I play a fighting game called Brawlhalla competitively – with a fighting game, having low latency is crucial. I live in Europe and I’m looking to reduce my ping to North America. I know some players use a VPN like TorGuard to reduce their ping. Any recommendations on which VPN to use for this situation? Will it actually help? Is there an easy guide on how to set it up, since i’m not very tech savvy. Thanks for you time!
A VPN more often than not will actually add latency as your traffic has to pipe out to the VPN and then to its destination.
The RTT across the undersea cabling US<>FR in the Atlantic is something like 80-85ms point to point. This is a figure largely dictated by physics, so you cannot achieve better than that. If you’re playing something like Bulgaria to California then forget about it.
The only way you’re going to decrease your latency is to physically move closer to the server. Adding a VPN will do nothing to decrease latency.
I don’t see how using a VPN would ever decrease your latency.
First, your signal needs to go from your computer and ISP to the VPN provider, and then to the end destination. That will take some time. Then the VPN needs to figure out where your signal is headed, which adds a few milliseconds, and the signal needs to head to the destination.
All you’re doing is adding a step (or several) and probably losing 10-50ms over just connecting directly.
Have you tried Battleping?
it depends on how poorly your traffic is being routed. if you are already under 16 hops to the game host, then a vpn will not help as it’s the distance that is causing the latency. a vpn might reduce the number of hops to get beyond a poorly routed country, but it can’t reduce the actual distance your data’s electrons must travel around the world. if you are suffering from poor routing, you should document it and notify your isp - most accumulate such complaints and eventually work to remedy it.
VPNs /can/ offer better connectivity/latency because of having access to better peered networks, but you’re still going to be going over the trans atlantic cable, so you’re mostly out of luck here.
Check with the guys at KillPing. They seem to be a good option to work around with this.
A VPN can’t reduce the speed of light, which is basically what latency/ping is.
The only way this might work is if your ISP is doing some kind of traffic shaping.
While that makes total sense, there are circumstances where you can achieve better latency and stability by using a vpn. I live in the Middle East and I always play on EU servers without a vpn, but on some games like Overwatch I can barely get a steady ping if I don’t use a vpn, when I use a vpn server based in the Netherlands I could play just fine and my ping is lower and more stable.
It’s largely variable but depends on the route the VPN server has to the destination as well.
If you have a super crappy route to a destination and the aggregate route between you->VPN->endpoint is actually better due to a better route from within the data center then you could potentially see gains, but a lot of planning and analytics would have to go into mapping this out. Also, routes over the Internet change fairly often so one day you might see the behavior be completely different.
On the surface that might appear logical, it’s not actually always the case in the real world.
- Some ISPs prioritise VPn traffic.
- ISP use Least Cost Routing. which is just like flying domestically in the US, where the most direct route can cost the most, so they send you via several regional hubs because it’s cheaper.
So using a VPN can (but not always) be quicker & more direct.
Op:: the only real way to achieve this is either get lucky & find someone who is on your local ISP & used the same game server & has found VPN which works better. Or sign up for various VPN trials/month and see how you go.
Yes. In rare occasions you’ll have a marginal (at best) decrease in latency depending on how close you are to your entry point and if the VPN takes fewer hops to connect than if you were just going straight through you’re isp. Those situations are pretty circumstantial and probably not worth even forking the money for the VPN IMO.
Yes, I see what you’re saying. I can imagine there could potentially be some gains from a better route from the VPN provider to the endpoint. But, I also think it is quite possible the gain is offset by the extra routing steps, and for most people, I doubt they’ll notice an improvement.
I see what you’re saying. I just doubt that a user in the real world would consistently have significant gains, but could more than likely have some delays over just connecting directly.
I would also say that OP could try several different VPN providers and see, but for my money and time I wouldn’t bother. 