What we record about you, where it comes from, why we hold it, who sees it, and what you can ask us to do with it. It covers ae-gaming.com, the AE Gaming Discord, SENTINEL (our Discord app) and every AE WARDOGS server we run.
We record what you do on our game servers and in Discord servers where SENTINEL is present, because that is how we run the servers, enforce our rules and keep bans enforceable. We never ask for your real name, email, address or payment details, and nothing we build asks for them. We do not sell data, we do not run advertising or analytics trackers, and everything we hold sits on machines we run ourselves in the United Kingdom.
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to remove it. Moderation records stay.
AE Gaming is run by Absconditus Eminus (AE), a gaming community. We run community servers for WARDOGS, the AE Gaming Discord, the SENTINEL Discord app, and the websites at ae-gaming.com and support.ae-gaming.com.
For anything in this policy, open a ticket in our Discord. If you are not on Discord, or cannot be, use the form at support.ae-gaming.com. Section 11 explains what you can ask for.
This policy covers our own spaces and systems: our websites, our Discord, SENTINEL wherever it is installed, and the game servers we run.
It does not cover the game itself, Steam, or Discord. WARDOGS is made by BULKHEAD and published by Team17, and your game account, your Steam account and your Discord account are governed by their makers' own policies. When you join one of our servers, the game sends us the data described in section 3 as a matter of how the game works; what the game sends to its own makers is theirs to explain, not ours.
Our Terms of Service set out the rules of conduct. This policy sets out what we record while enforcing them.
The game server reports every player on it to us. From that we record:
The game does not send us your real name, email address or IP address, and we do not collect them from the game.
SENTINEL is a Discord app. It sits in the AE Gaming Discord and in a small number of partner Discord servers whose owners have installed it. In every server it is in, it records the same things about members:
SENTINEL keeps the text of messages only where you are talking to AE itself: support tickets, reports, applications, direct messages you send to SENTINEL, and the commands you use. It does not store the text of ordinary channel messages, it does not store direct messages between members, and it does not record voice in Discord. Discord shows SENTINEL the content of channel messages so that moderation features can act on them in the moment; that content is not written down.
Moderation actions taken in our Discord (warnings, timeouts, kicks, bans) are logged with who acted, against whom, and why. SENTINEL also keeps a watch list of Discord accounts flagged by moderators, and raises an alert to staff when a flagged account joins a server it is in.
Some WARDOGS servers run by other communities link to our network through SENTINEL. A linked server sends us the same kind of player and match data our own servers do (section 3, first heading). We hold it separately from our own, tagged with the server it came from, and the owner of that server can export their own server's rows at any time.
You sign in with Discord. We ask Discord for one thing, your identity: your Discord user ID, username and avatar. We do not ask for your email address, your Discord connections, or anything else, and the sign-in screen Discord shows you says so.
You can link your Steam account to your Discord account through SENTINEL or the website. That link is made by you, on purpose, and it is what lets us show you your own stats, award honours, and reach you on Discord when something happens on a server. We record the Steam ID you linked and when you linked it.
For players on our servers, we read what your Steam profile shows to the public through Steam's own interface: your profile name, avatar, country, account creation date, Steam level, whether the profile is public, the number of games owned, your WARDOGS hours, and, where you have made them public, your friends list and the Steam groups you belong to. We also read your VAC and game ban status, which Steam shows regardless of profile settings.
A private profile is recorded as private. We never try to see past your Steam privacy settings by any other means.
Anything you post in our Discord is held there under Discord's terms. Section 14 of our Terms of Service covers how AE may use media you post.
When a report includes a clip, our own system fetches it from the link given to us and reads what it shows: the kill feed, the names the game shows for players who are speaking, any text chat on screen, and the speech in the clip, which it turns into text. This runs on our own servers, not through any outside service, and is used only to check the report. The same applies to every player the clip shows or can be heard in.
The clip and its audio are deleted within 30 days. The text read from them is kept with the report, like the rest of the report.
