Statement from TEP

[Sedgistan]

I will correct an earlier mistake on our part - there was no mobile IP shared between the nations. We will never normally comment on this kind of information, and it was a mistake for it to have been said in the first place (even putting aside the inaccuracy of it); nonetheless, as it was said and it was wrong, I feel it is appropriate to correct this.

Discussions on our ways of detecting multies inevitably turns into a discussion of how to get away with multying, even if that is not the intent of participants. That is not a discussion we are going to allow. I will never claim our methods are foolproof; we have no direct contact with the people playing the game; however, they are much more sophisticated that people imagine, and we've caught many a cheater who has thought using different devices would help them evade our checks.

As for G-R's suggestion that "TEP is lying, or that Mods are wrong", I don't believe that to be the case. TEP has a different set of evidence to us, and has chosen to interpret what they have differently to how we've interpreted our evidence.

As a final point, made in general rather than on this specific case, I'll note that consistent IP matches between two nations do not necessarily indicate that they are the same person. An example being Sedgistan and Crazy Girl.

[Glen-Rhodes]

As for G-R's suggestion that "TEP is lying, or that Mods are wrong", I don't believe that to be the case. TEP has a different set of evidence to us, and has chosen to interpret what they have differently to how we've interpreted our evidence.

I suppose I'll reword things. Either TEP is wrong, or mods are wrong. The circumstantial evidence is weighty on the latter, though. And given that, I imagine others will attempt to mimic Aelitia's actions in the future. On the topic of regional security, it's prudent for off-site forums to deny entry to people who apply for citizenship (or whatever equivalent) using a mobile IP.

As a final point, made in general rather than on this specific case, I'll note that consistent IP matches between two nations do not necessarily indicate that they are the same person. An example being Sedgistan and Crazy Girl.

Well, sure, but don't you have to declare that? Wouldn't Aelitia have said, "Hey, I'm on a shared computer?" Even if they do, the OSRS makes no exceptions for it. You and CG are mods, and the combination of special treatment and just the verifiable fact that you're two different people helps. But plenty of people sharing PCs have been booted from the WA for multying. So maybe the OSRS needs updating, if having consistent IP matches no longer triggers a boot? Either that, or I'm sure somebody will return to this thread in the future when they're booted for multying based on a shared PC/IP address.

[Canton Empire]

Are Sedge and Crazy Girl married/related?

Anyways, is TEP going to actually hold a fair trial? As Cormac said, Delegate McCloud has may friends. In fact, I associate TEP with Todd.

[Aenglaland]

Anyways, is TEP going to actually hold a fair trial? As Cormac said, Delegate McCloud has may friends. In fact, I associate TEP with Todd.

This is not about Todd having "friends", or something people did simply because they didn't wanted Aelitia to be Delegate. As stated in here before, there were several reasons that led, after following all legal procedures, to the removal of Aelitia. It is the duty of the Conclave to be impartial at all times and, as an Arbiter in TEP, I assure you that Aelitia will have a fair, clean trial.

[Sedgistan]

As a final point, made in general rather than on this specific case, I'll note that consistent IP matches between two nations do not necessarily indicate that they are the same person. An example being Sedgistan and Crazy Girl.

Well, sure, but don't you have to declare that? Wouldn't Aelitia have said, "Hey, I'm on a shared computer?" Even if they do, the OSRS makes no exceptions for it. You and CG are mods, and the combination of special treatment and just the verifiable fact that you're two different people helps. But plenty of people sharing PCs have been booted from the WA for multying. So maybe the OSRS needs updating, if having consistent IP matches no longer triggers a boot? Either that, or I'm sure somebody will return to this thread in the future when they're booted for multying based on a shared PC/IP address.

We don't receive special treatment, and no, there is no requirement to "declare" when people are sharing connections. I think you're mixing this up with sharing computers (and here).

Are Sedge and Crazy Girl married

Yes.

[Glen-Rhodes]

You can't really share an IP address without sharing a particular device. IPs can't be shared between devices. You'd actually get an IP conflict error if that happens :/ Unless you're using some kind of non-standard NAT settings, I guess. Consumer PCs ask the router for a unique IP, unless you've specifically set it not to in the router itself.

