[dtech]

> And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target. Keep in mind that the target might be geo distributed.

Like driving, going over 2 highways might be fasted than going over a direct dirt road, or a longer road might be faster because the direct road is congested.

[Shared404]

One case where I saw this was a friend who for some reason was being routed to game servers around the world when trying to connect to an Overwatch game, and a much closer server with the VPN.

Was this a bug in Overwatch? Almost certainly, but the VPN was an effective workaround.

[samhw]

> Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target

Is that surprising? I think that's what you would expect, and it's what the above commenter is suggesting (quite reasonably IMO) is very unlikely.

I think the issue is that you're implying the road to the target is a dirt road, but the road to the VPN is a highway, which seems a bit questionable.

[dtech]

I've seen it happen. Blizzard is quite notorious for having some weird network links, where a VPN is known to be a workaround. Example [1], and I've heard the same from WoW players.

[1] https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/lower-ping-whe...

[marderfarker2]

Most of the time the end user equipment is the bottleneck rather than the internet backbone