Hey all, I live in New Zealand, which falls under Oceania for anyone who doesn’t know. I have heard people saying that a VPN can reducing game ping which sounds really good to me. I don’t mind paying if I have to but I just want one (If possible) to reduce my in game ping to make the game better to play.
Thanks in advance, Zach.
It depends how many hops does your connection go through from your home network to the game servers.
A VPN may or may not reduce those number of hops and it varies on numerous conditions.
If you’re getting 300ms ping a good VPN could knock it down to around 150-200 for some online games depending on various conditions.
You could try out VPN services are preferred in NZ or AUS and see if there’s any improvements or wait until other players try it out and report their findings.
Try Leatrix Latency Fix if you haven’t. http://www.leatrix.com/leatrix-latency-fix
Tunneling services definitely help in lowering ping.
Copy pasting a reply I made to someone asking about some tunneling services before.
Been using Pingzapper for years for WoW (back when it used to be named WoW Tunnels). It lowered my ping by about 25-35% and–it’s hard to gauge since dcing is random–but it certainly feels more stable.
Their customer service is excellent. It seems to be just one guy (?) answering, but he’s on it whether you post in their forums or send an email; response time within a day.
They’re also quite agreeable. One time I suddenly had some new projects (work) all being rushed and found I wouldn’t have time to play WoW for a couple months. At the time I still had 3 months remaining on my Pingzapper sub as I’d purchased by the 6 month package. On impulse, I wrote to them and said, “Could my remaining 3 months possibly be frozen since I won’t be logging in for a couple months?” Their CS wrote back to say, “I’m afraid we don’t have the tools for freezing the time ticking, but here’s what we’ll do. Write to us when you do get back and we’ll add your unused 3 months on again for free so you can use them.” And I did and they did.
Um, what else? On rare occasions, connections go wonky and I somehow can’t log in to WoW using Pingzapper (getting stuck at ‘connecting’), but can log in directly. And vice-versa–sometimes I’ve found I can’t log in to WoW directly but can with Pingzapper. So it helps having an alternative means of connecting.
Sorry, all my testimony is WoW-based since I’ve only been able to play WS on beta weekends and a bit this open beta. Been using Pingzapper for WS and getting about 250-270ms. Will report back on ping difference since I haven’t tried logging in to WS without Pingzapper yet.
I tested a couple out last week. This is from the perspective of someone in Malaysia, not NZ, so keep this in mind, but it should still give an idea of where to start.
As each service has multiple regions, and multiple servers in each region, I went with a mid-US server with each, unless they didn’t have one, in which case I went with the nearest server to me.
My base ping (not alt-f1 “ping”, but actual server-client latency, as viewed using the Latency Monitor addon) is 310-380+ms.
BattlePing: Best improvement. Brought my ping down to a flat 200. It would vary sometimes 5ms+/-.
PingZapper: Minor improvement. Brought me to mid-200’s. Usually fairly stable around 250ish.
Lowerping: No difference.
ReduceTheLag: Made it worse. Actually increased my ping by about 20ms.
As I mentioned, these are not from the perspective of a NZ resident. Give them all a try as YMMV.