@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.
But.
Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?
Probably because MUs don’t collect the browsing infomation you might want to keep private. They don’t collect your credit card number or your social insurance number or your medical records or data about your pr0n-viewing habits.
I have only encountered two reasons for a person to use a VPN to connect to a MU. 1: They have it on for other reasons. 2: They have an ‘illegal’ alt.
Certainly stalking on and across MUs is a thing. But unless it’s an unlikely situation where somebody like Faraday is stalking you, the only stalker a VPN is likely to protect you from is a wiz-level staffer, who probably only has that power on one game. Nobody else is seeing your IP info. “Don’t play MUs where the game-runners are stalking you,” is a pretty obvious rule for protecting yourself, and a VPN isn’t enough in that situation anyway.
Using VPNs to do the stalking, however, can be effective.
I had somebody make a dozen alts to attempt to play with somebody who didn’t want to play with them. This poor player was having a weekly experience of finding out that NewPC was, in fact, AnnoyingPlayer. PoorPlayer would then ask AnnoyingPlayer to leave them alone. Not complying with such a request was a bannable offence. AnnoyingPlayer would abandon NewPC and make a new alt, EvenNewerPC, and pounce on PoorPlayer.
I made registering alts mandatory, and regularly looked for matching IPs. People using VPNs would regularly forget to turn them on, so yeah, I could see that a PC was logged on from Davenport, Iowa, and then again from Anchorage, Alaska, less than two hours later, and knew that the set of alts associated with those two IPs were probably all the same person. So, I’d ask them to register their alts and they’d either do it, quit the game on their own, or get banned for being bad at lying to me. Easy-peasey.
I felt hesistant about this because of the idea that ‘alt privacy’ is and should be a thing, but it didn’t take me long to feel confident it was a good choice. SO much, so very much, fuckery simply disappeared when the players themselves could spot stalkery shit, and conflict-of-interest shit, and cheaty shit. The game was empowered to police itself. And it allowed players more freedom – I could allow people to have alts in potential-conflict-of-interest situations and trust that they wouldn’t cheat in that way. Because if they did, it’d be obvious to everyone.