VPN and our services
November 9th 2019
The SWGEmu Team
We've heard many of you complain about the game and multi-account abuse that leads to unfair advantage to players that skirt the rules. A common tactic of these players has been to use VPN's to hide their real IP from our services. Taking community input into account we've updated our SWGEmu All Servers Rules and Policies around VPN usage:
The relevant section reads:
1.3 Connecting to our services through VPNs (Virtual Private Network) will not be accepted. Any account using this method of login will be rejected from our services and subject to automatic banning. Public IP’s must be used in order to gain access to our services.
We have been building tools to allow us to analyze multi-acct behavior and have started a process of scrubbing accounts where we see multiple accounts on the same IP without authorization through the multi-account household process. Our analysis of many of these accounts has show that VPN's are used by violators of our TOS as an attempt to hide from our detection systems. As we have moved to ban these people innocent players have been caught in the sweep, most unaware that their VPN usage puts them in the same IP pools as TOS violators. To that end we are rolling out more tools that deny registration via VPN and will auto-ban users who login to the game via VPN.
If you have been banned and wish to return to our services using a public IP please contact support and have your case reviewed. We have tools to allow us to manually review each case to help identify innocent people caught in this new policy. That said over the coming months we will become much more strict on this topic as the policy becomes more common knowledge in he community.
We are sorry if this inconveniences some valid VPN users, we know as an example some people use VPN's for privacy purposes or to stream content from other countries etc. However we feel strongly that as we move towards a post-1.0 world that the game needs as much protection from multi-account TOS violations as we can muster.
This is not a perfect solution, we still need the communities help, if you suspect someone of violating the TOS as always please report it to support and we will investigate and discipline where needed.
~SWGEmu team