
Originally Posted by
neko_lord
Your ISP is mistaken. Many ISP techs spout off stuff that is not true. Your encountered one of them. You have a different external IP address now, which is what solved your issue. The MAC address stuff is fluff that someone told you and you've believed.
MAC stand for Media Access Control, which is a sub-layer of the Data Link Layer of the OSI network model. The Data Link Layer is "Layer 2". Layer 2 traffic is not routed. Routers operate at Layer 3, the Network Layer.
Routers hold the MAC addresses of devices connected to them, but only those directly connected to them. From your computer to Evony's servers, there will be at least 10 different routers involved. Each router only contains the MAC addresses of the devices that are DIRECTLY connected to them.
What this means is that the first router away from you has a record of your MAC and the MAC of any other device connected to it. It will never have the record of the MAC of something more than 1 hop away from it.
So, router 0, your router, has the MAC of your network device. Router 1, your ISPs router, has the MAC of your router or your network device, if you've spoofed it. Router 2, the next router in the chain to your destination, has the MAC of Router 1, not the MAC of your router or your network device.
This is how things really work.
In the future, when IPv6 is out, your MAC address makes up part of your IPv6 address. There are privacy concerns with this, so IPv6 allows temporary addresses that don't compromise user security / privacy.
That said though, IPv6 has single-digit percentages of global traffic right now. The rest is still going through IPv4, which is the whole Layer 2 thing I described above.
I will caveat all that with a statement that I do know of two other ways to actually make the MAC go across IPv4, but I'm withholding that for now, because I think it would be distracting, as I doubt that either method is actually in use.
So, the actual most likely (99%+) bottom line is you have a different IP address now, and that address allows you to reach the game server.
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