IP-address/network rule and moderators

[Lord Paroni]

I'd like to discuss about the moderators and the rule that only one player per ip/network is allowed.

I don't know if this is the right place for this, if not I’m sorry.

I'm not sure what's the purpose of the game creators and admins are, but i believe (or at least hope) that they would like to encourage people to play CN more than prevent to play. I see the point that they don't desire people to create multiple nations, but i believe there're other ways to prevent it than the IP-rule as it is at present. Especially when they've made impossible to interact between the two nations that are logged in from the same IP even once. Of course there might be a deeper reason for this ip-rule, but then I’d expect in depth explanation about it.

This ip/network-rule gets rediciulous features, when we talk about schools or workplaces not to mention individual families at all. For example, according to the ip-rule and a certain discussion in game abuse forum, CN mods see that only one person can play CN from school computers (assumed that all school computers belong to same network). Expecting ceteris paribus, same thing hold good for household networks or appartment house networks (which can include even hundreds of households). I really don't see if preventing to create multiple nations through ip-address rule is any more justified when it's consequenses approaches the scale that damages exceed benefits.

Other thing i'm wondering is the moderators' way of acting. I had a question related to this same IP-address case and i got an answer quickly (which was nice). Then I presented a further (completely proper) and more clarifying question, which was totally ignored. I even asked again if i could get an answer, but still no reaction. I've read ToS and forum guidelines carefully and my question is not answered anywhere so is it just that nobody knows or don't dare to answer?

I’d respect proper replies.

Edited April 22, 2008 by Lord Paroni

[SlayerX46]

The moderators used to be more lenient with the IP rules to accommodate family and the like, but this was abused very frequently. To prevent such abuse, they made the rules the way they are now.

[Lord Paroni]

The moderators used to be more lenient with the IP rules to accommodate family and the like, but this was abused very frequently. To prevent such abuse, they made the rules the way they are now.

This is exactly what i'm questioning here and would like to get some discussion

[Syzygy]

what kind of discussion do you want to get? The administration has tested a more lenient way, and the users abused it. The admin does not want to have multiple nations per IP, and if this means that school- or uni-networks cannot be used, then so be it.

[Lord n00b II]

The IP-address/network thing used to be a right that we had, taken on good faith that we would follow the rules. We abused that privileged a long time ago. Therefore, we lost that right a long time ago. I doubt that we will be able to earn that trust again.

[Lord Paroni]

According to Sword of Estel's writing "People don't get deleted for logging in from hotels or other public locations if they are legitimately following the rules. We are able to determine the difference, even when players who are cheating attempt to use proxies to cover it up...and that in itself is illegal" (Link here), mods are able to discover possible cheaters. Therefore the ip/network-rule is futile as its present form. And presumably people follow rules legitimately when they play as their own nations and in-game interacting between others from same network is made impossible itself.

[Syzygy]

has all been tried before, if you cant aid yourself, you just use middlemen to move aid to your own nation. people always find ways to trick the system. And that statement from SoE is nice and fine, but it works only NOW, where we have the 1 nation per IP limitation. It would not work any more if multiple nations on the same IP were allowed, because there IS no technical way to tell who is logging in, me or "my little brother".

[bill n ted]

Doesnt happen mate. People abuse the rules; have 5 nations, one for their mother, dad, cat and dog but they all log in from the same computer and same IP addie for weeks

If you were going to a hotel and for some reason wanted to stay in playing on CN with your laptop I believe moderation probably would be able to identify that it is YOUR laptop where your nation always logs in from though the IP addie may have been used previously by someone else that logged in from that hotel so you get given some slack - where as that would be impossible to do when you have 5 different people login in from the same IP address, same computer for weeks - it becomes hard to differentiate assuming Im not talking out my backside here.

Either way Im not really interested in seeing multiple nations per IP come back - been abused before, will be abused again and it doesnt affect me

[JCFalkenberg]

IPv6 adoption can't come too soon...

[steodonn]

I like the rule. It gives me a excess to tell my brother he can't play

Srlys Its one of those sad but necessary rules

[EMATO]

I am going off to college in 5 months and i surely hope that i will be the only one on campus that plays CN or i am screwed. I have played this game for almost 2 years now and if i get deleted because other people are playing it too at UW-LaCrosse then that is BS. I have worked my $@! off to get to where i am right now in the game and if it gets deleted for this reason i will be very ticked.

[Aeternos Astramora]

I am going off to college in 5 months and i surely hope that i will be the only one on campus that plays CN or i am screwed. I have played this game for almost 2 years now and if i get deleted because other people are playing it too at UW-LaCrosse then that is BS. I have worked my $@! off to get to where i am right now in the game and if it gets deleted for this reason i will be very ticked.

This is the same for me. I'm hoping they'll be able to tell that I'm not cheating considering the fact that I've collected at my current IP only for the ~530 days before that.

[BlindMoose]

Maybe I can shed some light on this, but first some background on me.

I am a college student studying Computer Networking & Communication. I am not an expert on the issue, but I do feel like I understand at least a bit of what's happening. I am not going to discuss how the mods do everything and how they check IP addresses because I don't know. What I do know is a little bit about network basics that might clear things up a bit.

Hopefully you know that every device connected to the Internet needs to have an IP address in order to do so. The IP address is unique for all machines so all the computers know exactly who they need to send information to and who they need to request it from. IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), the current language that defined what an IP address is allows for a 32-bit address, which essentially means that there are 4 billion (2^32) unique IP addresses (minus a few for special features) that can be assigned to computers worldwide. That certainly sounds like enough, so for a while every new device that wanted to connect to the internet was given an IP address.

