You do not need an account to play. The game itself carries no ads during a match. Across the site — the menu, the pages around the game, and while you play — we use analytics to understand our audience and to keep out bots and abuse, and the website pages show ads from Google to keep the project free. We honour the Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals, and we do not sell your personal data. Everything else we process is what is needed to connect you to a game and to fix it when it breaks.
Connecting to a game server means your IP address is visible to the network path that carries the connection, including any relay involved and the server you are joining. This is how online multiplayer works and it is not something a browser client can avoid.
Public servers are operated by third parties. What they log is up to them and outside our control.
Most connections to public servers pass through a relay we run, because a browser cannot open the raw network connection a game server expects. For each relay session we record when it started and ended, your IP address, the server you joined, how much data was carried, and — if you have a player name registered — which name the session belonged to.
The relay also reads the game traffic it carries and keeps a record of what happened in your session: the map, the name and Steam identifier your game presented to the server, chat messages you sent, kills and deaths, score, money, damage taken, team changes, weapon switches and pickups, plus per-session totals of your input activity — trigger pulls, time active, distance moved, top speed and lowest health. We do not record your position over time unless that is explicitly switched on for a server, which it is not by default. This exists to run the in-game features that need it (the leaderboard, your session history, cheat and abuse investigation) and for moderation.
Individual session events are kept for 45 days, session summaries for 90 days, and a player's lifetime totals for a year after they were last seen; all of it is deleted automatically after that. Everything here is tied to your registered player name, not to an account or an email address.
Your settings and preferences are stored locally in your browser (localStorage). They stay on your device. Clearing your browser storage for this site removes them.
Choosing a player name registers it with us. Names are unique across the whole game, so the name, and the fact that it is taken, are stored on our servers and are visible to other players — in chat, in the notice shown when you come online, and on the leaderboard.
Stored alongside it are the IP address the name was claimed from and the address it was most recently used from. We keep these so that impersonation and name disputes can be settled and automated name-squatting can be spotted: a name here can only belong to one person, which is what makes it worth taking from someone. Both are deleted automatically after 90 days — the claim address 90 days after the name was registered, and the most recent address 90 days after you last connect.
Your name is not linked to an account, an email address, or any identifier you give us. Clearing your browser storage for this site abandons the identity, although the name itself stays registered.
Chat messages you send are transmitted to the server you are on and to the other players on it. If you use the optional voice or direct-message features, those use a peer-to-peer WebRTC connection, which can reveal your IP address to the peer you are connected to, and may pass through a relay when a direct connection cannot be established.
You can host a game from your own browser for other people to join. When you do, the game is listed publicly in the server browser the same way any other server is: its name, the map, the mode, how many players are on it, and whether it has a password are visible to everyone. Turning hosting on is what publishes it; stopping hosting removes it.
While a game you host is running, we store the game's details and the list of players currently in it so that people can find it and connect. Those records exist only for the life of the game — they are deleted when a player leaves and when the game ends.
Separately, we keep an event record of hosted games for moderation: which games were started and by whom, who joined and left, and any action a moderator took. That record is kept for 14 days and then deleted automatically.
Hosted games are subject to the same rules as the rest of the service. We can stop a game from being listed, close it, or turn hosting off entirely — for everyone or for one game — if it is being used to break those rules.
A hosted game is a direct connection between browsers, so your IP address is visible to the people connected to it, and theirs to you. Where a direct connection cannot be made, the connection may pass through a relay we run. We do not record the contents of what is sent over those connections.
When the game crashes, the client automatically sends a crash report so we can diagnose it. That report contains the browser console log leading up to the crash, the error and its stack trace, the page address with any private-server password removed, the game server address, the build identifier, your browser's user-agent string, and — if you have one — your registered player name. The connecting IP address is recorded with it. The client also sends non-fatal warnings in the same way.
While you play, the client sends a short performance record every second — frame time, frame rate, memory use and which part of the engine was slow — together with your graphics card's name, the number of processor cores and the amount of memory your browser reports, so that slowness can be told apart from a weak machine. Notable performance events are kept individually; the per-second stream is summarised per minute. You can turn this off with the console setting perf_log 0.
These reports exist to debug the game. Crash data is kept for 30 days, individual performance events for 14 days and the per-minute summaries for 30 days, and all of it is deleted automatically after that. A player name sent with a report is treated as a claim unless the report also carried your credentials, and is never used on its own to take action against a name.
The records above share three identifiers — your registered player name, the relay session, and your IP address — and we keep a short history of which IP addresses and browsers each registered name has been used from, so that impersonation, name disputes and abuse can be investigated, and so that a bug report can be matched to the session it came from. That history is deleted automatically 90 days after each sighting.
Across the site — the main menu, the pages around the game, and during a match while you play — we collect technical characteristics of your browser and device to understand our audience and to tell real players apart from bots and abuse. This includes things your browser makes available to any website without a permission prompt: your browser and operating system and their versions, screen and window size, graphics hardware, timezone and language, the fonts and media formats your system supports, and small rendering measurements (canvas, audio and layout) that together form a device signature. We also record broad interaction signals such as how long you stayed, how far you scrolled, and whether you used a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen.
Taken together these characteristics can recognise the same browser on a later visit without using a cookie. We use that only to count returning visitors and to spot automated abuse. We do not use it to build advertising profiles, and we do not sell it.
We honour your privacy signals: if your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, we do not collect this analytics information at all. This applies everywhere the analytics runs, including the desktop app and during a match.
This information is kept for a limited period (device profiles up to 90 days, individual visit records 30 days) and then deleted automatically. To have your profile removed sooner, email [email protected] and we will delete it.
Like any website, our servers and the CDN in front of them keep request logs (IP address, time, path, user-agent) for reliability, abuse prevention and security. Ours are kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically as they age out.
Content is delivered through a CDN. Peer-to-peer connections may use STUN/TURN relay servers. These parties process connection metadata such as IP addresses in order to do their job.
The website pages you read outside the game — including the leaderboard and the per-map server pages — display advertising supplied by Google, including through the Google AdSense program. The game itself, at https://combatskirmish.net/play, does not load any Google advertising code: the one advertising space there, in the panel around a server's Message of the Day, is served directly by us as a plain image and link, with no third-party advertising script, cookies or tracking of any kind.
Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this and other sites on the Internet.
You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings (adsettings.google.com). You can also opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info, or youronlinechoices.eu in the EU. If you do not opt out, you may still be shown non-personalized ads.
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, we ask for your consent before advertising cookies are used for personalization, through a consent prompt shown on the site. You can change or withdraw that choice at any time from the same prompt.
This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.
You can clear your browser storage at any time to remove local settings, and you can choose not to use the optional voice and direct-message features. For any privacy question or request, email [email protected].