I tired a bunch of "gaming" vpn trials to see if they would make a difference. Should you as well?

VPN
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First of all, a disclaimer. I’m not affiliated with anyone of these services in anyway and do not stand to profit it in any way from their use either. I was just curious if I could improve my ping so I tried a few vpn trials.

So VERY important note, how effective these vpns are will depend where you live, and on the ISP you’re using. There’s no magic involved, a good vpn will only improve your ping if you live far and/or have a shitty routing to the game server because of your ISP. I have Rogers, the 500u ignite plan, which while great for downloading large files and streaming 4k, is shitty at routing to EVERYWHERE, I seriously hate this ISP. If you have a good ISP routing packets using good routes, a gaming VPN will make your connection/latency WORSE, so please keep that in mind when considering a gaming vpn.

The data below will be most relevant to the following people (in order of relevance):

  • People who live in relatively close proximity of my location (near Toronto, ON, Canada).
  • People who on the same ISP (Rogers) or third party providers on the same network, like teksavvy, etc.
  • People playing on the same server I used for testing (NA)
  • People with shitty ISP routing, like Rogers

I tested the following in an NA custom game against bots, on a wired ethernet connection (Arris XB6 DOCSIS Modem), using a recent high-end almost new gaming computer that barely has anything installed:

  • No VPN: ~61ms
  • Mudfish: ~49ms
  • Haste Pro: ~49ms
  • Exitlag: ~34ms

So first of all, I want to reiterate my point about gaming vpns being useless for people who already have an ISP routing packets in good paths. See how I have 61ms on rogers? In my old house, I had 39-50ms on rogers, but I switched to bell fiber and got 14-19ms!!! Using gaming vpns made it worse, no matter what gaming vpn I tried, the best I could get was 24ms on bell. Seriously, rogers is ass, I would take bell fiber with a lower download speed plan over rogers any day, but sadly my new house isnt serviced by bell so im stuck with rogers.

Okay, with that out of the way lets discuss my experience using the listed vpns above. I didn’t bother with WTFast because it was sooo much more expensive than the rest, but if money isnt the issue I highly suggest trying ALL your available options with their free trials to see what works best for you, because what works for me may not work for you unless you live in the same area as me on the same isp.

Mudfish

Let’s start with Mudfish, my favorite of these options. Why mudfish? It’s dirt cheap, and it works. I paid for mudfish back in 2016, ONLY paid 5 dollars, and I STILL have 2.32 USD left in bandwidth credit. Ive used this vpn a LOT, this is my most used one, and I use it almost all the time for all my games, mmos, shooters, league, etc. The creator of mudfish is someone who made it as a hobby for fun! He spends no money on advertising, and has been super helpful whenever I had any questions. Surprisingly, it worked just as good as haste pro. Configuration is a little more involved than the other competitors, which will be a con for those who are a little less tech inclined, but you do get a lot more control and customization that the other choices. Mudfish can even be used like a regular vpn, and probably has a lot more other functions that I dont know of. The client interface is just a local web page that opens up in your browser from http://127.0.0.1:8282/ (at least in my case). This may be a con for some, a pro for others, personally I’m indifferent.

Haste Pro

Next on the list, Haste Pro. Not much to say here. It automagically sets up the connection for you, and it did an okay job reducing latency for me. Not worth the cost in my opinion. Client is a little annoying since its starts with windows by default but you can probably turn that up. It is on the other hand very easy to use, probably the easiest and quickest to set up and going out of all the ones I tested.

Exitlag

Exitlag, I wanted to hate and dislike this one. I really did. I see it advertised in almost every damn youtube video. I think they must have sponsored at least half the mmo content on youtube by now. Setup had me restart my pc, which I didnt have to for haste, and after I did all that, I couldnt log in, it was stuck on connecting. Client wouldnt close normally either, so I had to kill the task with taskmanager. Second attempt worked without a hitch, I set it up, tested it in league and my ping… didnt change at all. I turned it off and on, then after a short lag spike my ping dropped allll the way down to a consistent 33-36ms ping. So turns out this is the most effective choice for me if I dont mind the premium cost over mudfish. This is still the most expensive option here tested, but still cheaper than wtfast. I even found a random 20% off promo code by googling exitlag coupon, there are a bunch of these, use any. The client here is the best of the ones listed here I think, its the nicest looking, easy to use, lots of useful options, etc.

