Our system auto-blocks accounts with the same IP accessing the poker suite, since there's no way to ever verify that you were playing honestly.
It's true, there's no way to prove someone is playing honestly.
You can only prove that someone is being dishonest.
Allowing players to use the same ip gives them a chance to be transparent.
Are roomates not allowed to play on your site at the same time? Poker is fun to play with friends, most poker players prefer to beat their friends - not cheat with them. If two friends were playing from the same location, would you rather one of them changed their ip, so you didn't know or they both played from the same?
In the online poker world, the norm is to not allow multiple players from the same ip to sit at the same cash game. but usually tournaments are ok. (I believe stars only allows same ips to reg in mtts with 45 players or more, partypoker allows any non-sit n go - just examples) If there is anything which triggers an investigation - it would obviously not look good if they had the same ip.
Online poker players tend to be friends with each other, live together, hang out together etc...not to mention during major live events at casinos, everyone uses the same wifi to play the same tournaments. Only allowing one player per ip would kill any sites tournament schedule.
Most of them aren't cheaters and I would imagine those who do cheat would use different ips whether they were forced to or not.
You bring up some good points, as does Dooglus. I'm going to chat with some folks here - we've talked about these issues more than once already.
The options that we have are to a.) turn up the heat on the in-game collusion reports without IP blocks or b.) keep the block in place.
I'm pretty sure there are ways to get past any anti-collusion software, but obviously we'll have to consider giving people a chance and disabling the blocks for users that request it - while also perhaps limiting their access to some games as a sort of probationary period.
