faefrost said:
And you have just described the one single, and exceedingly rare situation where using some manner of VPN might change or improve a users performance in a game or reduce lag. And it is nothing predictable. It is just in that particular case the VPN in question happens to shift the routing to bypass the bad router. This is entirely by accident, not design. it may just as easily dump you onto a bad route.
FF14 has what, probably at least half a million subscribers? With a good chunk of that being NA players. The lag problems is hardly "exceedingly rare", considering SE had to make specific mechanic changes to try to alleviate its effect in the game. I know people who actually use VPN services regularly because they are unable to be effective in raids otherwise. And accident? Please, you may want to give us a bit more credit than that, people know where the bad routes are, or are you trying to say that we're all idiots who doesn't know how to use basic networking tools?
But at the end of teh day it truly has no real net benefit to most and an overall detriment to the vast majority as it adds more overhead in processing and encryption to no actual benefit. It's classic "magic network code to make games run super fast", and it always is and always will be pure and utter bullshit. There may be some anecdotal evidence that some users do better. But it is simply a crapshoot caused by shifting where the user seems to be sitting with regard to the desired server. The people running this service do not have any actual control over routing on the internet backbones. They cannot selectively find the best paths because they are simply another host on the web. They count on there being enough stupid people with no idea of how things worth willing to buy into the service and pimp it out via word of mouth. it's Homeopathic Networking at its worst.
VPN service is a tool, a tool designed with a specific purpose that may or may not be useful to you depending on what your issue may be. Lambasting it as "utter bullshit" because it's not useful at all times makes you just as bad as those who try to say it works all the time. An emergency carjack is really only useful during roadside emergency where you need to lift the car up a bit, it's certainly not very useful anywhere outside that scenario, but I doubt you'll find many people who'd think that an emergency jack "has no real net benefit to most" just because it's not something you'd ever use normally - hell, now that I think about it, I've used VPN services more times in the last year than I've used an emergency jack in the last twenty.
But since you obviously know better, why don't you tell all those FF14 players who can't dodge ground AOEs w/o VPNs how to actually play the game without relying on "homeopathic networking"?
