Last updated 20 August 2026

Terms of Service

The short version, which is not a substitute for the rest. The Olde World: Online is an open alpha. It is free while the alpha runs, it breaks, and your characters and items can be wiped. You must be 18 or older. Everything in the game is ours, not yours, and getting robbed or killed in a full loot PvP game is the game working, not a support ticket. Cheat and you lose the account.

Sections 13 through 16 limit our liability and require most disputes to go to individual arbitration rather than to court. Please read them.

1. Who we are

The Olde World: Online (the "Game") and the website at theoldeworld.com (together, the "Service") are operated by crkhaus studios, a sole proprietorship established in California ("crkhaus studios", "we", "us", "our"). You can reach us at legal@theoldeworld.com.

2. Accepting these terms

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and crkhaus studios. By creating an account, logging in, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why, and is incorporated into these Terms by reference.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service. By using it you represent that you are 18 or older, that you have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms, and that you are not barred from using the Service under the laws of your country or of the United States.

We do not knowingly permit accounts held by anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to a minor we will close it and delete the associated data. See section 12 of the Privacy Policy.

4. The alpha

The Game is in open alpha. That is not a marketing word here. It means, concretely:

The Service may be unavailable, slow, or broken at any time, with or without notice, including for as long as it takes us to fix it or for good.
Characters, items, houses, accounts, and the world itself may be reset, wiped, rolled back, rebalanced, or deleted at any time, in whole or in part, for any reason, including simple developer convenience. We will try to give notice in our Discord where we can, but we do not promise to.
Features may be added, changed, or removed. Nothing you see today is a promise about tomorrow.
Bugs may cause loss of progress, items, or currency. We are not obliged to restore anything.

Do not become attached to anything in the Game that you would be upset to lose.

5. Your account

To play you choose a character name and a password. That pair is your account. You are responsible for it.

Keep your password secret. We will never ask you for it, in Discord or anywhere else, and anyone who does is not us.
You are responsible for everything done through your account, whether or not you did it.
Do not sell, rent, share, lend, or transfer your account, and do not buy someone else's.
Do not choose a name that impersonates another person, infringes anyone's rights, or that a reasonable person would find hateful or obscene. We may rename or reclaim any name at our discretion.
If you lose your password we may be unable to recover your account, because we do not store passwords in a form we can read and we do not collect an email address to reset them against.
Tell us at legal@theoldeworld.com if you believe your account has been compromised.

6. Licence to play

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to access and play the Game for your own private, non-commercial entertainment. That is all you get. We reserve every right not expressly granted here.

7. Rules of conduct

You agree not to do any of the following, and not to help anyone else do it:

Cheat. No bots, macros, scripts, automation, auto-clickers, packet manipulation, memory editing, third-party clients, or modified clients. Play the Game with your own hands.
Exploit bugs. If you find a way to duplicate items, walk through walls, or otherwise break the simulation, report it in our Discord rather than farm it. Using an exploit knowingly is grounds for a ban and for removal of everything gained by it.
Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of the Service, or attempt to derive our source code or protocols, except to the extent this restriction is unenforceable under applicable law.
Interfere with the Service: no denial of service, no flooding, no probing or scanning our infrastructure, no circumventing rate limits or bans, no unauthorised access to any account, server, or data.
Scrape, crawl, harvest, or bulk-collect data from the Service, or use the Service to train a machine learning model, without our written permission.
Harass, threaten, stalk, defame, or incite violence against anyone; post content that is unlawful, sexually explicit, or that sexualises minors; distribute malware; or use the Service for any illegal purpose.
Post another person's private information, in game or in our community spaces.
Sell, buy, or trade accounts, characters, in-game items, or in-game currency for real money or anything of real-world value, or advertise doing so.
Use the Service commercially: no advertising, no selling services, no real-money trading, no gambling operations.
Impersonate crkhaus studios, our staff, or our game masters.

We decide, in our sole discretion, whether conduct breaks these rules. We are a very small operation and we do not promise consistent, timely, or appealable moderation.

8. PvP, loss and theft

The Game is a full loot, open world PvP game, and this is the point of it. Other players can attack you, kill you, and take everything your character was carrying. They can steal from you, lie to you, betray an alliance, gang up on you, camp your corpse, and ruin an evening you were enjoying. There are no safe zones, no insurance, and no undo.

Being killed, robbed, scammed, or otherwise defeated by another player is the Service functioning as designed, not a defect and not a breach of these Terms by that player or by us. We will not restore lost characters, items, currency, or progress, and we do not adjudicate disputes between players about in-game events.

Sections 7 and 13 still apply. In-game villainy is allowed; cheating, real-world harassment, and threats are not, and the difference is ours to judge.

9. Virtual items

Characters, items, equipment, houses, currency, skills, statistics, and every other in-game asset ("Virtual Items") are part of the Service and remain our property. You do not own them.

