Donation & Supporter Benefits Policy

DWO Reborn is a free-to-play, community-run revival of Dynasty Warriors Online. Donations are voluntary contributions that fund the project's running costs — servers, bandwidth, domains, development tooling and the time spent building it. Nobody is required to donate, and the game is playable without donating.

A donation is voluntary, but it is not without effect. Donations at or above a published tier threshold also deliver a defined set of digital supporter benefits to your account. Those benefits are described in section 2, most of them arrive within minutes of your payment being confirmed, and this policy treats them as something you have received — not as something we might get around to. Test access is the exception and has its own terms in section 3.

This matters for both of us. It means you know exactly what your contribution returns before you make it, and it means that if a payment is ever disputed we can show precisely what was delivered, to which account, and at what time.

Supporter tiers are cumulative and based on your lifetime giving in US dollars, converted at the rate on the day of each payment. Reaching a threshold grants that tier permanently; your tier never decreases because of the passage of time.

Community benefits — your Discord role, your in-game title, your place on the supporters list, supporter discounts — are applied automatically as soon as our payment provider confirms the payment and we can match it to your account, in practice within a few minutes. Discord roles are applied as soon as a Discord account is linked to your site account.

Test access, which is what the Tester tier and above are for, works differently and has its own section below. Read section 3 before donating at those tiers.

Current tiers and thresholds are published at /ranks and are part of this policy by reference. In summary:

• Supporter (from $30) — donor Discord role, listing on the supporters page, early news access.
• Backer (from $50) — the above, plus an exclusive in-game title.
• Tester (from $80) — the above, plus test server access, in-game discounts and priority feedback.
• Elite Supporter (from $100) — the above, plus early access and a permanent in-game discount.
• Private Support (from $300) — the above, plus a special title, event cape, Hall of Fame entry, private communication channel and influence on testing priorities.

You may request a full refund within 7 days, provided the supporter benefits your donation delivered have not been used. We will not ask you to justify the request.

The 7 days run from your payment, or from the day the benefit you donated for actually became usable, whichever is later. In practice that means: if you donated at the Tester tier or above and no test round was open, your window does not begin until your test access does. A refund window that expires before you could use anything would not be a refund policy, and we are not going to operate one.

Benefits count as unused if, since the payment, you have not entered the game or the test server using access the donation granted, have not created a character with it, have not worn an in-game title or cosmetic the donation granted, and have not made use of a supporter-only channel or discount. Holding a Discord role you have not otherwise acted on does not count as use, and neither does being listed on the supporters page — we will simply remove you from it.

Send refund requests to support@dynastywarriors.online from the email address you paid from, or through our Discord. Include your account username and, if you have it, the donation reference shown to you when you donated. We answer within 3 business days.

Refunds are returned by the same method you paid with. Where the original payment method cannot accept a refund — an expired card, a closed wallet, a cryptocurrency payment — we will agree an alternative with you.

After the 7 days have run, or where benefits have been used, donations are final. We may still make a refund at our discretion, and we would rather hear from you than not.

DWO Reborn is an unincorporated community project operated by its volunteer development team. Donations are collected through Ko-fi, which acts as the payment processor for card, PayPal and wallet payments; Alipay and Bitcoin donations are received directly.

Because Ko-fi processes the payment, your card or bank statement will not say 'DWO Reborn'. It will show a Ko-fi descriptor — typically KO-FI.COM, or PAYPAL *KOFI for PayPal payments. If you see a charge you do not recognise, this is almost certainly it, and we will confirm it for you within one business day if you ask.

Questions about a payment go to support@dynastywarriors.online.

DWO Reborn is in active development. The benefits listed in section 2 are what your donation delivers, and we stand behind them. Beyond those, donations do not purchase any particular feature, content, release date, server uptime or continued operation of the project, and no statement on this site, our Discord or our social channels should be read as a commitment to one.

One thing here is a commitment, and we are stating it as such: the game will be free to play at launch. Donation tiers buy early entry to development test rounds and the community benefits in section 2 — they are not, and will not become, the price of playing DWO Reborn. We will not put the finished game behind a paywall, a subscription, or a tier. If you are reading this and waiting rather than donating, you are not missing out on the game; you are missing out on the alpha.

We may add to, substitute or retire supporter benefits as the game changes — for example where a planned cosmetic is replaced by an equivalent one. Where we substitute a benefit, the replacement will be of comparable value, and we will say so publicly. We will not remove a benefit already delivered to your account except as described in sections 6 and 9.

If the project ends, donations already made are not refundable on that basis. Contributions fund work that has already been done.

Supporter benefits do not exempt an account from the Acceptable Use Policy, and a donation is never a defence to breaking it. Donors are moderated on exactly the same terms as everyone else.

Where an account is suspended or terminated for breaching the Acceptable Use Policy, the supporter benefits attached to it are suspended or lost with it, and donations previously made are not refunded. Enforcement is proportionate, and the Acceptable Use Policy sets out how to appeal.

Attempting to obtain benefits fraudulently — paying with a payment method you are not entitled to use, or repeatedly reversing payments after receiving benefits — will result in permanent termination.

When you tick the acceptance box on the donation page we record: your account, the date and time, the version and fingerprint of the policy text shown to you, the network address and browser you accepted from, and the payment method you selected. We keep this for as long as a payment can be disputed, and for as long afterwards as accounting requires.

We hold it for one purpose: to be able to show what was agreed and what was delivered if a payment is later questioned. It is described in full in our Privacy Policy, and it is not used for advertising or shared with anyone other than a payment processor handling a dispute over your payment.

We may amend this policy. Every version carries a version identifier and a fingerprint of its text, and the version in force when you donated is the one that governs that donation. An amendment never applies retroactively to a donation already made.

Material changes are announced on our Discord and on the site before they take effect.

Email support@dynastywarriors.online for anything relating to a donation, a refund or a payment you do not recognise. We answer within 3 business days, usually sooner. You can also reach the team on our Discord server, though email is the better route for payment matters because it gives us both a written record.