@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:
VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.
Certainly there’s no reason to be suspicious about somebody who connects from several different IPs – it’s probably home, work, the library, the coffee-shop. I never looked at the geographical locations unless I was fact-checking a story. No reason to be suspicious of people using VPNs, either. I figure you’re streaming Anishinaabemowin-language television the way one does.
There’s not much reason to be suspicious about two people connecting from the same IP, they’re house-mates or they use the same library or whatever. I’d ask and make a note.
It’s a good thing to keep an eye on, not hard proof of anything. And should be tempered with a good dose of “could I give a shit?” in a lot of cases – OMFG the horror if it turns out my suspicion is correct and Abelard and Bridget are really the same person and not neighbors. If they’re not making trouble, cheating hard, or squashing people’s fun, could I give a shit? Hell, odds are pretty good that Abelard just didn’t want to tell Camille that they really like her but sometimes don’t wanna chat and made the Bridget set of alts to avoid the conversation. I don’t even want to push an admission of this pretty-normal-but-embarassing situation.
We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.
I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.