I recently upgraded my computer to a ryzen 1700x and 16gb 3600mhz memory and an asus rog crosshair hero vi board(From an 8350)
My pc ran soo smooth, games even more so
The games ran great, but my personal performance went down.
I didn't understand why. Im probably just losing my edge.
I trained and tried. But still, it felt off.

Today I realized that with my new motherboard, I got a new mac address. And my friend is a bit of a neat freak with that stuff. He has a whole system for ip addresses.

So i told him, I wont have the correct ip address. Then he started laughing and asked my to browse to a certain site www.privateinternetaccess.com
There at the top it said: "you are protected by pia"

Devices without an ip address bound to their mac address, will automatically use the vpn according to his rules.

My ping improved by 10-15ms upon getting my normal ip address back and my game performance is back.

Interesting but what's the point of automatically sending traffic over VPN whenever a "guest" with an unknown MAC address appears in the network?
Could he fear the consequences if a guest does something illegal like filesharing over his network?
I think an unknown device shouldn't have any internet connectivity until it's clear which role the new device has because some services may restrict, lock or even ban accounts if they detect an IP coming from a commonly known service which also advertises itself as an anonymization service.

@lunatica its so guests can browse whatever they like without concern for their privacy

@zombie01 I think it's important to distinguish between privacy and anonymity. Privacy is when you hide *what* you're exactly doing (comparable with locking the water closets door from inside in buddy's home) and anonymity is when you hide *who* you are (walking with niqab in a foreign area).
As soon as the host sets up the VPN, the host only shifts the privacy concerns from the internet service provider to the VPN service but the privacy isn't guaranteed as the domestic network is still vulnerable to wiretapping by the host or other attackers from inside.
In the aspect of the anonymity: When unwitting using internet connectivity over an anonymous VPN service, the guest probably isn't prepared for an anonymous surfing session, which means he probably logs into his FaceBook oder something like email account which is associated with the real name, which nullifies the anonymization efforts. Because of cookies, browser fingerprints, an effecive anonymization involves a dedicated system.