic is recorded along with the game data and played back at the same time.
Information we collect may be retained by us indefinitely, including in backup media and archives.

Website Cookies

Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to provide features that recognize your account as logged on and other website features. Further, to help us tailor our website to the needs and interests of our visitors, or for other purposes, we may gather aggregate, non-personally identifiable information via cookies. Examples include the type of Internet browser our visitors are using, the frequency of visits to our site and which pages our visitors viewed. We may share these aggregate statistics with others. The use of cookies is standard on the Internet and many major websites use them. Cookies stored on your computer that are designated for use on our website cannot be retrieved by other websites.

In the course of serving advertisements to this website, our third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser, separate from the one placed by us. We do not have any control over or knowledge of the contents or purposes of these cookies.

Updating or Deleting Your Website Data

You can change or delete any optional information in your website account settings.

Once you make changes to your website account, they will take effect immediately. However, it is possible that old information you wish to change or remove could be restored to your account in the event that we need to restore our database from a backup copy. Old information may be preserved on our backup media or in archived form for a long time and may still be available to us (although not accessible to the public).

Security

To prevent unauthorized disclosure, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have in place reasonable physical and electronic procedures to safeguard and secure information we collect online. Portions of our website use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), an advanced encryption protocol, to scramble information that you enter so that it cannot be read as it is transmitted across the Internet. SSL is the recognized industry standard worldwide for such sensitive transactions, enhancing safety when you submit information over the web. In addition, certain items of personal information are encrypted when stored in our database.

It is important for you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer. When using a shared computer, be sure to sign off and do not opt to stay logged in to our website. Should you realize that you accidentally allowed a third party to access your account, you must let us know immediately, as you may be held liable for their actions in your name.

We will never ask you for your account password. Do not give your account password to any person who asks for it, even if they appear to be us or affiliated with us.

Children

We do not allow any child under the age of 13 to use our services. If you are aware that a child under the age of 13 has provided us with personally identifiable information, please contact us and we will remove the information. Children under the age of 18 but who are at least 13 years old may participate in our services and provide personally identifiable information, granted that they have the consent of their parent or guardian to do so.

Sharing of Information

We will not rent nor sell your personal information to anyone and we will share your personal information only as described below:

Our Personnel: Our personnel and authorized third parties such as consultants or contractors may have access to your information as is considered normal for the course of our operations.
Our Designates: We may designate users (such as staff members) to have access to your information as part of the duties of their position.
Protecting Ourselves and Others: We may release personal information when we believe in good faith that release is necessary to comply with a law; to enforce or apply our Terms of Use and other policies; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of ourselves, our personnel, our users, or others.
As Mandated by a Court of Law: We may release your information if we are subjected to a subpoena, warrant, court order, or are otherwise required to comply by a court of law.
Change of Ownership: If our services are to change ownership, the new owner will receive your personal information.
Website Profile Information: Any information you publish in your website profile may be displayed to other users. You may choose to hide this information by using any privacy options in your profile (if they exist) or by simply not publishing the information.
Investigations and Anti-Cheating Activities: We may provide information about you to third parties for the purposes of determining if you are involved in any cheating activity in regards to games played on our game servers. This information is generally limited to any game account information you have provided to us (such as your game name and GUID) and your IP address, but may also include game screenshots and recordings.
With Your Consent: If you consent to us sharing your personal information in a particular way, we may do so.
NO GUARANTEES

We will make every reasonable effort to abide by this Privacy Policy, but we cannot legally guarantee to you that we will do so in every instance. Sometimes, things happen that are beyond our control. It's possible that your personal information could be disclosed in spite of this policy being in effect. You accept this risk by using our services.