hubmix rules

One person, one account

Hold one hubmix account. Signing in with a second Steam account creates a second, separate player, and holding one while your first account is banned or closed is ban evasion — it is treated as the original offence, not as a fresh start.

Nothing blocks a second registration at the moment you make it, and we would rather say so than imply a wall that is not there. What the platform does instead is link accounts that keep presenting the same things: a phone number and an email address are each unique across all accounts, and a shared TeamSpeak identity, machine, device or Steam library links two accounts together for a human to look at.

A link is evidence for a person to weigh, never an automatic ban. Households share machines, and we know it.

Your nickname is permanent

You choose it once, during onboarding: 3 to 20 characters, unique across the platform, and final. There is no rename — not in settings, not as a support request, not through any staff tool, because none exists. Your avatar is taken from your Steam profile and follows whatever you set there.

Inside a match your name is locked by the game server to the format the platform issues: your team, your premium tier if you have one, your rating and your nickname — for example [A][P][1180] nick. Everyone in the server can therefore see which side you are on and what you are rated. You cannot change it while the match runs.

Length

3–20 characters

Changes allowed

None, ever

Locked in-game name

[A][P][1180] nick

Own the copy of Counter-Strike you play on

The Steam account you sign in with has to own Counter-Strike itself. A copy borrowed through Steam Family Sharing is refused the moment you load into a hubmix match server, and that match is cancelled for everyone in it.

Steam will only name the owner of a copy while an account is actually in the game, so this is checked at match entry rather than at sign-in. A refusal blocks searching for a match for 7 days: buying your own copy does not clear it sooner, because the only way to take a fresh reading is to catch the account inside a match. After that, one match entry settles it either way.

The rule is not about the licence. Every penalty on this platform — a ban, a cooldown, a ban-evasion investigation — only deters while a new account means buying the game again. A borrowed copy makes fresh accounts free and quietly undoes all of it.

Checked

At every match entry

Refusal blocks searching

7 days

The queue you picked has to be open

Not every mode is open at once. Which queues accept searches is a platform setting, not a property of your account, and a closed one refuses everybody equally — no tier, no level and no amount of premium opens it.

At launch that means 2v2 ranked: duos ship unranked-first, so ranked duos are closed until after the beta. /play greys the mode out and names it rather than letting you queue into a refusal.

Open at launch

5v5 ranked · 5v5 unranked · 2v2 unranked

Closed at launch

2v2 ranked

The hubmix anti-cheat has to be running

Searching for or joining any match requires the hubmix anti-cheat client to be running and reporting. This is not advisory — the server refuses the queue join when it is not there.

The client is not published yet, so matchmaking is closed until it ships. When it does, it will be downloadable from the anti-cheat page on this site and nowhere else; anything else calling itself a hubmix anti-cheat is not one.

You have to be on the hubmix TeamSpeak3 server

Connect to the hubmix TeamSpeak3 server before you queue, and stay connected. Your TeamSpeak identity is bound to your account during onboarding, and the queue gate checks that identity is actually online.

Voice is not optional here: a 5v5 match where one side cannot talk is not the same game as the one the other side is playing.

Server

ts.hubmix.net

Your account has to be clear

Your account must be active — not suspended, banned or closed — and off cooldown. You may be in exactly one queue at a time across every mode, you cannot search while a ready check is waiting on you, and you cannot search while you are already in a live match.

You can only party with friends

A private party can only be joined by players already on your friends list, so add someone as a friend before trying to queue with them. Public parties are listed openly and anyone may request to join one.

Every account is in at most one party at a time.

No cheats, no exploits

Do not run anything that gives you information or aim the game would not: aimbots, wallhacks, triggerbots, injected modules, external overlays, hardware that plays for you. Do not abuse engine or map bugs, and do not deliberately lose or throw a match to move your own or anyone else’s rating.

Statistical and behavioural detectors hold no ban authority whatsoever. What they produce — and what a player report produces — is graded evidence attached to a case about one player, and only a person deciding that case can ban an account. On that route a permanent ban needs two different staff members: one to propose it, a second to confirm it.

