Terms of Service

4Ascent is a free, community-run server for a classic fantasy MMORPG. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or licensed by the original publishers or rights holders of the game. All trademarks and game assets remain the property of their respective owners. We run it because we want the world to exist; these terms are the smallest set of rules that keeps it playable for everyone.

1. Acceptance

By creating an account, downloading the client, or connecting to the game server, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not create an account.

If you are under the age of digital consent in your country (13 in most places, 16 in parts of the EU), you may only use 4Ascent with the involvement of a parent or guardian, who accepts these terms on your behalf. Certain areas of chat and the marketplace may be restricted for younger players.

2. Your account

One account is both your website login and your game login. You are responsible for everything done with it, so:

• Use a password you do not use anywhere else, and never share it. Staff will never ask you for it — not in a ticket, not in game, not in a direct message.
• Keep the email address on the account current. It is the only way we can verify that the account is yours if you lose access.
• Accounts are personal. Selling, buying, renting, gifting or otherwise transferring an account is not allowed, and neither is sharing one between several people. Accounts caught being traded are closed, and the buyer has no claim to what was on them.
• You may hold more than one account, but not to gain an advantage that a single player should not have — stacking rewards, voting or referring yourself, evading a ban, or filling both sides of a trade or a battleground.

You may close your account at any time from your account settings or by opening a ticket.

3. Conduct

Play the game as it was built to be played, and treat other players as people. The following will get an account actioned:

• Cheating. Bots, macros that play for you, automated farming, memory editors, packet manipulation, modified clients, or any third-party program that gives you an advantage.
• Exploiting. Abusing a bug rather than reporting it — duplicating items or currency, walking through geometry, or repeating anything that obviously was not intended. Report it and, if it is significant, we would rather reward you for it.
• Real-money trading. Selling or buying in-game items, currency, characters or services for real money or for anything outside the game, on any platform.
• Harassment and hate.Threats, stalking, sexual harassment, or abuse directed at someone’s race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, gender or sexuality. Trash talk between rivals is part of a PvP game; this is not that.
• Scamming and impersonation. Deceiving another player out of items or account access, phishing, or pretending to be staff.
• Disruption. Attacks against the servers or the website, spam, advertising other servers, or deliberately sabotaging your own side in team content.
• Illegal content. Anything unlawful in your jurisdiction or ours, including sexual content involving minors, which is reported to the authorities without exception.

Character, guild and pet names follow the same standard. We will rename anything offensive, impersonating staff, or built to be unreadable, without warning.

4. Content you post

You keep ownership of anything you write in tickets, on your profile, or elsewhere on the site. By posting it you give us permission to store it, display it where it belongs, and quote it when handling a report or an appeal.

Do not post anything you do not have the right to post, and do not publish other people’s personal information. We may remove content that breaks these terms, and we keep records of moderation actions.

5. Moonstones and purchases

Moonstones are in-game virtual currency with no real-world value. When you pay for moonstones you are paying for a limited, personal, revocable licence to use them inside 4Ascent — you are not buying property, an investment, or a store of value. Specifically:

• Moonstones and the items bought with them cannot be exchanged for money, transferred between accounts, or sold to anyone.
• They have no value outside the game and no cash equivalent. If an account is closed, or the service ends, any remaining balance ends with it.
• We may change item prices, adjust what is on sale, or retire items at any time. Balances already credited are not taken away when prices change.
• Purchases are final once the moonstones reach your account. Where the law where you live gives you a statutory right to withdraw from a digital purchase, that right stands and this clause does not limit it.
• A duplicate charge, a payment that credited the wrong account, or a purchase that failed to deliver will be fixed — open a ticket with the payment reference. Starting a chargeback instead locks the account until the dispute is resolved.

Money spent supports server hosting and development. It does not buy immunity from these rules: a paying account is banned on the same terms as any other, and a ban does not entitle you to a refund of an unspent balance.

6. Enforcement and appeals

Depending on what happened and whether it has happened before, we may issue a warning, mute chat, remove items or currency obtained in breach of these terms, roll back progress, suspend an account for a set period, or close it permanently. Serious cases — automation, real-money trading, account theft, attacks on the service — usually go straight to a permanent ban on the first offence.

Every action is taken by a person reviewing logs, not by an automatic system acting alone. Evading a ban with a new account extends the original penalty to the new account.

Appeals. You can appeal any action through a support ticket. A banned account keeps access to this website so it can appeal. We will tell you which rule was broken and, where doing so does not expose our detection methods or another player, what evidence we hold. Appeals are answered once; reopening the same appeal repeatedly will have it closed. If we got it wrong, we will reverse it and restore what was lost.

7. Your data

We collect only what running the service requires: your username, email address, a hash of your password, the IP addresses you connect from, your characters and their progress, purchase records, and the contents of support tickets. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

• Why we hold it. To operate your account, credit purchases, answer tickets, detect cheating and multi-accounting, and keep the service secure.
• Who else sees it. Our payment providers process payments and receive only what they need to do so; we never store full card numbers. Our email provider delivers verification and reset messages.
• How long. Account and character data is kept while the account exists. Security logs are kept for a limited period. Records of payments and of enforcement actions are kept longer, because we need them to handle disputes and ban evasion.
• Your rights. Open a ticket to request a copy of your data, correct it, or have your account and its personal data deleted. Deletion removes your characters and cannot be undone, and we may retain the minimum needed for accounting and to stop a banned player returning.

Chat and other in-game communication may be logged so that reports can be investigated. Assume anything you type in game can be read by staff if someone reports it.

8. The service itself

4Ascent is provided as-is and free of charge. We do not promise uninterrupted uptime: servers go down for maintenance, patches introduce bugs, and hardware fails. We aim to announce planned maintenance on the news page in advance.

The game is under active development. Classes get rebalanced, items get changed, content gets added and occasionally removed. In the rare case of a serious bug or an exploit, we may roll back affected characters or the world to an earlier state, losing progress made in between. If we ever have to shut the service down, we will give as much notice as we reasonably can.

Everything in the game — characters, items, currency, and progress — remains part of the service. You have a licence to play with it, not ownership of it.

9. Liability

To the extent the law allows, 4Ascent and the people who run it are not liable for lost progress, lost items, lost virtual currency, downtime, or any indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the service. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death, personal injury, or fraud, and nothing limits any rights you have as a consumer that cannot be waived by agreement.

10. Changes and contact

We may update these terms as the game changes or the law requires. Material changes are announced on the news page, and the date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Continuing to play after a change means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, close your account.

Questions about these terms, a specific enforcement action, or your data go through support, which is the fastest way to reach a person who can actually do something about it.