What we keep.
What we never do with it.

When you create a Malevolent Gaming account we store the username, the email address you gave us and your password — the password as a one-way hash, never as readable text. Staff cannot look up your password; we can only reset it.

Alongside it sits the profile you build on the site: display name, avatar, the guilds you belong to, your friends list, your Renown rank and your Shard balance.

Where a service needs it, a Discord identifier is linked to your account so that roles, sign-in and support line up between the website and the Discord server.

The game servers keep the things a game has to keep: your characters, their inventory, skills and progression, and the login timestamps and IP history that let staff investigate a compromised account or a rule break.

Because the website is the identity master for every world, the account record here and the account record on a game server refer to the same person by design.

Every sign-in, registration, password reset and failed attempt is written to a sign-in log with the time, the result and the IP address the request came from. It is what tells the difference between you forgetting a password and someone else guessing at it.

Repeated failures from one address are rate-limited. Because the site sits behind Cloudflare, the address recorded is the one Cloudflare forwards as the real visitor, not Cloudflare's own.

The sign-in log is kept for 180 days and then deleted automatically.

Page views are recorded by Matomo, self-hosted at stats.malevolentmultiverse.com. It records the page, the referrer, a coarse location derived from the IP address, and the browser and screen size. Clicking certain buttons and cards also records an event, so we can see which parts of a page people actually use.

The part worth knowing:

While you are signed in, your visits carry your username in Matomo, so staff can tell one member's session from another when something breaks. Signed out, a visit is not tied to a name. Administrator visits are not counted at all.

Matomo is ours. It runs on our own machine and reports to nobody else.

When you leave a comment we keep what you typed together with your IP address and browser user agent, which is what lets staff deal with abuse and spam.

Where you can upload media, other people may be able to download it and read whatever is embedded in the file. Strip EXIF location data from photographs before you upload them — a phone camera writes GPS coordinates into the image unless you have turned that off.

A support ticket keeps what you wrote and which account raised it. A staff application keeps the answers you submitted and the Discord name you gave, and it is emailed to the team.

Shop orders record which items an account redeemed and what it cost in Shards. Shards are an in-house currency — no card number, bank detail or billing address is ever handled by this website.

Cookies here do two jobs: keeping you signed in, and counting visits. There is no advertising cookie on this site because there is no advertising on this site.

Blocking cookies entirely will stop you from staying signed in. Clearing them signs you out and resets the counter that tells Matomo you have been here before.

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal data. It is not passed to advertisers, data brokers or analytics companies, because we do not use any.

The few places data does travel:

• Cloudflare sits in front of the website.
  • Every request reaches Cloudflare before it reaches us, so Cloudflare sees the connection and its IP address, and filters obvious attacks.
• Wordfence is the firewall running inside the site.
  • It logs requests it blocks, including the address they came from, so staff can see an attack in progress.
• Our own game servers receive your account status.
  • They have to: that is how logging into a world works.
• Email leaves our systems to reach you.
  • If you ask for a password reset, the message includes the IP address the request came from so you can tell whether it was you.

That is the whole list. Nobody is paid for access to it and nothing is shared for marketing.

Some pages embed things from elsewhere — a video, an image, an article. Embedded content behaves exactly as if you had visited that other site directly.

Those sites can collect data about you, set their own cookies and track how you interact with what they embedded, especially if you have an account with them and are signed in. We have no control over what they do, and this policy does not cover them.

Different things live for different lengths of time. The one hard rule is the sign-in log, which expires on its own.

Members can view and edit their own profile at any time from My Account, except for the username, which is fixed once it is taken. Administrators can see and edit that information too, because moderating a community requires it.

• Passwords are stored as one-way hashes. Nobody here, staff included, can read yours.
• The site runs behind Cloudflare and an in-site firewall, and administrator accounts are protected by two-factor authentication.
• Repeated failed sign-ins are throttled rather than allowed to run on forever.
• Staff access to logs and member records is limited to the people who need it to moderate or to keep the servers running.

No system is perfect, and this one is run by volunteers rather than a company with a security department. Use a password you do not use anywhere else. If something does go wrong, we will say so rather than quietly hope you do not notice.

This policy changes when the site does. The date at the top of the page is the date it last changed, and the version on this page is always the one that applies.

If a change materially affects what we collect or who sees it, we will say so in the news feed and in Discord rather than leave you to spot the edit.