The anti-cheat is the one exception, and it is stated rather than hidden. When it confirms cheating from inside a match it bans on its own, immediately, with no person in the loop — that is the whole point of running it. Every such ban is appealable like any other, the login page tells you outright that the anti-cheat and not a staff decision issued it, and an upheld appeal reverses the ban and the ratings of the match it came from.

Enforcement outside a cheating case — a permanent ban for conduct — is taken by an Administrator or the Owner, and is recorded in the audit log with the name of whoever took it.

A statistical or behavioural detector can never on its own reach the evidence grade a ban is taken at.

What a confirmed cheat costs — and what it gives back

A confirmed cheater is permanently banned across every hubmix service, including the TeamSpeak3 server, and the match they were caught in is corrected rather than left standing.

Everyone who lost to them gets the rating back, has the loss cleared from their record, and is credited 50 Coins as an apology. Everyone who won alongside them keeps half of what that match gained them. The cheater’s own rating gain and match Coins are taken back in full. If a human report is what got them caught, the player who reported them is paid a 3,500 Coin bounty.

Every one of those corrections is recorded as a case, so if the ban is later overturned on appeal the whole correction is undone — including the ratings.

Wronged losers

Full ELO refund + 50 Coins

Cheater’s team-mates

Keep 50% of the gain

Report bounty

3,500 Coins

Do not let anyone else play on your account

Your account is yours. Handing it to a better player to raise your level, or to a banned player who wants to keep playing, is a breach of these rules and both accounts are dealt with.

We cannot see who is holding the mouse, and we will not pretend to. What we can see is the same machine, TeamSpeak identity or Steam library turning up under two accounts, which is exactly what account sharing and ban evasion look like from here — and that is what a reviewer is shown.

Ready check missed

You did not accept a ready check in time.

The nine other players in that lobby were sent back to searching. A missed ready check costs a 60-second cooldown — nothing else.

Match not entered

You did not join the server for a match you had accepted.

The match could not start without you. The first time costs 30 minutes; every repeat inside the next 7 days costs 1 hour. Seven clean days reset it to the first tier.

Live match abandoned

You left a live match.

Your team played the rest of it a man down. Abandoning a live match costs 40 ELO and a 3-hour cooldown.

Repeated disconnects

You repeatedly left and rejoined the same live match.

Every time you left, the match froze for the other nine players and waited for you. Doing that repeatedly in one match costs 60 ELO and a 5-hour cooldown. One disconnect you come back from is never penalized.

Disconnecting is not the same as abandoning

One disconnect you come back from is never penalised. When a player drops, the server pauses itself for 60 seconds and the player has 4 minutes from that exit to reconnect before it counts as leaving the match.

What is penalised is the pattern: leaving and rejoining over and over, freezing the match for the other nine every time, without ever quite abandoning it.

Automatic pause on a drop

60 seconds

Time to reconnect

4 minutes

Inside the match

Teams are fixed for the whole match — nobody changes team, and the server puts you back if you try. Sides do swap: at half time, and again at every overtime half, both teams change ends and the server announces it. Each team may call 2 tactical pauses of 2 minutes, by vote in chat.

5v5 is first to 16 rounds, 2v2 is first to 9. A tied regulation goes to a vote between a draw and overtime. An overtime block is MR3 — 3 rounds a side, so up to 6 rounds — and takes 4 round wins to end. A block that ends level starts another, without a further vote.

Matches are recorded. The HLTV demo of every match is archived and is the evidence a cheating case is decided on.

Tactical pauses

2 per team, 2 minutes each

5v5 format

MR15 — first to 16

2v2 format

MR8 — first to 9

Overtime block

MR3 — first to 4

Harassment, hate and threats

No harassment, no hate speech, no threats, no sexual content involving minors, no posting anyone’s personal information. Losing badly is not an excuse and neither is winning.

Toxicity and griefing are reportable categories, and the report goes into the same case system a cheating report does — a person reads it and decides.

