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Thread: VPNs and our services

  1. #1
    SWGEmu Admin Lolindir's Avatar
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    VPNs and our services

    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
    Lolindir
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  2. #2
    Junior Member LQUser's Avatar
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    What happens if someone who normally uses a VPN for privacy purposes or streaming content like you mentioned accidentally loads up swg whose still connected to the VPN and doesn't realize it? It's pretty easy using some minimalist VPN's to completely forget you are still connected to one if you leave it connected and come back to play hours later.

    Not sure if some safeguards can be in place for this other than support tickets or to just be really really careful?

  3. #3
    SWGEmu Admin Lolindir's Avatar
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    Have to be very careful. You are in danger of getting your account suspended.

    We are working on ways to just block anyone on a VPN to login to our servers. Trying again without a VPN will the get you in.
    Lolindir
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    Im all for this feature and understand the reasons behind it, but from a fairness standpoint it would have been prudent to publish this feature before implementing it so inncocent people did not get caught up in it. Thanks for the hard work this is a much needed feature.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kheb View Post
    Im all for this feature and understand the reasons behind it, but from a fairness standpoint it would have been prudent to publish this feature before implementing it so inncocent people did not get caught up in it. Thanks for the hard work this is a much needed feature.
    It's not fully automatic yet and we've only so far had ONE person out of double digits of people we banned actually come back to complain and we agreed.

    The goal will be a soft warning and auto-ban after repeated offenses.
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    I don't even know what a VPN is, but good work. Very excited as we get closer and closer....

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    Quote Originally Posted by lordkator View Post
    It's not fully automatic yet and we've only so far had ONE person out of double digits of people we banned actually come back to complain and we agreed.

    The goal will be a soft warning and auto-ban after repeated offenses.
    Ok, my misunderstanding, i thought it was fully armed and operational. Thanks for the clarification.
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    Member KhoridonSarin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by stonehocker View Post
    I don't even know what a VPN is, but good work. Very excited as we get closer and closer....

    Doesn't this "really" all revolve around ADK's?!?! Let's not kid ourselves.
    Make them no-trade and be done with it. Seems like a much easier solution.
    Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the effort you guys put in.
    Either way, thanks for all that you do!
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    Quote Originally Posted by KhoridonSarin View Post
    Doesn't this "really" all revolve around ADK's?!?! Let's not kid ourselves.
    Make them no-trade and be done with it. Seems like a much easier solution.
    Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the effort you guys put in.
    Either way, thanks for all that you do!
    While ADK's are part of it this will also be a big step in stopping people from being able to multi account to farm resources, mobs, city lots, in the future. Especially if a future server has less character slots per account.

    Now you just have to find a way to ensure people with multiple accounts so their wife, brother, kid, dog, can all play aren't just actually doing the same thing.

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    I have a slight problem with this. I work from home sometimes. This means that I need to VPN into work. Being that i'm home I sometimes play SWG while waiting for phone calls. This can reflect my works IP address. Can I give you my work IP and you guys keep it on file or something?

    Edit: i'd like to add that I have SWG on my work laptop as well, and sometimes will be at hotels and play, is this a problem?
    Last edited by splntz; 11-10-2019 at 03:37 PM.

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    Addicted Walking carpet's Avatar
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    You know that many countries around the world requires the use of VPNs since there governments blocks many parts of the internet, also those who travel to those countries and still want to play?
    I recommend allowing VPNs only on demand by users put there names on a list and then you can check them for abuse.
    Blocking it all is too drastic in a free world.
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  13. #13
    SWGEmu Admin Lolindir's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Walking carpet View Post
    You know that many countries around the world requires the use of VPNs since there governments blocks many parts of the internet, also those who travel to those countries and still want to play?
    I recommend allowing VPNs only on demand by users put there names on a list and then you can check them for abuse.
    Blocking it all is too drastic in a free world.
    I would feel sorry for people in cases like that, but we will not start with an on demand thing and have to check them. Then we are back at what we do now. You have no idea how much time some of us spend on this project, searching and banning. It is ridiculous. I'm soon at my limit of it and this can't come soon enough. Just today I have searched a bunch more and banned 19 of the accounts for multiple accounts. last month i banned 84 accounts in one day. I also had a record that day, one guy having 27 accounts. I hope people understand that we need to control this before we go to 1.0 and that means we will not allow VPNs. For the ones who can't or will not login to services without a VPN, I'm sorry, but then we are not the server for you. It will actually be a very little part of the community that only have VPN as an option.
    Last edited by Lolindir; 11-17-2019 at 11:15 AM.
    Lolindir
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    Quote Originally Posted by splntz View Post
    I have a slight problem with this. I work from home sometimes. This means that I need to VPN into work. Being that i'm home I sometimes play SWG while waiting for phone calls. This can reflect my works IP address. Can I give you my work IP and you guys keep it on file or something?

    Edit: i'd like to add that I have SWG on my work laptop as well, and sometimes will be at hotels and play, is this a problem?
    We will roll with this slowly, in the begining it will be about automated checks, emailing people when they show up on a new IP. Much like WoW and other games will do when you're moving your account around. It'll help with people who get accounts stolen etc.

    Quote Originally Posted by Walking carpet View Post
    You know that many countries around the world requires the use of VPNs since there governments blocks many parts of the internet, also those who travel to those countries and still want to play?
    I recommend allowing VPNs only on demand by users put there names on a list and then you can check them for abuse.
    Blocking it all is too drastic in a free world.
    I happen to work for one of the same types of companies! And I traveled 100k miles this year already! I'm going to be a live tester myself and the everyone can laugh at me every time the system bans me!

    Again we will roll this out slowly, we are deploying the tools now and you will always have the option to ask for an exception. But as Lolindr says this is a major pain for everyone in game and on staff. We must make it better for everyone involved. We will be leveraging new machine learning based detection technology and we will develop more of our own tech to make this easier for everyone.
    LordKator
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  15. #15
    Junior Member Pitchcontrol's Avatar
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    Great changes you guys are making Iff no adk's, are the devs going to slow down decay a bit in 1.0 because you only can use a weapon a few buffs right now at speedcap. I was thinking of non tradeable adk's but no adk's is fine too.
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