These terms cover the Auto Ball game and the website at
https://autoball.net. Auto Ball is made by
Dominick Favata ("we", "us"). By playing the game
or using the website, you agree to them.
Your privacy is covered separately, by the Privacy Policy. Where the two disagree about data, the Privacy Policy wins.
1. The short version
- Buy the game, play the game. Offline play needs nothing from us.
- Online play needs a Steam account and a working connection to our servers.
- Don't cheat, don't attack the servers, don't try to break other people's games. That's the whole conduct list.
- The game is sold as-is. We can suspend online access for the conduct above.
- Nothing here takes away rights your local consumer law gives you.
2. Buying and owning the game
Auto Ball is sold through Steam. Valve handles the sale, the payment and the refund - so your purchase is governed by the Steam Subscriber Agreement and Steam's refund policy, not by us. If you want a refund, ask Steam.
We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and play the game for your own entertainment. You do not own the game itself, its code, its characters or its art.
There are no in-game purchases. No currency you can buy, no loot boxes, no subscriptions. The in-game gold you spend in the shop is worth nothing outside a single match session and cannot be bought, sold or transferred.
3. Online play
Online play is optional. The game is fully playable offline.
To play online you sign in through Steam, and we create an account record for you. What that record holds is set out in §3 of the Privacy Policy.
We do not promise the servers will be available. Servers may go down for deploys, for maintenance, or unexpectedly. We aim to keep them up and we do not guarantee it.
Online play may end. If we stop running the servers, online play stops. Offline play - the whole game against AI opponents - keeps working on any copy you have already installed, and we will not push an update that takes it away.
4. Ranked play and the leaderboard
If you play ranked, we keep a rating for you and your Steam display name appears on a public leaderboard alongside it. That is the point of a ladder, and it is the one place your name is published. If you do not want your name published, do not play ranked - your rating is otherwise never shown to anyone but you.
Ratings are ours to calculate and to correct. If a rating is wrong because of a bug, we may recalculate it.
5. What you agree not to do
- Cheat. Modifying the game, the network traffic or your machine's clock to gain an advantage in online play - including automating your play.
- Attack the service. Attempting to disrupt, overload or gain unauthorised access to the servers, or to another player's session.
- Impersonate. Using a display name intended to impersonate us, our moderators or another player.
- Abuse other players. Deliberately ruining other people's games - including repeatedly abandoning ranked matches.
- Resell or redistribute the game, or circumvent Steam's licensing.
The game has no chat, no voice, no usernames we control and no user-generated content, so there is nothing else here to prohibit. Your display name comes from your Steam profile, and Steam's own rules govern it.
6. Suspension
If you do something in §5, we may suspend or terminate your online access. We will do it proportionately: a first offence is not a permanent ban.
Suspension affects online play only. It never removes the game you bought, and it never stops you playing offline.
If you think a suspension was wrong, email admin.autoball@gmail.com and tell us why. A human will read it.
7. Changes to the game
Auto Ball launches in Early Access, and Early Access means the game changes. Characters get rebalanced, abilities get reworked, and things that are good today may be weaker tomorrow. Buying the game buys the game as it is now, not a promise about how a particular character will play later.
We may add, change or remove features, including online features. Where a change is significant we will say so in the release notes.
8. The website
The website exists to publish this document, the privacy policy, the licence notices and the game's mechanics reference. It sets no cookies and runs no advertising or profiling analytics. Our host processes your IP address and request metadata to deliver and protect the site - see §10 of the Privacy Policy.
The mechanics reference is generated from the game and is provided for information. It describes the game as it is built today and will change with the game.
9. Other people's code
The game includes open-source components under their own licences. Those licences govern those components and nothing here overrides them. The full notices are published at /en/licenses and ship with the game.
10. No warranty
The game and the website are provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that the game is free of defects, that it will run on your hardware, or that online play will be uninterrupted.
11. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything arising out of the game or the website is limited to the amount you paid for the game.
We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss - lost time, lost progress, lost ratings, or lost opportunities.
None of this limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
12. Your consumer rights
Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have under the consumer law where you live. If you are in the EU, the UK, Australia or anywhere else with mandatory consumer protections, those protections apply on top of this document and win where they conflict with it.
13. Age
The game is not directed at children under 13. See §11 of the Privacy Policy.
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of the United States, and the courts there have jurisdiction - except where the consumer law of your own country gives you the right to bring a claim locally, which it may.
15. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The "last updated" date at the top changes when we do. If a change materially reduces your rights, we will announce it in the game's release notes rather than changing this page quietly.
Continuing to play after a change means you accept the updated terms.