Me and my friends play Unite in Portugal. However, one of them lives in Brazil but was spending the holidays here, and now that he’s back there, he wanted to keep 5-stacking with us. BUT, there’s the ping issue. Sometimes it’s really bad, sometimes barely noticeable. So he’s thinking of downloading a good VPN (ExpressVPN, NordVPN) to try to mitigate the problem, but then I thought of dropping this situation here to see if anyone has ever tried it before. Does it work? Which one is the better one? Does anyone know if it’s against the Code of Conduct? (We also don’t want to do anything illegal and get banned or something).
Note: I’ve found this in the Code of Conduct for Unite - “Unauthorized Technology, Cheating, or Modding - Attempting to bypass any restriction in the Service based upon age, geography, gameplay, or other restrictions imposed by us”
However, ping/latency/lag is not a restriction imposed by them. If he only uses it to play the game with friends in another continent, I don’t think that’s not being compliant with the rules. What do you think?
I don’t see how adding more network steps between client and server can possibly reduce latency. Data still needs to transmit to their location which is where the latency comes from.
Look, multiple factors dictate if a VPN will help or hinder your connection to a game and it all depends on what your ISP’s basic route is from your location to your destination.
What a VPN does (a good one anyway) for gaming is that it’ll take you via the most direct route to the country of choice regardless of your ISP’s basic routing preferences, however you won’t get much of an effect if your routing is efficient, do keep this in mind.
I used to use a VPN to connect to the FF14 servers on the ARR relaunch in 2013/2014 from Australia and the ff14 servers then were in Canada and my ISP’s routing to there was shocking, so it dropped my latency from 350ms to 250ms and a much more stable connection too.
That’s what I always thought too, however, I’m looking it up and found that people do use VPNs to reduce latency. I don’t know how it works, though, cuz it doesn’t seem logic.
Thanks! I’ll definitely take this into account. One smart thing to do might be finding a good VPN that has a trial period, so he can try it out before reaching for his wallet.