Sometimes people coordinate their logins OOC. One guy (sometimes a "power house") will login and then all his buddies from IRC, AIM, etc., may follow suite because the original guy said "Yo, I'm on CF now.". This is shady, but it's really hard to prove and it probably happens less than you think.

I've heard people say things like "Well gee, those 2-3 guys always login at the same time!!" or "When X logs in, Y logs in within a half hour!!". Consider for a moment a situation like this: I get off work at 5pm (like a lot of people). I go home, get settled, eat some food, and maybe MUD a little (like a lot of people). I, A) can't help it and, B) don't want to hear shit about the fact that my logins seem correlated to the logins of other people who happen to me in my timezone. Obviously it's hard to tell when it's innocent vs. not, but I think a lot of people are way too quick to throw a fuss when it comes to, for example, a certain cabal having an "upswing" of logins/power for a few hours every night or what have you.

You also have people to piggy-back on that kind of thing. Someone might say, "Hey, Empire is buff as fuck every night, and that's when I play! Bandwagon, here I come!!!". Then you've got someone else who may or may not be part of some OOC-cheat-ring that may or may not exist, but he's one more guy to bitch about always logging in his Imperial when it knows (innocently) that Imperials are either already on in mass, or will be soon.

And of course there is the (very small) minority of people who do actually roll Xyz cabal with their friends all together, rank up, and play in a coordinated way. It may be super obvious or less so, if they're trying to hide it. Pretending it never happens is silly, but it's probably one of the things that people cry wolf over way too often.

Lastly, if the IMMs punished everyone for breaking the "letter of the law" when it comes to permas, OOC stuff, etc., CF wouldn't have a lot of players. Even the blatant stuff tends to go unpunished until somebody makes a stink about it (semi-recent Hell trips, for example, where the people involved didn't get denied until a couple players made a huge, public fuss, despite the fact that the IMMs had noticed earlier). I think a lot of the time, the IMMs are content to let it slide as long as nobody is making waves for the sake of not making bigger waves.