1) Yes
2) No

Well, then 2) quite sucks : <

I've found games where 5 players (and even in one case, all 7) were banned.

It actually can, but I have only seen it done once, which is where someone basically hacked another player and screwed up their orders to solo. They don't do that for basic multis, though.

Hacked another player to win an online Diplomacy game?

That sounds like a serious addiction problem.

@silent knight: it doesn't actually sound that weird. I have never personally played a f2f game, though have heard people commonly intercept other people's orders and submit new ones.

Yeah, when I played email games, I would intentionally email one of the players false orders and tell them it was meant for the adjudicator, hoping to throw them off. Anything goes I guess, but there are obviously rules against accessing accounts without permission. I don't remember who it was but he's banned.

@tvrocks: while it might not sound weird to you, it can, at the same time, still sound quite serious to me.

A bit of horseplay amongst friends in a f2f game (though I wouldn't condone that personally) is quite different to the remote hacking of someone's computer. Also, hacking is a criminal offence (at least in my country), while horseplay amongst friends in f2f board game is clearly not.

Hacking is the wrong word. The offender sat the victim's account once and then kept their password. He used it again when they played each other.

Bo - That game wasn't cancelled: gameID=103065

Kestas changed the result from a solo to a draw in the database, but messing around with the database directly can have very bad consequences so it's not been done since.

Also, the player who changed the orders was not in the game.

That wasn't canceled? Damn it -_-

"2. Can this be done even after a game has finished (e.g. as a result of some new evidence)"

There are a few problems with this. The first is that sometimes we don't catch people cheating for a long time. A good example of this is an ex member sargmacher who was well respected and played in close to 40 games with multi's over months and months, carefully hiding them. By the time we found him all we could do was ban him. If we'd cancelled the games it would have had widespread impacts on players records, points, and would have caused significant problems for ghostratings.

The other problem is there are so many games that meet the 2 multi and cancel condition from the 5 years or so before we implemented that rule that the backlog of games would overwhelm the mods.

Okay, so:
2.a) What's the 2 multi and cancel condition? Does that mean that every game with 2 multi accounts should be banned?
2.b) To be honest I ask because often when I play anon games (and right now I play almost exclusively) I sometimes get the feeling something's fishy, but I don't want to bother mods with every little hunch I got (and especially mess up my great stat of 4 times being right about multi in a row record), so I always think "Nah, I'll wait till the end, see their accounts (like the time of setting up the account, games played together, number of games etc), and if things still smell fishy I'll mail the mods, but now it seems that would not work perfectly. Bummer.

And BTW - the "hacked" game is the stupidest thing I've ever seen, he didn't even try to make it look like Austria messed up his orders, he just went full berserk. Dumbass.

2.a) From the rules page:
"We will consider cancelling games when there are 2 or more multis in the same game and they had a considerable effect on the game as a whole. We will encourage the remaining players to cancel on their own. If they do not, we will ask for an explanation. We will determine if the explanation is warranted and either leave it alone or force cancel with an explanation. If no players have been eliminated the remaining players may choose to draw the game before it is cancelled. "

2.b) Please email us whenever you are suspicious - if they're clean, the check doesn't take much time, and if they are multis/metas it can help us find them a lot faster than we otherwise would.

"I don't want to bother mods with every little hunch I got"

Don't worry about that. It takes us very little time to check, and if you report it to us while the game is ongoing we will cancel the game if there is cheating even if our investigation goes past the game completion.

Games with 2 or more activly cheating people will be cancelled. Some games may have more banned players without being cancelled if those people were not cheating in that specific game.

ninja'ed :(

Yay! Sarg is back!

Awww... Sarg is banned

Nice bit of huntsmanship by whoever caught him. Almost disappointing to see him go though.

If i'm not mistaken the person who did the 'hack' in that game confessed to it too.

Our new young Knight has fallen... :(

"If i'm not mistaken the person who did the 'hack' in that game confessed to it too."

No, they did not. It was a royal pain to sort out, most of that credit going to yebellz for hours spent figuring it out.

As for catching sarg again, joint effort by the team.

Lol, again?

I meant after confrontation? I feel that's what I was told before I magnanimously let my deserved victory get stripped from my record ;)