I'm sorry if I offended someone but I really didn't know situation's like that where you live. It's customary here to have multiple public ip adresses for every hotspot. All the people who are on my cable operator have public IP adresses and each and every company that I work for has one or even 2 public ip adresses. I guess IPv4 is really used up :(
But apart from IP adressing probs, can we at least try to do something against cheating? I don't think same ip in the same game would hurt many people...

well, if you consider the twenty or so from our school a lot...

Well, lets drop the whole IP thing. It doesn't sound feasible. Lets face it, I'm in the USA studying at a university where every user is assigned an individual IP. My roommate's computer not 10 feet from me has a different IP than mine. Most universities in the USA are setup like this. There's not much that can be done (besides blocking the entire subnet) to prevent someone in my situation from going over to that computer and playing there on a different account. Or to the computer lab. Or I could connect to a wireless network and grab a different IP there. IPs are not a solution.

The only thing I could think of would be to make a cookie that expires after a set amount of time that locks the computer to an individual account. It's an imperfect solution to be sure, easily circumvented, but it's better than IP blocking. You could set the expiration time to be, I dunno, 1 or 2 hours, or even 24 for a full turn. The 24 hour expiration may interfere with those players who access Diplomacy from computer labs though. Basically the cookie wouldn't prevent multiple accounts across the board, just make it a little harder, a little more annoying to do it.

It might even be possible for the brothers mentioned in an above post to play on the same computer if they use different user accounts (which has a variety of other benefits as well.) As I recall, if using multiple windows accounts (and probably Mac OS and Linux accounts as well) the cookie is stored in a unique location for each user (also assuming the browser is installed for multiple accounts.)

There are other, trickier ways of preventing this multiple user problem, however I would prefer to not post them in a public forum. But I do agree, IP blocking isn't a realistic solution with the shortage of IPv4 addresses that currently exists.

I know a player called ' mandila ' who is using multiple account and must be disband from the game !!! Something must be quickly done to prevent this !! Dont play with mandila !!

u can never stop the multiple account problem but when u realise that a player is playing with 2+ accounts then u leave that game and make him wait 24 hours as a punishment..

then implement leave button so I can leave a game where cheater plays and be on my way. I don't want to play in a game where certain people have unfair advantage.

okay, i know a good way to implement the "leave button". we make a button to leave the game, and YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IN THREE TURNS and still play. even if you get to 18 SC's you get kicked out after three turns. whether you win or lose.

I think another pair of accounts which is being controlled by the same person is "Decato" and "Darkfire". I'm not sure, but it's very likely, they are in nearly all the games together, and they join at nearly the same time.

you don't actually have to ban ips. You could make a rule that every active game cannot have players that are represented in another active game.

Then it becomes way to much of a hassle to multi-account. coz you got to create a new account and a new email for each game.

This is a silly idea. I've played a number of online games and any measures revolving around IPs usually fail. Why? because there are to many easy ways to get past them so all you do is harm 'normal' people in main.

A simpler solution would be to have a leave and a report button ingame. This way you can leave whenever you want, and the report action could draw administrative eyes to the game. If something along the lines of say russia and turkey work together, but there is no message history ingame you can start to narrow things down, and do other checks, ie similar passwords/emails/etc.

Last on this, talk about a witchhunt, i made an account yeserday for the first time after having the game recommended to me and im almost immediately accused of cheating?

'I think another pair of accounts which is being controlled by the same person is "Decato" and "Darkfire".'

Im guessing you mean by decato as me. First of all being new to the game i tried to find a way to join games, when i found every single one to be passworded i simply made 4/5 new games. Several have started now. Darkfire was presumably online looking for games the moment i made my ones. Suddenly were multies?

I have played games where witch-hunts have gone on, or where enforced multi prevention measures have occured and really all that happens in the main is you harm innocent people. In one game the admins banned an entire city because of suspicious IP log-ins. Seriously, there are better ways.

yes, but this argument won't end until you MENTION those "better ways". i agree with you. i know another game that had a very sucsessful anti-multi system, but i can't remember it.