For those of you who use VPNs, do you keep it on while you play games or do you turn it off? I for some reason can’t find much about this topic, you’d think privacy minded individuals and people who play video games on PC would have overlap; especially considering how easy it is for someone to find your IP address while playing games (admittedly I’m unsure of how easy it is to find someone’s IP in modern titles).
I understand that VPNs tend to increase latency, so they wouldn’t be great to use in competitive PvP games where ping is king. Which is unfortunate since competitive PvP games are the games in which you’d need to hide your IP the most lol.
I also understand that some games disallow VPNs, to what extent I am not sure; I’ve only started using a VPN recently.
If anyone could give any insight it’d be appreciated.
Off as it adds latency.
Most modern popular titles run on dedicated servers so no one can get your IP, but there are games that are p2p and with those people could get your IP.
if they have dedicated servers your IP wont be exposed. and on some p2p they can obfuscate IPs so theyre safe to play without vpn as well.
and then there’s gta online…
Most competitive gamers (or gamers that play any games that depend on reaction time/latency to another player/server) will turn off their VPN when playing a game.Loads of games say VPN’s are banned for several reasons, but i’ve personally never heard of anyone getting banned or punished for having a vpn. HOWEVER a risk you take when using a vpn is that a malicious player using illicit tools is using the same vpn/IP as you, or might do so in the future and then your account might get punished by association to that person. it can also make it more difficult or sometimes impossible to recover a stolen or banned account if your IP has changed alot or overlaps with other players known IPs, which again is hugely more likely to happen if you are using a vpn. i feel like alot of companies simply disallow vpn’s for mostly that reason and to cover their own ass if something happens due to your use of a vpn so it can’t be used as an excuse by people who do act maliciously.
As for security, that kindof depends person to person. for me I use a VPN for privacy and access (for instance to region locked content) alot more then for security.your mileage may vary ofcourse and it is a personal decision. but for me it means i’m not too worried about how safe I am from threats on the internet on my pc. that is a calculated risk for me and just a pro’s vs cons thing.
Getting someone’s IP in modern titles depends alot on the game. if you are playing on a large multiplayer server hosted by a company then it is more likely that only the company can see your IP directly or easily. are you playing on a game that lets people host their own servers or where you are directly connected to other players in a “lobby” (Such as COD or GTA online to name 2 that i know of but the list goes on for quite some time.) then its almost certain that any player connected to the same host or lobby could if they really wanted to get your IP rather easily.
At last though I would like to point out that an IP in most cases is dynamically assigned by your ISP and changes over time (usually whenever your modem is disconnected from the ISPs network for X amount of time) and then you are assigned a new IP from the pool of IPs owned by your ISP. its not something permanent that people can use to trace you eternally… there is still some risk, ofcourse that some malicious player could be so pety as to hack into your network and commit a malicious act but this is rare. very rare.
I always keep my VPN on when gaming. I used to play R6S and me dying was not a result of my VPN, just skill. If you are super competitive you might have a problem and need to make a decision
Thanks, though wouldn’t it seem tedious? Isn’t the point of a VPN to have it on at all times? What if you want to look something up or listen to music using a 3rd party application while playing with your VPN off?
Not really, unless you are using it to geo unlock things or are paranoid and want everything encrypted from your ISP. I try to avoid sketchy sites so I only use my VPN for torrenting and stuff that is geoblocked.
Good point, I don’t do anything sketchy nor do I care for geo unlocking things. I guess it’s just out of paranoia, as of recent I’ve been trying to be more private online in general. I have in the past had my IP pulled so maybe I just wanted more peace of mind while playing games.
Maybe I’ll stop using a VPN altogether if it really doesn’t do much.
I would just look up what games you play and the types of servers they use, if you aren’t sure then keep the VPN on.
Also if you use discord people will post ip grabber links so watch what you click.