Accounts

What an account is

One thing: a name you chose, and a hash that recognises your Google sign-in. No email address, no real name, no password of ours to leak. Signing in with Google is what makes it free to have and expensive to duplicate - and duplication is the only thing that breaks a ladder.

Your username is claimed once, on your first sign-in, and it is permanent. It is the name on every scoreboard and every ladder row you will ever appear in, it cannot be changed by you or by us, and nobody else can take it. Choose it carefully - that is not a warning we can soften later.

Why it appeared at all

ProAim used to identify you by a token the game generated on your own machine. It worked exactly as well as asking players to promise who they were: making a fresh identity was a deleted file away, so nothing on the ladder was ever really attached to anyone. A rating you can reset by reinstalling is not a rating.

A signed-in account fixes the part that mattered. It cannot be minted by a client, a ban cannot be shed by wiping a folder, and the name on the scoreboard is one the server assigned rather than one the connecting client asked to be called.

How the game signs you in

Press SIGN IN on the main menu and the game opens your browser here. You sign in with Google, the browser comes back, and the game picks up the result on its own - there is no code to copy and nothing to paste.

From that point the game holds a long-lived token for this install, and that token never travels to a game server. Before each connection it is traded here for a ticket: single-use, valid for a minute, and bound to the one server address you are joining. A server therefore learns that you are you, and learns nothing it could reuse anywhere else. That matters because the game transport is plain UDP - readable by whoever runs the server and by anything on the path between you.

Sign in once per install. Reinstalling asks again; your account, your name and your history are untouched by that, because none of them live on your computer.

Official servers, and what "ranked" means

Two servers are official - one competitive, one casual - and they are the only ones whose results move the ladder. They are the servers listed at the top of the in-game browser, and they take a sign-in ticket and nothing else.

Officialness is not a claim a server can make about itself. Anyone can run the same server binary we do, including with the flag that says "I am official", so the game checks the address it is connected to against the list published on this site before it counts anything. A server that is not on that list is unranked no matter what it says about itself, and your career page will not move a pixel for playing on it.

Everything else still works there: bans, votes, reports, bots and the whole game. It just does not touch the ladder.

LAN and hosting your own

A LAN game, a server a friend hosts, and the map you are hosting yourself with the in-game editor all ask for no account at all. The game plays under a local identity taken from your name, exactly as it always did, and none of it reaches us or the ladder.

That is the same path the game's own bots use, which is why five bots on your machine are five distinct players rather than one confused one.

Two people, one connection

A match where two players connect from the same address is recorded in full and rated for nobody in it. Not a punishment, and not a suspicion of you specifically: from the server's side, two people on one household connection and one person running two clients are the same packets from the same place, and the second of those is the cheapest way there is to farm a rating.

An account is unforgeable but it is not scarce - Google accounts are free - so this rule stays regardless of how many accounts are in the room. The honest version of the cost: two housemates who queue together genuinely get no rating for those matches. We would rather say that out loud than pretend a filter can tell the two situations apart.

Bans

A ban is against the account, and an account is a Google sign-in. Coming back means a new Google account, which is a real cost rather than a deleted file - that is the entire point of the change.

Bans are permanent by default and the reasoning behind each one is ours to keep - see the terms for what earns one and what appealing it looks like.

What we hold, and losing it

The full list is on the privacy page, and it is short: a hash of your Google sign-in, the username you chose, and what you did in matches on the official servers. We ask Google for one identifier and nothing else - no email, no name, no photo - and we hash even that before storing it.

The consequence, stated plainly because it cannot be undone: lose access to that Google account and your ProAim account goes with it. There is no recovery, because we deliberately hold nothing to check you against. That trade is on purpose, and it is the same trade that means a stolen copy of our database tells a thief nothing about who any of you are.