Accepted Ban Appeal

[LilyAnon]

1. LilyAnon#7976 (https://bans.wonderland.tf/index.php?p=banlist&searchText=LilyAnon&Submit=Search )

2. I logged on Team Fortress 2 and went to the server list page, and was notified in the process of connection that I had been banned from all Wonderland servers, and directed me to a link to appeal the ban. After doing some digging on the Wonderland's main page, I discovered I had been banned on May 17, 2019. I can't recall exactly what I was doing in TF2 that day, but I recall enough to flabbergasted as to why I'd be potentially banned, much less permanently. The reason on the Wonderland site stated "Duplicate Account," which I"m not sure as to what that alludes to; I have no alternate Steam Accounts to speak of.

The only time in recent memory I've been kicked from a match was for accidentally voting to kick an idle player who turned out not to be idle at all. Being new to the site, I checked around some other ban appeal threads, and discovered that among accidental bans (mine is permanent, for the record), that VPN seems to be a common theme.

3. I can only assume I might have had my VPN on in the midst of playing and that when several servers detect a player using VPN, it treats each joining of a server as a seperate player rather than the same person. I'm not sure how exactly VPN software works beyond granting a stable, secure connection, but in the future, I will refrain from playing with VPN turned on. I attribute this permanent ban to an honest mistake and would be highly appreciative of my unbanning.

 

[Eight]

Sorry for the lack of response to this appeal, but here is a full explanation regarding the ban:

"Duplicate Account" means that your account was sharing an IP address with a banned account. For your situation, you were sharing an IP with https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198936348200, which was auto-banned for aimbotting. Can you explain your relationship with this account? There is only a 3 day difference between that account's ban and your ban.

 

[LilyAnon]

For the Steam account, I don't recognize a "Justin Von Ungern Sternberg" and don't have any Steam friends who are friends with the profile to my knowledge. I wish I had a better explanation for how the account has the same IP address, I'm not very knowledgeable on these kinds of matters. I don't have any Steam Accounts I play on besides the link provided above.

The best I can guess at is that I was playing with ProtonVPN turned on that day and must have been assigned the same IP address/server that this user who was aimbotting. Since I'm not using the premium version, I can only assume they use shared IP addresses among its users for the free version.

The most I can guarantee in the future is not to log on to Team Fortress 2 without disabling VPN first to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future.

Thank you for your response.

 

[Stao]

Can you explain why these are associated with you?

 

[LilyAnon]

Other than the possibility of shared IP addresses via VPN, no. I'm unable to explain the association.
I'm not clear how I'm associated with these accounts in the first place.
Frankly, I've never heard that many account names before, much less recognize them. I've only used one nickname on Steam.

I will restate that it seems more likely that multiple people would end up being assigned a shared IP address via VPN. Some servers don't accept them, some do.

It seems more likely to me than one individual person going through the trouble of creating that many Discord accounts or Steam accounts or whatever to evade bans.

Then again, I don't know how often you encounter such a phenomenon in your moderation of TF2 servers.

 

[Stao]

Alright. I thank you for your appeal and patience with this. I've decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and unban you. Appeal Accepted.