Its very simple, people know what they do online and on their computer and if you are doing things you want to hide you need to hide it. Personally I have many reasons but when people where discussing downloading illigally its just a no brainer for me personally that if you do that a VPN has proven to be a good investment to people in the past.

But like I mentioned before some really cool benefits right here:

You can set your region using VPN getting cheaper offers online for CD-Keys (PC/STEAM). 
You can more easely set up games with friends by selecting a VPN in their country
You can unlocked content that is blocked in your country
You can download and share content more safely

and yes also if You want to protect your online data from government surveillance, ISPs, hackers, snoops, and spies.

I am not trying to sell people on VPN but I have always apriciated the service myself and I was wondering who else thinks so. Obviously if you are an average joe and just play games and don't use the computer much, it might not be worth it for everyone

All the things you said are either completely illegal or in a dark grey legal area. Your first paragraph alone sounds like an advertisement on how to do crime. But the most ergregious one is in bold. Because that is a lie told by VPN providers to make money. They're really the only ones profiting from this business. And of course you, when you do your crimes.

I'm not saying that everyone who uses TOR or VPNs is a criminal, even though you just admitted that to the world, all I'm saying is it's absolutely worthless for non criminal activities.

Malicious people will not go after your IP. They couldn't care less about that. Your information you spread on the internet is not stored in your IP. It's stored on web servers you have no control over. It's stored in your browser, your email address, your smartphone. Masking your IP is just a feeble attempt at most and a useless one at worst.

Another interesting tidbit is that you are making yourself a lot more vulnerable to attackers by using VPN. Because in VPN hosts thousands of connections are bundled together, making it a juicy target for government agencies, corporations and hackers.

Being a single individual on the internet is the most protection you can get and all that you need.

All the things you said are either completely illegal or in a dark grey legal area. Your first paragraph alone sounds like an advertisement on how to do crime. But the most ergregious one is in bold. Because that is a lie told by VPN providers to make money. They're really the only ones profiting from this business. And of course you, when you do your crimes.

I'm not saying that everyone who uses TOR or VPNs is a criminal, even though you just admitted that to the world, all I'm saying is it's absolutely worthless for non criminal activities.

Malicious people will not go after your IP. They couldn't care less about that. Your information you spread on the internet is not stored in your IP. It's stored on web servers you have no control over. It's stored in your browser, your email address, your smartphone. Masking your IP is just a feeble attempt at most and a useless one at worst.

Another interesting tidbit is that you are making yourself a lot more vulnerable to attackers by using VPN. Because in VPN hosts thousands of connections are bundled together, making it a juicy target for government agencies, corporations and hackers.

Being a single individual on the internet is the most protection you can get and all that you need.

I fully agree with you. Yet also isn't the time of static user ips long gone? My isp regularly assigns a new ip address. I wouldn't even know what ip address to give out for someone to connect to. Ipconfig gives me 5 different ipv6 addresses, local ipv6 address, local ipv4 address. The modem has 2 different WAN IP addresses on a 7 day lease. Plus they have their own firewalls and even notified me once I had some malware causing suspicious internet access. Turned out to be some nasty worm on my old xp laptop. VPN would not have helped with that.

When I just got internet at home through isdn 20 years ago you still needed your own firewall. Always on internet was brand new, which attracted plenty wannabe hackers that regularly tried connecting to random people with port snoopers lacking anything better to do on a fledgling internet. You could see them logged on the firewall trying different ports. That wild west version of the internet has long since been tamed.

Using a vpn to play multiplayer games, doesn't that add extra lag? My work vpn had a 120ms to 150ms ping time from Europe to Canada. I couldn't imagine playing a game over that!

FYI: I have been using ExpressVPN since 2010 and I use it because of the work I do on my computer mostly but I also use it to purchase products from different regions because they are cheaper that way and I use it to access other countries their digital stores and so forth.

Its also been very usefull to connect with friends from the US in certain games and get around limitations, all around its been usefull and yes obviously when you pirate series and other stuff its essential and I would personally never advice anyone to use a free one either, so good point by you.

But when you use a VPN either you have a bad provider which doesn't value your security *aka not paid scam* or you have a good one and if people want to know what you are doing they need to really really want to know to do the effort thus making most activities very safe and secure by having a good paid VPN provider.

All the things you said are either completely illegal or in a dark grey legal area. Your first paragraph alone sounds like an advertisement on how to do crime. But the most ergregious one is in bold. Because that is a lie told by VPN providers to make money. They're really the only ones profiting from this business. And of course you, when you do your crimes.