Thoughts on using a VPN for ping reduction?

Fawn4287 · June 2020

I play from Australia and the connection although much better at the start of the patch will eventually decline as the patch goes, cyrodil gameplay and connection is already incredibly frustrating for many so you can imagine if you were doing it with what at times feels like 500+ ms of lag. Ive heard of gaming VPNs and wanted to ask if anyones tried using one, which they used, what they cost and if the improvement was worth it. What sort of ping were you were getting prior and post use of the VPN?

yRaven · June 2020

I'm Brazilian and there's one here pretty popular here called ExitLag, in the beginning i didn't need to use that as my ping was 180 without much variation.

Everything changed after Greymoor Launched and my Internet provider decided to change routes, so my ping become unstable as hell, coming from nice 180 to 500+ and 999+.

I end up using this ExitLag and my ping go back to solid 180 without variation. My opinion? It don't reduce ping but stabilizes it, so basically it works, but you're monthly paying to play a game that technically don't need that, so not worth it.

PS: It's 15 BRL a month, not that expensive, but paying that to play only one game? I could pay some Amazon Prime with it.

TineaCruris · June 2020

Lag issues this game are 100% server side nearly 100% of the time.

maddiniiLuna · June 2020

First of all: In Cyrodiil zone chat i have been told you can get banned, for saying the names of vpn services as it's advertisement. I don't know if it's true or not, i still have my doubts but i won't do it since then.

Second the VPN i was using has similar effects to what yRaven shared. It seemed to stabilize my ping. However i noticed, that it was more or less a false impression. The real problem comes from the game and so i noticed lagg spikes, even when my ping was stable. Without the VPN i still had the same issues, except for now i could see the actual numbers. Since it didn't make a difference i just turned it off and left it off.

Lysette · June 2020

With OZ it basically depends how you get routed to the US - guess you play on PC NA - if you are routed via asia this is much worse than via auckland-hawaii sea cable - I heard from someone he gets 240ms via auckland from the east coast of straya.

Fawn4287 · June 2020

Lysette wrote: »

With OZ it basically depends how you get routed to the US - guess you play on PC NA - if you are routed via asia this is much worse than via auckland-hawaii sea cable - I heard from someone he gets 240ms via auckland from the east coast of straya.

So picking a service provider with a better optimisation Routing path looks like my best bet?

Alwari · June 2020

I live in a rural area and use something called fixed wireless for my internet access. Basically I have an antennae on my house that is connected to a dedicated 4G LTE line (5G soon I hope). This works surprisingly well for use at home, we can watch 4k movies no problem and regular internet is at 50+ mbs download. But playing games was awful. The ping would be all over the place due to bufferbloat and rubber-banding. So just on our PCs for gaming I got NordVPN to see if it would help, and to my surprise it did. A lot. Before the VPN I would sometimes lag out and get kicked from the game 5 or 6 times in a row... it was unplayable. But now I can play all night just fine. So in our case I can say that yes, the VPN did make a HUGE difference.

code65536 · June 2020

The problem is that the NA server (though not the EU server, apparently) is protected by Akamai from DDoS. I.e., you traffic goes to an Akamai scrubbing center, which then passes it along to the actual server.

For example, I've seen a player in South America have their traffic get routed to an Akamai node in Europe before getting passed back across the Atlantic a second time to the US.

What a VPN does is fool Akamai into thinking that you're connecting from a different place, potentially avoiding stupid routing issues like what I just described above.

Lysette · June 2020

Fawn4287 wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

With OZ it basically depends how you get routed to the US - guess you play on PC NA - if you are routed via asia this is much worse than via auckland-hawaii sea cable - I heard from someone he gets 240ms via auckland from the east coast of straya.

So picking a service provider with a better optimisation Routing path looks like my best bet?

I guess so, players from NZ have a far better ping than OZ to PC NA due to the sea cable there. I play mostly on PC EU and haven't played for a while on the NA server, so I can't really tell what ping I would get.

Lysette · June 2020

Alwari wrote: »

I live in a rural area and use something called fixed wireless for my internet access. Basically I have an antennae on my house that is connected to a dedicated 4G LTE line (5G soon I hope). This works surprisingly well for use at home, we can watch 4k movies no problem and regular internet is at 50+ mbs download. But playing games was awful. The ping would be all over the place due to bufferbloat and rubber-banding. So just on our PCs for gaming I got NordVPN to see if it would help, and to my surprise it did. A lot. Before the VPN I would sometimes lag out and get kicked from the game 5 or 6 times in a row... it was unplayable. But now I can play all night just fine. So in our case I can say that yes, the VPN did make a HUGE difference.

NordVPN is what I am using sometimes as well - not yet tried with gaming though.