And if you're a n00b as I am they will be too busy laughing at your performance to care about your IP. ;)

Ugh. Here we go again.

You're worried about nothing. Any fool you connect to can get your IP whether it's splashed accross the screen or not. IP addresses are not some kind of super secret hackers trick. Anytime you connect to another gamers computer your IP addresses are visible to one another.

Just FYI, your IP isn't a font of personal information. For the VAST majority of noobs like yourself all the IP address is telling anyone is who your ISP is and what general area you're in.

Depending on how your PC connects through your gateway, you may have good reason to worry that an amateur server is exposing your IP.

Anybody who has your gateway's IP address can attempt to make connections to services on your PC. Your protection from these attackers depends on how well your gateway prevents those connections. There are three common ways that MMO's that must traverse gateways are set up; from most to least secure, they are:

* Port forwarding. Only those ports that the MMO requires are set up to be passed by your gateway. So long as only trustworthy applications listen on these ports, you're fine. But the idea that an MMO supported by an amateur server is trustworthy is probably a mistake.

* UPnP. Only the ports used by UPnP are set up to be passed. Windows advertises the services that others can use UPnP to connect to. Again, so long as all of those are trustworthy, you are in no danger, but the belief that all of them are trustworthy is naive.

* DMZ. Everything that the gateway doesn't forward to anything else, it forwards to your PC. Treat your PC as sacrificial, because it will be compromised in a short period of time.

I would demand that the server operator cease revealing IP addresses for any purpose other than operation of the server itself, and refrain from using that server until the operator has complied.

For the record most game servers use port forwarding.

Dirty server admins are always a risk. They have your IP simply by virtue that you connected to them, but they don't need it. You're always vulnerable when you connect to an outside server. Dirty server admins have a lot of easy ways to compromise your rig without going to the trouble of tracking you down with your IP.

Other players with just your IP pose very little threat, and If a hacker with the kinds of resources to find you targets you he's going to get you whether your IP appears on a game server or not.