Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing, browsing, or using HexSettlers Online ("the Game", "Service", "we"), whether as a registered account holder or as a guest player, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree with any part of these Terms, you must discontinue using the Service immediately.

2. Intellectual Property & Fan Project Disclaimer

Catan® is a registered trademark of Catan GmbH. HexSettlers is an independent, non-commercial fan project and research implementation developed for educational, mathematical, and recreational enjoyment.

Game mechanics, hexagonal mathematical structures, and dice probability distributions are non-copyrightable systems under established law (17 U.S.C. § 102(b)). Visual icon assets are licensed under open licenses (Phosphor Icons MIT, Game-Icons.net CC BY 3.0), audio is generated procedurally via the Web Audio API without external samples, and board rendering is performed mathematically via procedural SVG algorithms.

3. Fair Play, Matchmaking & Anti-Bot Verification

To preserve competitive integrity and provide a welcoming experience for all players, you agree to the following Fair Play standards:

• One Account per Person: Using multiple accounts or simultaneous browser tabs to manipulate matchmaking queues, win rates, or Elo ratings ("win-trading") is strictly prohibited.
• Anti-Bot & Automation Policy: You may not deploy automated bots, scrapers, headless browser scripts, or modified clients in public rooms or Ranked matchmaking queues. The game's built-in AI opponents are permitted; automating your own account or device to play on your behalf in live multiplayer is not.
• Cloudflare Turnstile Verification: We utilize Cloudflare Turnstile to prevent bot spam, credential stuffing, and automated abuse during authentication, registration, and sensitive actions. Attempting to bypass, reverse engineer, or forge Turnstile challenge tokens is a material violation of these Terms.
• Abandonment & Disconnections: In Ranked matches, voluntarily abandoning an active match counts as an automatic forfeit, resulting in a last-place result and standard Elo rating adjustment. For unintentional connection drops, a 60-second grace period is provided to reconnect using your session token.

4. User Conduct & Community Standards

When participating in public lobbies, game chat, and custom rooms, you agree to adhere to common community standards:

• Do not transmit harassment, hate speech, defamation, threats, vulgarity, or discriminatory remarks.
• Do not choose offensive, hateful, or misleading display names or avatars.
• Do not attempt to disrupt server operations, broadcast malicious WebSocket packets, or exploit game engine glitches.
• Do not spam friend requests or game invites, scrape or harvest the player directory, or use the player-search feature for anything other than finding people to play with.
• Do not circumvent a block placed on you, including by creating additional accounts or using a guest session to contact a player who has blocked you.

Room hosts and server administrators reserve the right to kick, mute, or permanently ban players who violate these conduct standards.

5. Social Features, Friend Requests & Blocking

Signed-in players may use the friends system. Guest players have no social profile and cannot send or receive friend requests or game invites.

• Friend requests: You may send, accept, decline, or cancel requests at any time. Sending a request reveals your display name and avatar to the recipient.
• Game invites: Invites are delivered only to accepted friends and only for lobbies that have not yet started. Joining an invite is always voluntary.
• Blocking: Blocking is a one-directional safety measure. A blocked player cannot send you friend requests or invites, and cannot lift the block; only you may unblock from your profile. Misusing blocks to harass, or evading a block, violates these Terms.
• Rate limits: Friend requests, player searches, and invites are rate-limited per account; attempts to bypass these limits are a violation of these Terms.
• Availability: Social features depend on your account and network and may change or be withdrawn as the game evolves.

6. Security & Responsible Disclosure

We take the security of HexSettlers and player data seriously:

• Responsible Disclosure: If you identify a security vulnerability, we invite you to report it responsibly in accordance with RFC 9116 via [email protected] / [email protected], or through our security policy.
• Prohibited Actions: Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS) attacks, brute-force attacks against user accounts, unauthorized penetration testing against production servers, or harvesting private player information without permission is strictly forbidden.

7. Account Management & Self-Serve Deletion

You are responsible for safeguarding your login credentials. You may terminate your account at any time through our in-game self-service deletion option:

Navigating to Profile > Danger Zone > Delete Account will permanently wipe your authentication records and personal rankings from our database and cascade-delete your friendships and blocks, anonymizing historical match references in compliance with GDPR and CCPA.

8. Disclaimer of Warranties & Limitation of Liability

The Service is provided on an "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" basis without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise. We do not guarantee that the Service will operate without interruption, lag, network disconnects, or unexpected bugs.

Under no legal theory shall the project maintainers, developers, or server hosts be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, or consequential damages resulting from your use of or inability to access the Service.

9. Modifications to Terms

We reserve the right to update or modify these Terms as the game evolves (e.g. adding new expansion modes or tournament rules). Your continued use of HexSettlers following the publication of revised Terms indicates your acknowledgment and acceptance of the changes.