IP Bans, IP Bans Everywhere

Day 2,143, 05:53 • Published in China USA • by Elongated Musket

A little background for those less interested in what's technically going on.

Ever since the Epic War Tournament/contest/whatever (and those dreadful server slow-downs) the eRepublik team started banning IP addresses that have been making... let's just say unusually high amounts of requests (bots).
And, around the same time, i've heard that the eRepublik api is being shut down (yet again).

Ever since then i've heard players sayng: "Need to get new IP", "Got IP Banned" etc.
I realize that they're not banning those IP's manually (that would be ... crazy).
They must have some king of app/script monitoring access requests.

A couple of days ago i heard that Google Docs's IP's were also banned.
And today i've heard this rumor that they somehow managed to ban an entire Poland Internet provider (namely UPC Poland).

My initial thoughts on this were: either a) some Cloning machines or b) Market farming scripts.

But then i realized something. egov4you.info is run by some polish guys. That means Polish IP's.

And i ask you (Plato, eRepublik team):
You think and API just costs money and produces nothing?
An API SAVES money.
An API SAVES bandwidth.
An API allows players to make their own TOOLS.
An API supports the meta-game.

And when you have a game like yours and fail (for soooo long) to provide players with the tools they need/want, they WILL find ways to get the job done.
No matter your IP Bans and/or restrictions.

Fine. Stop the API. But do SOMETHING ELSE. Here, take Travian's example.
I remember Travian had a nice way of doing this kind of thing without an API.
They would just make available an SQL dump updated daily.
http://{server}.travian.com/map.sql.zip
and that dump file vould contain SQL statements.
CREATE TABLE x_world;
INSERT INTO `x_world` VALUES(...);

I really believe that implementing something like this would drastically reduce the crawl rate by player-made bots.
Just make, at each day-change, some SQL dump files containing player data (containing the friggin' "PREVIOUS DAY_DAMAGE"), grouped by various things:

http://www.erepublik.com/country-{country_id}.sql.zip
http://www.erepublik.com/MU-{military_unit_id}.sql.zip
etc.

How hard can that be?


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