I'm curious to know what the rest of the community think of the value of the VPN providers?

They claim your so much more secure, when technically unless you don't trust your ISP all that you are really doing is moving your egress point out to the VPN provider where your unencrypted traffic will again traverse the internet and could be eaves dropped on.

If your that concerned about your traffic then make sure all your applications and sites you use are encrypted else your living on false sense of security.

IMHO the only real use-case for a VPN is when traveling and using untrusted networks such as hotels, cafes etc etc and to access networks not exposed to the outside world such as corporate networks or home networks when traveling.

Shouldn't that be the lesser of two weevils?

I get kilometres per litre you insensitive clod.

We'll if you think about it, this wont be a good idea in the online (registered) hosted game servers. If you have bots there is a degree of predictability in their behavior, where as humans are a little more unstable :)

And now to the point, if you exploit a bot's weakness you will skew the online rating system, and it would be very easy for someone to pad their scores.
Conversely if the bots where too good, they would slaughter you and you would have a negative score, not nice :)