This system worked fine for a while, but believe it or not we're actually getting close to filling all 4 billion of those addresses (think that not just every computer, but every internet-capable phone, blackberry, iPod, router, and refrigerator needs a unique IP address). In order to conserve the distribution of IP addresses someone came up with an idea called Network Address Translation, or NAT. The idea behind NAT is that you can get multiple computers to work off the same IP address. While before this would have caused Internet traffic to get all messed up and sent to the wrong place, NAT utilizes network routers to consolidate IP addresses.

If you have more than one computer in your house, you probably had to go buy a router to hook them all up to the Internet. You probably had to do this because chances are your ISP only gives you one IP address to use for your entire home. More than likely, you bought a router off the shelf of Best Buy such as those made by Linksys or Belkin. These things are smart pieces of machinery. They actually take the IP address that your ISP gives you for themselves, and then give each computer in your house a "fake," non-unique IP address (I know Linksys routers use 192.168.1.x). At this point, your computers trust your router when it tells them the IP address and as far as they know, they really DO have the address 192.168.1.x.

However, the router that you bought is smart enough to know the difference between each of the computers in your house and, more importantly, it is smart enough to know to which of your computers to deliver any information it receives. Therefore when you talk to another computer anywhere else in the world (such as the CN server), your router will actually take off the "fake" IP address your computer put on the 'return address' section of the information you send out and replace it with the real IP address that your router got from your ISP.

(This is the important part)

Now pretend you are the CN server for just a minute. Because the router you bought for your house is replacing the 'return address' section from all of the traffic from all of your home computers with the exact same IP address it got from your ISP, it looks like all the traffic from your entire house is coming from the exact same IP address! That is why you cannot have more than one CN account from any one household.

Schools, work, and hotels are a little bit trickier. The bottom line is that CN will not allow more than one account per IP address, therefore they only allow one account per NAT-enabled router (the device that changes all internal traffic to a single IP address). Most schools, including almost all colleges & universities DO NOT use NAT and give each computer a truly unique IP address, so EMATO will probably be okay.

So the question is not whether you can access CN as part of a network or not (if you are connected to the Internet you are always part of a network), it is a question of whether or not you are sharing your IP address with anyone else. If you are sharing an internet connection or sitting behind an NAT-enable router (like 99% of all home networks are), there can only be one CN account.

Here is a decent (but not fool-proof) way of telling whether or not you can access CN from your computer.

Go to Start>Control Panel>Network Connections

Right click the network interface you use to connect to the Internet (probably either Local Area Connection if you use an ethernet cable or Wireless Network Connection if you're wireless)

Click "Status"

Go to the "Support" tab.

Record the "IP Address" your computer gives you. This is the IP address that the computer thinks it has

Go to some website that reports back to you your IP Address. http://whatismyip.com/ works well.

The address you see there is what the rest of the Internet thinks your address is. If it is the different than what you saw in the "Network Connections" page of your computer, you are probably sitting behind a NAT-enabled router and can only have one CN account on your network. If the IP address is the same both places, your computer is the only one with that IP address, and you SHOULD be free to enjoy CN to the fullest. That is not a guarantee, but as close to one as you'll ever get in this description.

I hope this helps.

~BlindMoose

[Severus Snape]

The rule is there for a reason and have been covered by the users above. You log in to school or other public networks at your own risk -- the reason we do not recommend it is the possibility that others may be logging in from that network as well. If you interact with them, you're in trouble.

If you are cheating, we can tell. It's that simple.

Colloportus!

[Fort Pitt]

well... this isnt a cover up story, but my older brother plays CN too, we have emailed Kevin, and we dont trade, aid, go to war, or even PM each other...

i started playing CN in mid October, he started playing sometime in November, he is in college, i am not... when he is home, were on the same network, since we told Kevin, we dont get flagged...

but otherwise, dont create multis, its too risky, even using middlemen you get traced...

wow i did the whats my IP thing and its totally different

Edited April 28, 2008 by Fort Pitt

[Pmac627]

I'm Fort Pitt's older bro that he is talking about.

We use the same home network and I play at school.

Like he said, we do not do anything other than PM's to each other, and that has kept us alive.

When tech deals go down, we make sure there is no way it could even look like we are trying to launder CN money. Aka, we are on different cycles in the BDC tech store.

He has a computer, I have my laptop, and my parents have a computer. We NEVER use the same computer, EVER.

Following these rules seems to have kept us alive and it works for us.

I suggest for the college folk. Don't check on library computers or whatever. Use your own computer, always.

I do wonder, however, if I want to make a donation to Fort Pitt's nation for his B-day or other reasons, will I get flagged?

[Gilly754]

I'm Fort Pitt's older bro that he is talking about.

We use the same home network and I play at school.

Like he said, we do not do anything other than PM's to each other, and that has kept us alive.

When tech deals go down, we make sure there is no way it could even look like we are trying to launder CN money. Aka, we are on different cycles in the BDC tech store.

He has a computer, I have my laptop, and my parents have a computer. We NEVER use the same computer, EVER.

Following these rules seems to have kept us alive and it works for us.

I suggest for the college folk. Don't check on library computers or whatever. Use your own computer, always.

I do wonder, however, if I want to make a donation to Fort Pitt's nation for his B-day or other reasons, will I get flagged?

you shouldn't if your paying to the game but the again you might

[Fort Pitt]

you shouldn't if your paying to the game but the again you might

donations are outside sources though... and have no ingame mechanics besides the bonus's that it gives