11-17-2017, 12:00 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-17-2017, 01:36 PM by Sweetwater.)
Recently, as many of you know, there have been a slew of accusations tossed around regarding multis and rigged sims.
Some circumstantial evidence was provided, but not in a positive manner. This evidence was released to the entire league without going through the proper protocol (consulting the Head Office and waiting for a full and proper investigation to be completed before airing it out to the league.) When this approach is taken it detracts us from the investigation and we have to spend our time discussing and elaborating to many different individuals rather than making progress with the situation at hand.
We believe this hurts the league because public opinion DOES make a difference. Not only does it give a bad image to incoming players about the integrity of the league without providing us the proper time to address the issue, but it is very mentally taxing on the individuals involved in finding a solution.
After thorough and extensive research of the matter at hand, we've found no reason to believe that any of these claims hold enough water to confirm the serious accusations presented.
Sweetwater is currently working but he can further explain the technical details later by editing this post. I'll try and give a brief summary of it.
The technology necessary to place every accused party within a reasonable distance of each other to justify suspicion isn't available to the general public. Thus, we're forced to speculate based on incomplete and loosely connected data that someone may or may not be spending a significant portion of their lives every day cheating a fake football league with no tangible rewards.
The main concern is players being assigned an IP address from the same cell phone tower. This doesn't determine anything because a single cell phone tower covers a wide area, specifically 45 miles in one direction (90 miles). We have a large amount of users and it's possible that some of them are from the same area, especially the Los Angeles, San Jose area which is host to approximately 5 million people.
I'm not sure if people are familiar with the pigeonhole principle but I think it could help people understand how a "coincidence" of players being in the same area is actually more likely to happen than to not happen.
If 367 people are in a room, we know that at least two people in that room share a birthday. However if a room has 23 individuals, it's more likely that two of them share a birthday than no one sharing a birthday.
Now applying that to our league, we have have around 200 active users. (We've had 166 actives in the past 24 hours).
Lets say we have 5000 possible cities/locations that our users can be in (which is probably a huge overestimation).
With that many users and locations, there is over a 98% probability that two users are from the same location.
Now, when we factor in friends, this has to go up. I recruited Calkewelated Chambers the third and I know he's from my city. I'm sure other people are similar, like Deuosolis and RainDelay.
Anyways, I just wanted to highlight how we can't prove anything by being connected to the same cell tower.
Now lets get on to further solutions.
First off, no more witch hunts. If you have evidence like this, bring it up to the head office and we will investigate it to the best of our ability. We did this when presented with the Noble Dusty evidence, we did it when presented with the recent evidence and we will do it again in the future.
Second, It's possible some people are unsatisfied with this, so I think the best way to handle this is have a meet up through discord voice chat where a few head office members will be in attendance and we can host anyone else who believes there is some sort of cheating that is going on. I believe if we live stream this chat and allow live Q&A, we can get through this quickly and have an easier time explaining which will allow the league to move forward.
Feel free to comment in this thread. However, keep in mind to refrain from witch hunting. Also, if you are asking for technical details, it would probably be best to wait for Sweetwater to answer.
Sweetwater's Tech-splanation:
IP addresses are an interesting thing in that they are similar to street addresses, but not quite the same, and because of how they are generated, don't necessarily give the same locational accuracy when searched using a standard checker as Google maps would with a street address.
This is compounded with cell phone towers. Each tower has a unique IP, and will assign a version of that IP to a cellular customer accessing it. However, because of how they must broadcast, especially to the amount of customers using a tower at the same time. So a few hundred customers may appear to have the exact same IP address at the same time, because we don't get to see the full IP address for a cellphone.
This site intentionally leaves out a section of an IP address to help prevent doxxing and stalking. It leaves off the port number. So if two people had the displayed IP of 1.1.1.1, and this came back as being a cellular service located in Dallas, Texas (all hypothetical here), we'd assume they were the same person. But, because Dallas has a few million people in a very dense area, it could be that they just happen to live within the service area of a same tower, and we can't see that one of them is 1.1.1.1:105 and the other is 1.1.1.1:243. Two different customers accessing the same tower at the same time, but being ported to a different access point.
What we have seen with the 208.**.*.*** Is that the displayed IPs don't match exactly, so this would mean 2 different towers.
Dan said earlier that a cell tower has an access radius of around 45 miles. This means they cover an area of over 6000 square miles. Now, these could be located along a 135 mile stretch of the California coast, including the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and Los Angeles. A population of around 15,000,000. According to their 2016 data, T Mobile has just under 70,000,000 subscribers in America that access their wireless network. That means around 1 out of every 5 Americans owns a TMobile subscription. That's not taking into account people who don't own cellphones. So, following that math, of the around 15,000,000 residents of the coverage area, an estimated 3,000,000 own T-Mobile cellphones.
I'm a fan of Occam's Razor for most situations. For those unfamiliar: among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
In an area that's home to 4 NFL teams, 2 out of 3,000,000 people finding a site advertised every month on the football forums of the most popular internet site ever, is almost statistically likely.