Chat limits

Messages are plain text and are never interpreted as markup. Invisible, control and text-direction characters are stripped before a message is stored, and there are per-sender rate limits, so flooding a channel simply stops working.

Direct messages only exist between friends. Blocking someone severs the friendship, cancels any pending request, and prevents any new request in either direction while the block stands.

Direct message length

Up to 2,000 characters

Direct message rate limit

30 per minute · 400 per hour

Reporting someone

Report a player from their profile or from the match you met them in, and pick the category that fits: aim, wallhack, another cheat, griefing or toxicity. Add what you saw — up to 1,000 characters — because a reviewer reads it next to the demo.

One report per player per match: reporting the same person again in the same match updates your report rather than stacking a second one, so mass-reporting moves nothing. A report is evidence, never a verdict, and it never bans anyone by itself.

Coins are earned, not bought

There is no card payment anywhere on hubmix. Nothing on this site will ask you for card details, and if something claiming to be hubmix does, it is not us.

Coins come from playing: 1,500 as a welcome bonus on a new account, plus match and weekend rewards, tournament prizes and report bounties. Every movement of your balance is an entry in an append-only ledger you can read on your wallet page.

Coins have no cash value, cannot be withdrawn, and cannot be transferred to another player — there is no mechanism to do any of the three.

Welcome bonus

1,500 Coins

Premium tiers

Premium tiers are bought with Coins. Prices are set on the server and the client never sends a price. Each purchase is recorded as an order, so what you paid and what you got is on the record permanently.

No tier buys an advantage in a match you are in. What a subscription does today is listed on the premium page, and every perk that is specified but not yet built is marked there as not available yet.

hubmix is in beta, and beta ends with a reset

When the beta ends, accounts and ranks reset to zero — everyone starts from scratch. That is the deal for playing early, and it is the reason nothing here takes real money yet.

Please report the bugs you find. It is genuinely the most useful thing you can do for the platform right now.

Who takes action

Enforcement is taken by hubmix staff, and it is attributable to hubmix staff and to nobody else — you will never be told which person acted, and that is deliberate rather than evasive. Which staff member did what is recorded in an append-only, hash-chained audit log so it can always be established internally.

Staff powers are tiered: the reversible actions sit at the lower tiers, and the irreversible ones — a permanent ban, an appeal that rewrites ratings — are reserved for Administrators and the Owner. A permanent ban decided on a cheating case additionally needs a second staff member to propose it, and an appeal that rewrites ratings needs a more senior reviewer than the ban did.

A suspension is temporary

A suspension has an end time, it lifts by itself, and you can sign in and play again straight away when it does. Nothing else is taken from your account in the meantime — not your rating, not your Coins, not your history.

When you try to sign in while suspended, the login page tells you that you are suspended and when it ends. It will not tell you that Steam failed.

A ban is permanent

A permanent ban does not expire and applies to every hubmix service, including matchmaking, the forum and the TeamSpeak3 server.

You will be told whether the ban came from the anti-cheat or from a staff decision about your conduct. You will not be told which detection fired or what it saw: that detail is a tuning guide for the next person, and handing it over would cost the players who are still here.

Appealing

Every ban can be appealed once. Write to support@hubmix.net from the email address on your account and quote your Steam account.

An upheld appeal is a full reversal, not a favour: the account comes back and the rating of every match the ban affected is put back the way it was, for everyone in it. That is why the reversal needs a second, more senior reviewer than the ban did.

Closed accounts

A closed account cannot sign in and is not recoverable. If you want to play on hubmix again after closing an account, contact staff before creating a new one — registering a second account while one is closed is treated as ban evasion.

Your acceptance is recorded with a version

The rules you accept during onboarding are stored on your account as a version — this page is version 2026-01 — together with the moment you accepted them. It is therefore always possible to establish which text you actually agreed to.

When these rules change materially, the version changes with them. The version this page carries is shown at the top and in the onboarding step, so the two can never silently drift apart.

Current version

2026-01

What we store about you is a separate document

These rules cover what you may and may not do. What hubmix collects, why, how long it is kept and who else ever sees it is set out in full on the privacy page.