Our web servers keep standard access logs, which include the IP address and browser of every request to our websites. These are kept for 14 days and then deleted. They are used only to keep the sites running and secure.
When you submit a report, an appeal or a request through our websites, we keep a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address with it, so that the same person cannot flood us with submissions. The support site keeps the same scrambled form for the same reason. The scrambled form cannot be turned back into your address. Actions our staff take on our own tools are logged with the address they came from.
If a future system of ours would need any of these, this policy changes first and says so.
| Purpose | What it uses |
|---|---|
| Running the servers | Player and match records, so that the automatic systems in our Terms (teamkill and AFK handling, server weapon rules, the reserved list) can work, and so a ban applies on every server and survives a restart |
| Enforcing the rules | Reports, chat logs, match records, Steam ban status and Discord moderation records, reviewed by our staff and by our own system, SHEPHERD. We do not publish how SHEPHERD works |
| Your stats and honours | Match records and your Steam link, for the public stats pages, leaderboards and honours |
| Membership | Discord and Steam records, for applications, recruitment, probation, roles and rank |
| Support | Tickets, reports and appeals, so there is a record for you as well as for us |
| Security | Access logs and sign-in records, to keep our sites and systems safe |
In the language of UK data protection law, we rely on our legitimate interests in running a game community and keeping it safe for the records above, on your consent where you choose to link accounts or sign in, and on our legal obligations where we must respond to a lawful request.
We do not sell data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not run analytics or tracking scripts on our sites. We do not use any third-party service to hold or process what we record, other than the three named in section 7.
Everything we record is held on servers we run ourselves, hosted with OVH in London, United Kingdom. Backups are copies on our own machines. We do not use a third-party storage or analytics service.
Three outside services are involved, each for one thing:
We keep records for as long as the community exists. Enforcement records are kept so that a ban stays enforceable, and player records are kept so that your stats and honours remain yours. If you leave every Discord server SENTINEL is in, SENTINEL stops recording anything new about you, and what it already holds stays under this policy.
There are two exceptions. Web server access logs: 14 days, then deleted. Clips sent to us for a report, and their audio: 30 days at most, then deleted; the text read from them stays with the report.
Our websites set only the cookies they need to work. None of them track you across other sites.
| Cookie | What it does | Lasts |
|---|---|---|
aeg_sess | Keeps you signed in to ae-gaming.com | Until you sign out, or it expires |
aeg_ostate, aeg_return | Carries the Discord sign-in handshake, and takes you back to the page you came from | Minutes |
aeg_link, aeg_sxp | Carries the Steam link flow between pages | Minutes |
aec_sess, aec_ostate, aec_oret, aec_coal_t, aec_native | The same jobs for the coalition pages | As above |
Pages with a theme switch remember your choice in your browser's local storage. That never leaves your browser.
Our Discord is for adults, 18 and over. We do not knowingly hold records about anyone under 18 in our Discord. If you believe we do, tell us and we will remove them.
Under UK data protection law you can ask us:
Ask through a ticket in our Discord, or the form at support.ae-gaming.com if you are not on Discord. We will need to confirm you are who you say you are, which usually means asking from the Discord or Steam account the records belong to.
Your Discord records, your Steam profile records and your Steam link can be removed on request. Your in-game stats can be removed from the public stats pages on request.
Moderation records stay. A report, a warning or a ban, naming who acted and why, is our record of running the community, not only your data, and removing it would defeat the point of a ban. We will tell you plainly what was removed and what was kept. Records that name other people are anonymised rather than deleted, so that their records are not damaged by your request.
If you are unhappy with how we handled a request, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
Our sites use encrypted connections. Sign-in goes through Discord, so we never see or store a password. Staff access is tiered by role, and staff actions on our tools are logged. Backups stay on our own machines. If we ever find that records about you have been exposed, we will tell you.
We update this policy when what we record changes. The version and date at the top of this page tell you which version is current. Anything significant will be announced in our Discord.
Open a ticket in our Discord. If you are not on Discord, use the form at support.ae-gaming.com.