The Mana World Forums

Could someone of official TMW faces explain me official TMW position about Tor use? (I refer to The Onion Router network, torproject.org)

Facts I've quickly measured in instrumented ways are:
1) Forum sometmies works via Tor. Like 30% of time. Tor makes several retries to choose exit that works, but eventually figures it out. Sometimes. I do not really get it. Are you banning Tor? Or is it allowed? How it comes to such strange "half-ban" pattern?

2) TMW server appears to be unavailable via Tor. OTOH some other servers, including Evol are fine with it, therefore it seems Tor could exit eA server ports on its own and its TMW server being picky.

Yet I'm curious about official explanations. Are there official policy on this, etc? What is it and why, etc?

Accepting people using TOR is not good for gm-reasons. Your identity is concealed to all but admins and as far as I know no real ip's has been showed for people that are not admins.

From a players perspective:
Why would you want to play thru TOR? Lags would be worse and what do you gain?

From a GM perspective allowing players to play thru TOR it would be impossible to spot people that multibox, really hard to follow up on scams etc.

This is just my personal views and does not necessarily reflect what TMWCs views.

Tor would cause horrible, painful lag as it goes through several nodes before reaching the end node. Use VPNs (preferably with the OpenVPN protocol).
And if you want cheap offers, check stacksocial. Make sure you choose a VPN that takes your anonymity seriously.
Some companies also offer personal VPNs (basically a VPS set up with OpenVPN on which you are the only user).

At least, it is nice to see friendly and constructive replies, thank you

What's good about Tor from my personal point of view?
1) Encrypted by default and reasonably protects traffic against LOCAL sniffers. Handy for over-the-free-air scenarios, etc where AP is open (or everyone knows network key). Caveat is that exit node could potentially steal password, but since its rather custom protocol, it going to be quite unlikely to say the least.

2) Free and always available. Even under restricted net conditions it would bring one into full version of the Internet. Esp. with obfs4 protocol, etc. Which AFAIK one of few things capable of bypassing even great china firewall (these actually ban "simple" tor and openvpn, etc).

3) No payment req'd. Once someone pays for something, their privacy just complately gone. So paid VPNs vs privacy is a nice joke. But it just does not works this way. Credit card comes with a full details of owner most of time, transactions are aggressively tracked "to prevent fraud".

As major drawback, it is surely bad in terms of latency, any day. But it's not a big deal when I'm in fairly remote location and my WAN is a crappy 3G modem anyway, doing ~700 ms ping on its own.

Btw from privacy and censorship points of view, openvpn is both easy to detect by DPI and easy to firewall. OTOH it takes a lot to set it up in secure manner. Almost nobody manages to get it right, actually. On side note I've gone for rather strange network setups, passing VPN through it isn't entirely impossible but takes a bit more efforts. But sure it isn't your fault.

Maybe we'll meet one day in game. If I'll manage to get some time to sort it out. What is strangest thing for me is half-working forum though. How exactly you do it this way it works half of time?