Why do people say VPNs arent good for gaming?

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1

I play CSGO so I need low ping on my games at all times. I looked into purchasing NordVPN and consulted the opinions of other gamers, to which they told me not to. They said it would actually increase my ping

Now, I have used a free VPN before, but I stopped using it after the servers were shutdown. I used it to connect to a server closer to my country, and it improved my ping on CSGO from 90 to 60 ms. I expect NordVPN to do the same, but why are people saying that all VPNs won’t work?

Thank you for any answers. They are greatly appreciated

2

A VPN could add a lot of latency. They always add latency btw, but it could be pretty extreme.

Edit: and highly variable latency, which might be the bigger issue.

3

VPNs are used for security, not speed. When you use one, you are just adding extra hops to your traffic.

4

unless your network routing is particularly bad, generally a vpn just adds more/further places your network requests have to go before they reach wherever they’re supposed to.

however, as you’ve seen, sometimes your network routing is particularly bad, and the change in routing from sending your network requests through a nearby vpn can occasionally result in better ping due to the route your network traffic takes being faster/having less places to go.

it’s a bit of a “it depends/your mileage may vary” kind of thing.

usually people don’t recommend vpns for gaming because the standard use case for vpns nowadays other than privacy concerns is connecting to some place far away to get around region locked content, and sending all your traffic through somewhere far away is absolutely going to increase your ping significantly to things closer to you, because it’ll have to go all the way there and back again.