How we keep play fair

How Nirvana keeps play fair — and the honest limits. Nirvana checks fair play entirely on the server, from the actions the server already receives when you play — the timing of your attacks and skills, how you move, what you pick up and use, trades and shop flows, when you log in, and who you share a connection with. Nothing is installed on your computer: no DLL, no driver, no launcher agent, and there never will be.

What this lets us see

Programs that play for you (bots), inhuman timing (speed and no-delay), impossible movement (position hacks), reading things your character cannot see (ESP against hidden players), item and currency duplication, and real-money trading patterns — because all of these change what the server receives, and a program’s footprint differs from a person’s.

What we deliberately cannot see

We cannot read your computer’s memory, your files, or your game’s graphics data. So a client that only changes how the game looks — a modified GRF that removes weather, resizes a sprite, or re-skins a map — is invisible to us, because it changes nothing the server receives. We detect such tools only by their consequences: if a visual edit lets a character act on something it should not be able to, that action is what we measure. Pure memory reading that never changes a packet is, likewise, something we honestly cannot detect.

Probes

Rarely, and with strict limits (a few a week at most), the server may ask you a harmless question to tell a person from a program — a townsperson you may know from the city whispering a simple question (which map you are on, your level, or a word to say back), a Poring walking past, an ordinary item lying nearby, or last of all a picture check. It never happens in a fight, a boss, PvP, an instance, a trade or a conversation, and some of these moments are shown to players at random so that seeing one means nothing. Nothing happens to your account whichever way you respond; the outcome is noted for one human reviewer. Your answer is checked by simple rules and not kept.

Your standing

Your account page (and both apps) shows your standing: any hold, the checks you were asked and how they ended, and any decision a person made, with the way to appeal. It never shows a score.

Reporting a bot

You can report a player you believe is a bot (@report <name> in game, or from the apps). A report never punishes anyone by itself: enough reports from different, trusted players make the server look more closely, and reports that turn out false count for less over time.

Conduct

Some unfair play is not a program: taking kills from strangers, training monsters onto other players, taking a party member’s loot before their turn, standing on a portal to block it, a name made to look like staff or a well-known player, a trade that strips a stranger of their items, and harassment in public chat. The server notices these patterns and a person looks; the outcome is a warning, a mute or a short spell of restricted rates, never automatic.

Every month

we publish the numbers: how many holds, appeals and decisions there were, in groups of five or more so nobody can be singled out.

Advisory AI

To help our single reviewer read a case, we may send a pseudonymised summary of gameplay statistics (never your chat, password, IP or character name) to Anthropic PBC; its model returns an advisory summary only. It decides nothing.

Retention

Behaviour baselines, scores and summaries are kept for a bounded time (see the Privacy Notice) and never sold.