Tracking IPs is not hacking. And it has everything to do with
PBeMail, where people deal solely by email and use, say, Hotmail
or other accounts. What you said is like saying I should not
look at the postmark on the envelope of a PBM ["snail mail"]
to see if the letter originated from the same city/nation as
the letter writer says he's at on the return address.
You track IPs by looking at the "Properties" or details on the return
address.
I was as you in an earlier PBeM game. Learned the hard way that you
cannot be so trusting. A player presented himself as a computer programer
out of India. Claimed to be independant. Joined our alliance. He was
using
a Hotmail account.
Subsequent to his back-stab, which totally destroyed 90 turns of work for
3 other players, I backtracked his IPs and discovered the originating IP
[from where Hotmail picked it up] was the same one that one of our enemies
[in France]used. 90 turns each, destroyed in 1 turn.
It wasn't the backstab that was the most frustrating part. It was the
nagging suspicion that both the enemy and the mole were the same player.
IPs don't prove that, one way or the other. Any more than, say, a group
of players all working for the same company. [I'm told by friends of
mine in the computer industry that lots of computer company employees
form game clubs of one sort or another...I suspect that would be true of
a lot of office enviroments...in agriculture, its usually softball].
In PBeM, unlike most PBM games where all the players are usually on the
same continant, you cannot call up all the players in your alliance.
Not when your alliance stretches from, say, Australia to Sweden.
So unless you like joining games where you only ally yourself to people
you know from other games, or want to avoid alliances with players with,
say,
hotmail accounts, you need to find a way to take a surface look and see
that people are at least _where_ they say they are. As I play these games
to meet new people outside of my line of work [and surprisingly enough, I
end up meeting some one _in_ my line of work in an enemy alliance], I
decline
your invitation to be stupid. If someone wants to backstab me, I cannot
stop
them, but I can make them work a little harder at it.
"Hackers" who try to do things outside the game to make up for things they
cannot do inside the game would be doing something like trying to get into
Rich's computer to see if they can get copies of other players' orders.
Being a farmer, I wouldn't know if that was possible. I can believe it
possible, but that's my _ignorance_ speaking. People who do that are not
only cheaters, they are criminals.
People who play multiple factions, they are cheaters, but not criminals.
People who claim to be allies but are really enemies are neither cheaters
nor criminals. They are backstabbers [in their role in the game]. It is
fun for them, and their _true_ allies. It is unfun for the people they
"stab".
Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: Majestic <majestic@mail.dma.be>
To: g2-list@pbm.com <g2-list@pbm.com>
Date: Sunday, November 22, 1998 5:48 AM
Subject: Re: Date
>Could you please stop these endless, stupid and irrelevant discussions.
>This has nothing, really nothing to do with Olympia. If you wanna discuss
>IP-addresses etc. get subscribed on a newsgroup for hackers and be done
>with it.
>BTW tracking people by their IP-address is really the lowest thing to do
and
>is a lousy way to get a grip on things you cannot do in the game. I'll
start
>using anonymous servers now and but you guys are spoiling the game.
>
>Thx
>Yves.
>