Terms

Who this is

Wyrmcourt is a game run by one developer, not a company. Anything on this page - a question, a complaint, an account you want gone - goes to [email protected]. What the game stores about you and how to have it back or deleted is on the privacy page, which is the more useful document of the two.

This is an alpha, and the wipe is real

The footer of the game says it and this page says it again, because it is the single most important thing to know before you spend a fortnight here: levels, silver and gear are wiped before beta.

What survives is what you earned by handing a character back: your titles, your Crowns, and the number of times you have been round. Alpha characters also keep a founder's mark. That is a deliberate promise rather than a hopeful one - the wipe tool writes down the roll before it runs, so the record of who was here exists independently of the database it is clearing.

Outside the wipe, the island can change. Numbers get retuned, systems get rebuilt, and a thing that was worth having on Tuesday may be worth less on Friday. That is what an alpha is for. There is no compensation for a balance change, because there is nothing to compensate you with that would not itself be a balance change.

Your account

• One person, as many characters as you like - but see the next section about what they may do with each other.
• Your password is yours to look after. Sessions are kept as hashes, so nobody here can read your password or lift your session out of a backup, and equally nobody here can recover a password you have lost without a confirmed address to send a link to.
• You can sign in with a password or with a linked provider, and the account panel will refuse to unlink the last way back in, because that would lock you out of your own character.
• You can have your account deleted. Ask, and it goes.
• Names are on screen for everybody, forever, and there is no unsaying one - so the swear jar refuses them outright rather than starring them out.

Playing fair

The island watches for a few things, and it is better to say which than to leave it implied:

• Scripting and automation. The game is a daily allowance of clicks and a set of decisions about how to spend them. Something that plays it for you is not playing it. There is a floor under how fast a human can act, and acting under it is noticed.
• Your own second account. Two characters at the same address are refused robbery, market trades and arena bouts with each other. This is not an accusation - households, halls of residence and shared connections all trip it, and it is a refusal rather than a punishment. Everything else on the island still works normally.
• Bugs. Finding one and telling me is welcome and always will be. Finding one and farming it is the one thing here that will actually cost you the character.
• The other people. Robbery, theft and the arena are in the game on purpose and none of them are cheating. Harassment, slurs and following somebody about to make the island unpleasant for them are a different thing, and the answer to them is not a game mechanic.

Where a rule is broken, what happens is usually nothing dramatic: a refused action, a note in a ledger, and a look from me if it keeps happening. An account is only closed for the deliberate and the repeated.

Silver is not money

Silver, Crowns, items and characters have no value outside the game and cannot be bought, sold or exchanged for anything real. There is nothing to buy in Wyrmcourt today. If that ever changes, the rule it will be built on is already written down and public: nothing sold is unobtainable by playing, nothing sold touches the daily click allowance, and nobody is forced to buy anything to keep up.

What you make here

Your character's name, your clan's name and motto, the notices you post and the things you say in chat stay yours. By putting them in the game you are letting it show them to other players and keep them in its database, which is the whole of what it needs to do with them. The writing, the art, the map and the code are mine and are not licensed for reuse.

No warranty, plainly

This is one person's game, running on one machine. It may be down. It may lose a day. It is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind, and my liability for anything arising from using it is limited to the nothing you paid for it. The backup runs nightly and is verified, which is a real effort rather than a promise of perfection.

If the island shuts down for good, I will say so in advance rather than simply switching it off.

Changes to this page

These terms will change as the game does. The date below is when they were last read against what the software actually does, and material changes will be announced in the game rather than made quietly.