Conclusion and Closing Thoughts

What worked best for me, may not work best for you because how effective a gaming VPN will depend on your ISP and your location. If there’s anything to take away from this post that might help you, its to TRY whatever you can afford with trials and see what works best for you. If you just want something cheap, try mudfish, if you’re lucky this will at least reduce your ping by a bit, and you can probably use for YEARS on just a few dollars. If money isnt the concern, try everything, and use what works best for you!

Good luck finding what works best for you, hopefully this helps some of you understand gaming vpns better and reduce your ping by a bit!

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99% of users in free nations don’t need VPNs, most are snake oil, especially those selling themselves as “lag reduction”. Unless they’ve built their own cable network (which none of them are) and are charging access to it like a toll road, their performance will be highly variable on your proximity to a data centre they have an entry node in and where their exit nodes are in relation to game server locations.

Anyone buying one for privacy reasons is probably being misinformed too. 99% of internet traffic is already encrypted and all you’re doing is changing who can read the rest, your ISP which is subject to your nations data laws or a VC funded startup that may not even have a physical office.

As for those that appear to work at “reducing lag”, round trip ping time is only 1 measure of a very complicated aspect of networking. Most aspects of packet routing are out of the hands of both your local ISP and the VPN provider too.

Having sold VPNs to a lot of people that don’t need or benefit them, some have realised you can sell anything to gamers if you tell them it will make them play better.

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How does that work then ? Surely adding a VPN will just add latency

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I tried out some gaming specific VPN few years ago that helped with routing and cut my ping to two games from 50ms to 30ms but i didn’t feel like it was worth the money for just two games that i didn’t even play that much monthly.

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One issue I’m having is that your not posting your pre VPN pings. How will we know the difference.

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100% this, VPN actually adds overhead since you’re encrypting on both ends of the connection. The only time you would get an increase in latency is if you’re using it to avoid a path issue from your home to say World of Warcraft server. Otherwise you don’t use a VPN for better performance, you’re using it for privacy or obfuscation.

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Theres only a few groups of people that actually benefit from a VPN.

  • People in oppressive countries that filter the internet trying to access the wider net.
  • People trying to circumvent region locking on streaming services.
  • People who often do sensitive work on public wifi for some reason (coffee shops or w/e).

Pretty much anyone trying to sell you a VPN claiming it’s useful for anything else is lying to you.

Also, pretty much every VPN provider you’ve ever heard of (via commercials) is a honeypot run by the feds. The actual legit VPN providers don’t have enough money to sponsor tens of thousands of youtube videos or podcasts.

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Label anything a “gaming” version and mark it up 10x people will buy it. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to leave reddit for a bit and sit here in my 500$ gaming chair (my fourth such chair in under 6 months from Wayfair (don’t worry only bought one the other three broke almost immediately out of box and Wayfair replaced them)) and wonder why I didn’t do what I did last time and buy the 30$ chair from Walmart.

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Weird,because it sure helped me a lot playing Blade and Soul back in the day from New Zealand. Reduced my ping and spikes which let me animation cancel a lot better. Playing a class which relied on it was next to impossible without it since you would get times where you can sorta pull it off or not at all, but with mudfish on I was able to reliable pull it off every time better than I could before

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Default routing is the cheapest route while a gaming VPN can theoretically use the fastest route, even if it isn’t the cheapest.

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Roger just has shit peering apparently

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I literally did. It was the first one.

One issue I’m having is that your not posting your pre VPN pings. How will we know the difference.

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Probably not good for gaming. Seems more focused on providing cheap privacy. Try the trial and see what kind of latency you get. Every vpn will work different from everyone just cause of how routing works, VPN node locations, your location, etc.so no matter what the best way to see what VPN is good for you is to try their trials.

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This is not entirely true. Gaming VPN solutions can sometimes address chronic routing problems which massively inflate ping in some circumstances.

For example, during most of 2020 a good portion of Australia had ping almost 100% higher than normal to certain common Asian datacenters (Sydney->Tokyo went from 105ms~ to 230ms+ for example) and using something like Exitlag would return this to ‘normal’ values by virtue of routing around whatever was causing the increased trip times.

So in some circumstances, a VPN can provide some benefit for ping-sensitive multiplayer games. Knowing whether you’ll benefit from one without some technical know-how before hand is difficult though.

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Ah then I misunderstood, where are your post VPN pings then? I’m only seeing one set of pings so I was assuming it was the post ones.