You receive, at most, a limited, revocable, non-transferable licence to use Virtual Items inside the Game, for as long as we operate it.
Virtual Items have no monetary value, are not property, are not a stored balance, are not redeemable for cash or anything else, and cannot be exchanged outside the Game.
We may modify, rebalance, remove, wipe, or revoke any Virtual Item at any time without notice, compensation, or refund.
Your licence to Virtual Items ends when your account ends, for any reason, including a ban.

10. Fees

The Game is free to play during the open alpha. We may introduce charges, subscriptions, or paid content in the future, and we may end free access. We will give notice on the website before we start charging for access that is currently free, and you will never be charged without agreeing to the charge first. If we ever do take payments, additional payment terms will apply at that time.

Nothing you accumulate for free during the alpha creates any entitlement to anything later.

11. Your content

"Your Content" means anything you submit through the Service: chat messages, character and house names, bug reports, feedback, and anything else.

You keep whatever ownership you have in Your Content. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable licence to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt, and distribute Your Content for the purpose of operating, moderating, securing, and promoting the Service. You confirm you have the rights to grant this and that Your Content does not infringe anyone else's rights or break the law.

Feedback and suggestions are a special case: if you send us an idea for the Game, we may use it freely, without compensation, attribution, or obligation of any kind, and you waive any claim to it.

We may remove, edit, or refuse any of Your Content at any time, and we may monitor chat and other communications for moderation, security, and enforcement of these Terms.

12. Our rights and third-party code

The Service, including its code, art, music, characters, world, names, logos, and the marks "The Olde World: Online" and "crkhaus studios", is owned by crkhaus studios or its licensors and is protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws. These Terms grant you no rights in any of it beyond section 6.

The Service includes third-party open-source components, each licensed under its own terms, which prevail over these Terms as to that component.

13. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your account or your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice, with or without cause, and at our sole discretion, including if we believe you have broken these Terms or that your conduct risks harm to other players, to us, or to the Service.

You may stop using the Service at any time. To have your account deleted, write to legal@theoldeworld.com; see the Privacy Policy for what happens to your data.

On termination, your licence under section 6 and your licence to Virtual Items end immediately, and we may delete your account data. Sections 8, 9, 11, 12, and 14 through 20 survive termination.

We may also discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, permanently, at any time. It is an alpha run by one person.

14. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", with all faults. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express, implied, or statutory, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement, and any warranties arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, timely, error-free, or free of loss of data, that defects will be corrected, or that any content, character, item, or progress will be preserved.

We are not responsible for the conduct of other players, in the Game or anywhere else.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

15. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, crkhaus studios will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, Virtual Items, characters, progress, or other intangible losses, arising out of or relating to the Service, whether based in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, or otherwise, and whether or not we were advised of the possibility.

Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred United States dollars (US$100). While the Game is free, that generally means US$100.

These limits apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so parts of this section may not apply to you, and nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence.

16. Disputes and arbitration

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights.

16.1 Talk to us first

Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to try to resolve the dispute informally by writing to legal@theoldeworld.com with a description of the dispute and the relief you want. Give us 60 days to respond. Most things end here.

16.2 Binding individual arbitration

If we cannot resolve it, you and crkhaus studios agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitration will take place in California, or by telephone or video, or by written submissions, at your election. The arbitrator's award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

16.3 Class action waiver

You and crkhaus studios agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims. If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim, and only that claim, must proceed in court under section 17.

16.4 Carve-outs

Either of us may bring a claim in small claims court if it qualifies, and either of us may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorised access to the Service. Nothing here waives any non-waivable right you have under California law, including any right to seek public injunctive relief.

16.5 Opting out

You can opt out of sections 16.2 and 16.3. Email legal@theoldeworld.com within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, with your account name and a statement that you are opting out of arbitration. Opting out costs you nothing and does not affect anything else in these Terms.

16.6 Time limit

Any claim relating to the Service must be brought within one year after it arises, to the extent that limit is permitted by applicable law. Otherwise it is permanently barred.

17. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and the federal laws of the United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Where section 16 does not send a dispute to arbitration, you and crkhaus studios submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in California.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer-protection rules in your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.

We operate the Service from the United States and make no representation that it is appropriate or available in any other location. You are responsible for complying with your local law.

18. Copyright complaints

If you believe material on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@theoldeworld.com that includes: your signature (electronic is fine), identification of the work, where the infringing material is on the Service, your contact details, a statement of good-faith belief that the use is unauthorised, and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them. We will respond as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires, and we terminate repeat infringers.

19. Changes

We may change these Terms. When we do, we will update the date at the top of this page, and for material changes we will give notice on the website or in the Game before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept the new Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service.

20. General

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service and replace anything said earlier.
Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it is severed or narrowed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it.
Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them, in whole or in part, to a successor or acquirer of the Service.
Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something outside our reasonable control.
No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms create rights only between you and us.
Relationship. Nothing here creates a partnership, employment, agency, or joint venture between us.
Headings. Headings are for convenience and do not affect interpretation.

21. Contact

crkhaus studios
A sole proprietorship established in California
legal@theoldeworld.com