Some circumstantial evidence was provided, but not in a positive manner. This evidence was released to the entire league without going through the proper protocol (consulting the Head Office and waiting for a full and proper investigation to be completed before airing it out to the league.) When this approach is taken it detracts us from the investigation and we have to spend our time discussing and elaborating to many different individuals rather than making progress with the situation at hand.
We believe this hurts the league because public opinion DOES make a difference. Not only does it give a bad image to incoming players about the integrity of the league without providing us the proper time to address the issue, but it is very mentally taxing on the individuals involved in finding a solution.
After thorough and extensive research of the matter at hand, we've found no reason to believe that any of these claims hold enough water to confirm the serious accusations presented.
Sweetwater is currently working but he can further explain the technical details later by editing this post. I'll try and give a brief summary of it.
The technology necessary to place every accused party within a reasonable distance of each other to justify suspicion isn't available to the general public. Thus, we're forced to speculate based on incomplete and loosely connected data that someone may or may not be spending a significant portion of their lives every day cheating a fake football league with no tangible rewards.
The main concern is players being assigned an IP address from the same cell phone tower. This doesn't determine anything because a single cell phone tower covers a wide area, specifically 45 miles in one direction (90 miles). We have a large amount of users and it's possible that some of them are from the same area, especially the Los Angeles, San Jose area which is host to approximately 5 million people.
I'm not sure if people are familiar with the pigeonhole principle but I think it could help people understand how a "coincidence" of players being in the same area is actually more likely to happen than to not happen.
If 367 people are in a room, we know that at least two people in that room share a birthday. However if a room has 23 individuals, it's more likely that two of them share a birthday than no one sharing a birthday.
Now applying that to our league, we have have around 200 active users. (We've had 166 actives in the past 24 hours).
Lets say we have 5000 possible cities/locations that our users can be in (which is probably a huge overestimation).
With that many users and locations, there is over a 98% probability that two users are from the same location.
Now, when we factor in friends, this has to go up. I recruited Calkewelated Chambers the third and I know he's from my city. I'm sure other people are similar, like Deuosolis and RainDelay.
Anyways, I just wanted to highlight how we can't prove anything by being connected to the same cell tower.
Now lets get on to further solutions.
First off, no more witch hunts. If you have evidence like this, bring it up to the head office and we will investigate it to the best of our ability. We did this when presented with the Noble Dusty evidence, we did it when presented with the recent evidence and we will do it again in the future.
Second, It's possible some people are unsatisfied with this, so I think the best way to handle this is have a meet up through discord voice chat where a few head office members will be in attendance and we can host anyone else who believes there is some sort of cheating that is going on. I believe if we live stream this chat and allow live Q&A, we can get through this quickly and have an easier time explaining which will allow the league to move forward.
Feel free to comment in this thread. However, keep in mind to refrain from witch hunting. Also, if you are asking for technical details, it would probably be best to wait for Sweetwater to answer.
Sweetwater's Tech-splanation:
IP addresses are an interesting thing in that they are similar to street addresses, but not quite the same, and because of how they are generated, don't necessarily give the same locational accuracy when searched using a standard checker as Google maps would with a street address.
This is compounded with cell phone towers. Each tower has a unique IP, and will assign a version of that IP to a cellular customer accessing it. However, because of how they must broadcast, especially to the amount of customers using a tower at the same time. So a few hundred customers may appear to have the exact same IP address at the same time, because we don't get to see the full IP address for a cellphone.
This site intentionally leaves out a section of an IP address to help prevent doxxing and stalking. It leaves off the port number. So if two people had the displayed IP of 1.1.1.1, and this came back as being a cellular service located in Dallas, Texas (all hypothetical here), we'd assume they were the same person. But, because Dallas has a few million people in a very dense area, it could be that they just happen to live within the service area of a same tower, and we can't see that one of them is 1.1.1.1:105 and the other is 1.1.1.1:243. Two different customers accessing the same tower at the same time, but being ported to a different access point.
What we have seen with the 208.**.*.*** Is that the displayed IPs don't match exactly, so this would mean 2 different towers.
Dan said earlier that a cell tower has an access radius of around 45 miles. This means they cover an area of over 6000 square miles. Now, these could be located along a 135 mile stretch of the California coast, including the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and Los Angeles. A population of around 15,000,000. According to their 2016 data, T Mobile has just under 70,000,000 subscribers in America that access their wireless network. That means around 1 out of every 5 Americans owns a TMobile subscription. That's not taking into account people who don't own cellphones. So, following that math, of the around 15,000,000 residents of the coverage area, an estimated 3,000,000 own T-Mobile cellphones.
I'm a fan of Occam's Razor for most situations. For those unfamiliar: among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
In an area that's home to 4 NFL teams, 2 out of 3,000,000 people finding a site advertised every month on the football forums of the most popular internet site ever, is almost statistically likely.
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