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This comment on my recent rant on not needing to know your own IP address made me think about my own experiences in online gaming. True, it's a while ago - in the mid-nineties, when I was very keen on playing Bolo by Stuart Cheshire – one of the finest games around.
Even back then, I never needed to know my own IP address to play a game. Some tracker application would happily register that with some server. And that was in 1995 or so, you should've thought technology has evolved since. In fact, I think it has – but programmers became worse and even more lazy. Thus, users of their software may need to know their IP addresses. It remains silly, though.
In fact, Steffen's latest progress on the upcoming, network-enabled version of Ballerburg proves my point. All it takes is a programmer who doesn't want the user to need to know his IP address.