Not gonna lie, this sounds like big fat ol' snake oil.
As in it sounds cool on paper, but in reality it's useless.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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It's useful in narrow circumstances, if your not fighting 200+ms latency its probably not relevant.
They’re literally junk, that’s there to collect your data, while also sometimes charging you for the privilege. It’s snake oil. VPNs CAN help play geo-restricted games/content, and hide your IP from malicious gamers (eg: Dead by Daylight is known to leak your IP, to those you’re playing with), but beyond that… yeah, no. Any benefits you’re getting is placebo. If anything it’ll be worse, due to the added latency of hitting the VPN server, then going to the games server.
If you must use one, at least look at a VPN that’s privacy respecting. Something like ProtonVPN, Mullvad, Windscribe, or IVPN.
They can be a benefit if you could benefit from multi-hop re-routing.
i.e. your playing in PI and you have a non-congested connection to hong kong, and from there you connect to LA, to make sure you use the efficient links without congestion.
If your playing with <150ms RTT to servers, then game networks wont help.
Sometimes comcast has bad routes and forcing a destination to go via a different route can be beneficial.
It doesn’t really work like that.
My experience is they're pretty pointless. Speedify advertised itself as something that increases your latency but all of these products are pretty much just a regular VPN. My latency increases every time I tried them. I'm not sure how having to bounce your connection from another server is supposed to increase latency, but maybe I'm missing something.
Sometimes routing can be weird, and a VPN can change that. I’m not sure how they’re ever supposed to do it consistently though. I use express, and have in very rare occasions seen reduced latency while connected vs. not. I’ve never managed to make it happen on purpose, though.
Edit: I also live within spitting distance of one of the largest server hosting locations in the world, so that may factor into my experience somehow.
The only use-case I van provide I'd at some point FFXIV was being routed to a bad tower or something which caused constant dc's / horrible lag and using a vpn to change the area / towers I would route to totally removed that issue.
It has since fixed itself and the vpn did help, but I don't think its a magical fix for bad internet
I use speedify, its great, but only at Multipath bonding. Take a bunch of crappy ISP links and put them together to get a solid single connection. So if your Rural with starlink, DSL, and cellular - you can bond all 3 links, send your game traffic across all 3, and any packet loss will be almost un-noticable.
It wont decrease your latency, but it can improve reliability. I highly recommend speedify if you have multiple flaky internets available.
Not sure about those game VPN, but VPN in general might be useful if you have a super shitty ISP like mine. I played war thunder a while ago and would often got assigned to a server with over 90% packet loss, which make the game completely unplayable. Turned on the VPN (Mullvad) and the packet loss issue disappear.