If you did a search on the Battlefields for the word 'hunch'* you'd probably find a ton of posts by various players (imm and non) who would say "I had a hunch this was you."

Speculation like this in a playerbase community as small as ours is human nature. No, I don't imagine people see some guy on WoW and say "I bet that's joebob899 on the WoW boards."

But that's different than how we are here, and you're not going to see it change I'm afraid. The speculation (or knowing) isn't really the issue, it is making sure that despite speculating (or knowing) who is playing what that everyone is treated according to the character's actions, not those of the player behind the character.

One random imm (who doesn't have the ability to check IPs) commented recently that she can pick out a certain player's chars the moment she hears them speak after a death.

That's not on us, as an Immstaff, to pretend that we can't see that pattern. That's on the player to not be so blatantly obvious (if they don't want staff picking them out). I include myself on this list. Iunna told me about one of my "tells" a long time ago - I had a bad habit of not always capitalizing the first word on a cb. So I'd be like:
cb lich on eastern.
I made a conscious effort to correct this.
Also do you have any idea how many innuendoes I had to let pass when playing Tavlin? Ones that Dupmasione or Woldrun would totally have made a crack about? Tavlin's mind simply wasn't dirty like that, even if mine was.


*I could be totally wrong on this, I didn't try a search on the word hunch prior to posting.