Hey-o. Long time player on several keys over the years. First time poster. Got a problem that hopefully someone can sort out for me, as I've never seen this. I usually lurk around Space Station 13 and occasionally some other games, and all was fine and dandy. One day, my computer's motherboard dies and I need a replacement. Oh well. Can't get one right now, and the motherboard isn't made anymore so I buy a temporary laptop to tide me over until I can more or less rebuild from scratch. I try to log into one of my games and get told that I was banned back in 2014. Strange, I didn't even play back then. So I contact the admin and we determine that my CID is identical to another player's. We get me unbanned, and things go alright for a time.

Log into a different game, and get told I'm logged in under another key and thereby need to log out on this one or risk being banned, as it's against the game's rules to run two clients at once. "Strange. I'm only logged in once." I say. Ask some players, get no response. Dismiss it.

Log into a different Space Station 13 server, and get the same message. Inform THEIR admin team, and I discover that I do in fact have the same CID as one of their online players. Fun. We do some investigating, and they determine that I'm not avoiding any bans and apply a flag to my account that I'm fine. What I did find out, though, is that my CID is shared by THIRTEEN OTHER PLAYERS. Talk a bit more with the admin and learn that the main thing linking all 13 players, is that they all have store-bought machines. Most of us, if not all, have HP machines.

Log back into my usual Space Station 13 server, and discover I have been banned yet again, this time back in 2017, under a key that I once again can confirm that I've never had. My computer is an HP Pavilion x360, fresh out of the box from this past Black Friday. I did some looking around and discovered another thread on the matter; I'll link it at the end of the post. So what I'm saying is; what am I supposed to do? I can't keep going around getting these games to unban me when I'm not even supposed to be banned in the first place. Especially when CIDs are supposed to be largely unique. What can be done about this? Calling out all BYOND staff here. Not sure if this should be going in the Help forum or the Bug Report forum, honestly.

Thread 1: Two players share a CID, and were also banned at one point. http://www.byond.com/forum/post/2014250

Also, interesting fact! Those two players ALSO have their CID linked with 13 other people, however I don't think they're linked with mine.