Terms

These terms are an agreement between you and [operator not set] (“we”, “us”), who operate Tennis Lob at tennislob.com. By playing the game — with or without an account — you accept them. If you do not, the remedy is simple: do not play.

How we handle personal data is a separate document, the privacy policy, which forms part of this agreement.

Anyone may play as a guest. To hold an account you must be 16 or over and legally able to enter into this agreement. If you are under 16, practice and exhibition matches are open to you and need no account.

You may not use the game if we have previously closed your account for breaking these terms, or if the law where you are forbids it.

• Give a real email address you control. It is the only way to recover the account, and the account is not usable until the address is confirmed.
• One account per person. Extra accounts made to influence the ladder, to farm rewards, or to get around a suspension may all be closed.
• Keep your password to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you, unless you tell us it was not and we can see that it was not.
• Your display name is seen by other players. Do not choose one that impersonates somebody else, advertises, or is abusive — we can change it, and will if it is one of those.
• Accounts are personal. Do not sell, rent, share or transfer one.

You may play the game, for fun, as much as you like. Within that, do not do any of the following:

• Modify the game client, run it through a modified client, or feed the servers anything other than what an unmodified client would send.
• Automate play — bots, scripts, macros or input replay — whether to farm rewards, to climb the ladder, or to keep a session alive.
• Attack or overload the service: flooding, denial of service, probing for holes to exploit rather than to report, or bypassing rate limits.
• Reverse engineer, decompile or extract the game's protected parts, except where the law expressly allows it despite this clause.
• Scrape the site or its APIs in bulk, or reuse its data to build a competing product.
• Harass, abuse or threaten other players, or use a display name that does any of that.
• Resell, sublicense or commercially exploit access to the game without our written agreement.

Playing badly, quitting a match, or losing on purpose against a friend is not a breach of these terms — this section is about interfering with the game itself, not about how well you play it. Deliberately losing rated matches to manipulate the ladder is covered by the next section.

The match server, not your browser, decides where the ball landed, whether a serve was in, and who won the point. It also checks every shot for whether a player could plausibly have reached it and hit it at that speed. Shots that fail those checks are rejected, and a client that keeps sending them is a cheating client.

If we conclude that an account has cheated, manipulated the ladder, or abused rewards, we may — in proportion to what happened —

• reverse the results and rating changes it produced,
• remove Ace Points, items or achievements obtained that way,
• reset the account's rating, or
• suspend or close the account.

We will tell you what we did and why if you ask, and you can dispute it by writing to [email protected]. Where a decision was automatic and you disagree with it, a person will look at it.

Quick Match puts you in a queue and pairs you with an opponent near your rating. A private lobby, opened with a code, pairs you with whoever you gave the code to.

When nobody suitable is searching, the queue may seat you against a computer-controlled opponent rather than leave you waiting. Such an opponent plays under a generated name, holds a rating like any other, and the match counts. We tell you here that this happens; we do not announce it during a particular match, because a queue that says “nobody else is playing” is both discouraging and, given this, untrue.

Online play needs a working connection at both ends and we cannot promise either. If your connection drops mid-match, section 8 says what happens to the result.

Ace Points are an in-game score, not money. They are earned by playing and spent in the locker on kit. They are not a currency, cannot be bought, cannot be exchanged for money or anything else of value, cannot be transferred to another player, and have no value outside the game.

• Items you unlock are a personal, revocable licence to use them inside the game — you do not own the artwork.
• We may add, retire, reprice or rebalance items and rewards. Retiring an item does not take it out of a locker that already holds it.
• Points or items obtained through a bug, a cheat or an exploit may be removed, and repeated exploitation is a breach of section 4.
• If the game closes down, points and items end with it. See section 10.

There is no way to spend real money in the game today, and nothing here is a purchase. If that ever changes, the terms will change with it, and paid items will carry their own refund terms.

Rated matches come from Quick Match only. A match in a private lobby is never rated, because two people trading a room code can hand each other wins. Your rating moves up or down with each result, more sharply while the system is still learning where you belong.

Leaving a rated match early counts as a loss and the opponent still sitting there is awarded the win. That is deliberate: without it, closing the tab on a match you are losing would cost nothing, and quitting would be the sensible play. If a genuine outage on our side spoiled a match, tell us and we will look at it.

Ratings and leaderboards may be reset at the start of a new season, or recalculated if we find a fault in how they were computed. We will say so when it happens.

The game — its code, its court, its characters, its sounds and its name — belongs to us or to the people we licensed it from, and is protected by copyright. These terms give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to play it. They give you nothing else, and nothing in them transfers ownership of anything.

Some assets in the game are third-party work used under their own licences — the sound bank credits its sources in the game's files, and character rigs and textures come from libraries with their own terms. Those licences stay with those assets; nothing here grants you any right to extract and reuse them.

What you create — a display name, a kit you assemble — stays yours, but by using it in the game you allow us to show it to other players and on public pages like the leaderboard, for as long as your account exists.

If you send us feedback or an idea, we may use it without owing you anything for it. Do not send us anything you want to keep or be paid for.

The game is offered as it is, when it is. We may change it, take features away, take it down for maintenance, or stop running it altogether. It is under active development, and things will break.

If we shut the service down permanently we will give notice on the site beforehand where we reasonably can. Accounts, ratings, saves, Ace Points and items end with the service, and nothing about them is compensable.

We may change these terms. The date at the top of this page says when they last changed, and material changes will be announced on the site before they take effect. Playing on after that means the new version applies to you; if you do not accept it, close your account.

You can stop at any time, and you can have your account deleted by asking — the privacy policy says how, and what happens to your data.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that we are required to close by law, or that is being used to harm other players or the service. Where the breach is minor and fixable we will normally warn first; where it is serious — cheating, attacking the service, abusing other players — we may act immediately. Sections that by their nature should survive the end of this agreement (ownership, liability, governing law) do.

Nothing in these terms takes away rights the law gives you and does not allow you to sign away. If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, that includes your rights under consumer protection law, and it includes the right to bring proceedings in your own country's courts.

The game is free and there is nothing to buy, so no right of withdrawal or refund arises — there is no payment to withdraw from. If paid features are ever added, the withdrawal and refund rules that apply to them will be set out at that point.

The game is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we make no promises that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, free of lag, secure against every attack, or that saves and ratings will never be lost. Nothing here excludes a warranty that cannot lawfully be excluded, and if you are a consumer your statutory guarantees are unaffected.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows: we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data, lost ratings, lost Ace Points or lost items, or for loss arising from your inability to play. Because the game is provided free of charge, our total liability to you for any claim connected with it is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us (which today is nothing) or 100 EUR.

You are responsible for what you do with your account, and if a claim is brought against us because you broke these terms or the law, you agree to cover what that reasonably costs us.

These terms are governed by the law of [jurisdiction not set], and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of your own country's mandatory law, and you may bring proceedings where you live.

Please write to [email protected] before doing anything more formal. Most of what looks like a dispute is a bug.

• If a clause here turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands and that clause is read as narrowly as it needs to be to work.
• Not enforcing something once does not mean we have given it up.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours if the service changes hands, and will tell you.
• These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the game.
• They are written in English; a translation is a convenience and the English text governs.

Contact: [email protected]. By post: [operator not set], [address not set].