Been trying out Exit Lag as they have a decent server selection and know generally game server locations and IP’s, but as of late they seem to give any care, as their application has many bugs, connection times out leading to competitive bans and sometimes randomly throws you from Europe to USA.
I live in South Africa and a good VPN can take your connection down from 240ms to Europe to 175 which is playable in a ton of online games.
Are there any go-to VPN’s that are decent for gaming?
I will prefer to use PIA VPN because it will be very helpful to reduce ping and lagging during gaming. It may useful to improve the gaming experience.
As somebody who owns a gaming VPN company, let me give you my thoughts.
Firstly, a VPN is something good to use regardless of gaming. Nearly all ISPs monetize your traffic by selling your data patterns, your website visits, and most scary, your overall data profile to 3rd party brokers who use this information to determine many things you wouldn’t like them do (example: Determine your political leanings, produce reports for governments).
Now with that said, all VPNs are not created equal. Absolutely not. For gaming, having a VPN provider that is not overselling their service is absolutely key. You don’t want somebody downloading all those linux .ISOs to suddenly turn your ping to Overwatch into a jitter-fest.
You also want a VPN software + provider that is lightweight. Nearly every VPN on this planet use OpenVPN, an extremely old and bloated codebase that adds a significant amount of latency and CPU overhead. Find a provider that is Wireguard based.
Lastly, understand that a VPN doesn’t magically reduce your ping. Instead what it does is provide an alternate route to a game server. Sometimes this can improve your latency/reduce jitter, sometimes this can make it worse.
TLDR: Get a VPN subscription from a provider that is FAST/not oversold (basically none of the big ones). Understand that VPNs provide alternative routes which can sometimes be a great thing, sometimes bad, depends on the game/servers/time of day. Also always use a VPN.