There may not ever have been a specific request, instruction, or even suggestion to log in at a certain time. It may simply be that they know that gives them an advantage, so they all tacitly agree to do so.
And even if there was some kind of explicit coordination outside the game to log on at certain times, there's nothing we can do about that. For one thing, we can't find out about it unless they talk about it in-game.
For another, they'd have to actually report it. And why would they? All that's happening is they're mutually agreeing to log on at a certain time, which gives all of them an advantage. Who's getting hurt by it? No one who matters, certainly.
Just the enemy.
And if we observe that this is, in fact, happening; that realms are displaying disproportionately high time-coordination, even aside from time zona considerations; if they are acting with coordination in excess of that which would seem to follow from the messages they send IG.... I'd call that evidence of OOG clanning. I do not believe OOG planning can be inclusive, personally. I just don't think it's possible. Moving OOG is costly: note how few players get on IRC. It creates a powerful clique that finds it worthwhile to pay that cost, and a less powerful group that is unable or doesn't find it worthwhile.
But that's just my perspective. I would say that we might not be able to perfectly prove it, but we don't need to perfectly prove it. We need to observe that they're messing up the game for players; not behaving as if they are playing with
and against friends. If a new noble couldn't plop down in their realm and gain access to things that can be reasonably expected for a competent nobles (army membership, oath, chance to hear about some realm politics/issues, opportunity to seek positions), looks like its exclusive to me. If the standard for competence is suspiciously high ("He won't make a good Marshal; he doesn't always make his moves less than 2 hours before the turn change"), again, I'd say that's enough to make a response.
I don't think this is really that hard to police. Between family histories, message volume, movement patterns, and gold transfers, I feel pretty convinced someone with database access (Tom) can identify a clan with an entirely adequate degree of precision, provided the time to sort the data is available.