[Calvinistan]

You can't really share an IP address without sharing a particular device. IPs can't be shared between devices. You'd actually get an IP conflict error if that happens :/ Unless you're using some kind of non-standard NAT settings, I guess. Consumer PCs ask the router for a unique IP, unless you've specifically set it not to in the router itself.

Coming to Sedge's defense (*gasp*) this isn't the case for external IPv4 addresses.

While for IPv6 protocol there is plenty of space to go around, all IPv4 addresses have been sold out on the upper layer (at least in the U.S); there are no more coming and literally every one is assigned to at least some form of ISP. This makes assigning a independent IPv4 address to each machine on the same connection extremely impractical, to say the least. While it does happen with IPv6 addresses, much of the web (And i'd wager NS included) still uses IPv4 as the backbone, so even if the end user uses IPv6 it's highly unlikely the, say, moderator viewing will see a IPv6 address.

This isn't usually as bad for computers, but it's really bad for mobile devices. You often have literally thousands of phones sharing the same external IPv4 address. That's how congested the IPv4 array is and why Ipv6 is badly needed.

Where you probably got NAT settings/IP conflict errors from is that your router will assign different IP's within your local area network, but it will still more likely than not only display one external IPv4 IP.

[Glen-Rhodes]

I suppose you're right, Hobbes.

Anyways, it doesn't really look good. Again, either TEP is wrong or the mods are wrong and their detection is failing. It sheds a little light on what the game can & can't detect. That's probably not good in the long run.

If Aelitia is sharing a network with someone else, you'd think they'd have mentioned it before. So I just have a hard time believing the evidence collected so far isn't convincing. But it also makes me wonder what they were doing differently to not trip the multying detection on NS. From what's publicly available, we know that NS uses IP tracking and login behavior as 2 out of 4 methods for detecting multies. A fair trial in TEP will probably have to contemplate what Aelitia could have done to avoid detection here.

[Topid]

I suppose you're right, Hobbes.

Anyways, it doesn't really look good. Again, either TEP is wrong or the mods are wrong and their detection is failing. It sheds a little light on what the game can & can't detect. That's probably not good in the long run.

If Aelitia is sharing a network with someone else, you'd think they'd have mentioned it before. So I just have a hard time believing the evidence collected so far isn't convincing. But it also makes me wonder what they were doing differently to not trip the multying detection on NS. From what's publicly available, we know that NS uses IP tracking and login behavior as 2 out of 4 methods for detecting multies. A fair trial in TEP will probably have to contemplate what Aelitia could have done to avoid detection here.

I don't think the mods said that what was going on didn't hit some automatic trigger for them to review behind the scenes.

The mods said we don't know what their tools can do, and after looking at all the evidence there's not going to be any action.

Maybe the system does throw up a flag to look but in this case most of the activity on the two accounts are on exclusive IPs and some small percentage is overlapped. Maybe they use a computer at school sometimes but their night time patterns are consistent enough to provide assurance the nations are two different people. Or maybe it's anything else.

None of us have a clue what we're talking about on the in-game side of this.

[Caelapes]

We do know a bit about what mods can see, because we know what information websites can gather from their users. IP, useragent, cookies, etc. NS moderation tools can't be more sophisticated than what websites can already see from users.

It's entirely possible that NS moderators are looking at the useragent and seeing evidence of separate devices that is not being represented in IP addresses alone, as Hobbes has laid out a case for. I don't know about TEP's forum software, but The Internationale's forum does not display useragent data via moderator tools - that's something I have to check in the server logs themselves if the need arises.

[WARDEN DRAKE]

User Agent can be easily changed/faked by the user, that shouldn't be relied upon. I've always been under the impression that the only way to really get a hardcore cheater was to overlay-analyze their activity history, down to the clicks. You can change IPs, devices, user agents at will, but how long can you really drive two accounts with unique enough logins, clicks, time spent, pages viewed, etc. until the lines begin to show correlation? A week? A month? Certainly not a year, you'd go nuts. At the end of the day, I think that's our main and only true protection against cheating - the limited time ability of someone to keep it going.