High ping in online games on a good connection: when a VPN helps and when it adds delay

The connection is fast, video plays smoothly, yet the game shows a ping of 200+ and a “network error” every few minutes. The first advice on forums is to turn on a VPN. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it makes things worse, and you can tell which case is yours in advance.

What ping in a game is made of

Ping is the time it takes a packet to reach the game server and come back. The megabits from a speed test have little to do with it: what matters to a game is not how much data fits into the link but how quickly and without loss each packet makes the trip. So “high ping on a good connection” is not a contradiction — it is the most ordinary picture.

Three things drive ping:

• Path length. Not the distance on a map, but how providers carry the packet. A server in Germany can end up “further away” than one in Finland if traffic takes a roundabout route — our test below shows exactly that.
• Queueing. While the link is busy with a download or video, the game’s packet waits in the shared queue. In one of our runs on a cellular network, ping was 76 ms at idle and 650–670 ms under load; more on that in our piece on speed tests.
• Loss. A lost packet never arrives. A little loss and the character stutters while ping jumps; a lot in a row and the server stops hearing the player and drops them on a timeout. That is what “Network error” and “ServerTimeout” look like.

One more caveat: the “ping” number in the corner of the game screen and the ping command do not measure the same thing. The command sends ICMP service packets, while most game servers talk UDP, and network equipment often treats the two differently — the Amazon GameLift Servers documentation, a cloud service for game servers, says so plainly. This is partly why in our app the ping under the button and the ping next to a country differ. For a game, trust the ping inside the game.

When a tunnel helps and when it adds delay

With a tunnel on, a packet does not go straight to the game: it goes to the exit server first and to the game from there. A path made of two legs is almost never shorter than the direct one. Hence two cases.

The direct path is healthy — the tunnel adds delay. If ping is steady without it and the connection holds, a tunnel improves nothing: a detour through the exit is added to the path. For a good route from Russia to servers in Germany and Finland we estimate that at 10–30 ms (the test is below). To time a tunnel adds milliseconds, and to volume about a tenth — how much data it uses we measured separately. It is most obvious when the game server is in Russia and the exit is abroad: the packet travels there and back. From a phone on a mobile network in Moscow on 28 July 2026, Yandex Internetometer, which measures to servers inside Russia, showed 20 ms without protection and 81 ms through the Netherlands.

The direct path loses packets or takes a roundabout route — the tunnel may help. A tunnel changes the road: packets travel to the exit and from the exit to the game along a different route. If they get lost on the direct path, or the provider carries them the long way round, the road through the exit can be steadier and sometimes even shorter. From one and the same machine of ours, Germany via the Netherlands came out 6 ms faster than direct, while Finland came out 62 ms slower. You cannot guess in advance; you can only compare.

The main rule: for a game, a tunnel is not an accelerator but a different road. It can swap a lossy or roundabout direct path for another one, but it never shortens the distance to the server.

And not every outage is your path. Outages happen without anyone intending them: on 20 October 2025 there was a global outage in the Amazon Web Services cloud, which many online services run on; on 18 August 2026, a fire at a network node in Moscow. If the game server itself is down, or a stretch of network shared by every road, a tunnel will not help.

What our test showed

On the night of 16 September 2026 we brought up a real AmneziaWG tunnel to our exits in the Netherlands and Poland and sent 50 ping packets down two roads: direct and through the tunnel. The publisher does not publish Delta Force server addresses, so as targets we took Hetzner hosting sites in the countries where, according to the third-party site PingAim, the game’s nearest servers are: Falkenstein in Germany and Helsinki in Finland.

An important caveat: the test was run from a server, not from a subscriber’s phone. The provider of our work machine carries traffic to Europe along a roundabout route, which is not typical. That is why there is a second table below — an estimate for a data centre in Russia with a good route.

How to read it. We measured both legs separately and added them up. To the exit in the Netherlands — 162.6 ms, from it to Germany — 12.9, 175.5 in total against 176.7 through the tunnel. Via Poland: 198.3 + 25.5 = 223.8 against 225.4. The tunnel itself added 1–2 ms; everything else is the length of the path to the exit and from it. Through the tunnel not a single packet was lost in any of the six pairs; direct to 1.1.1.1, 2 % were lost.

Germany via the Netherlands came out 6 ms faster than direct: for this machine the direct road to Germany is worse than the one through the Netherlands. Finland is the opposite: 62 ms slower. One machine, one tunnel — and opposite results for two neighbouring countries.

And if the route is good. So as not to judge by a machine with a poor route, we measured the legs from a data centre in Russia, 20 packets each: to Germany 50.2 ms, to Finland 53.7, to the exit in the Netherlands 46.9, to the exit in Poland 51.3. From the exits: the Netherlands to Germany 12.9, to Finland 35.4; Poland to Germany 25.5, to Finland 16.2. We did not bring a tunnel up from there, so the table shows the sum of the legs, that is, an estimate; the first table shows the sum differs from a real tunnel test by 1–2 ms.

The takeaway for a player. On a healthy path a tunnel adds 10–30 ms, and the exit closer to the game server adds less: for Germany that is the Netherlands, for Finland — Poland. A gain happens only when the direct path loses packets or takes a roundabout route.

What this test does not say. It is ping with ICMP service packets to hosting sites, not the game’s ping to its own servers; one night and 50 packets per pair; a server, not a phone. On a mobile network the signal comes on top of all that: on a weak signal we saw idle latency swing by up to 1058 ms, and no tunnel can smooth that out.

Why ping gets through a tunnel at all

The ping command uses the ICMP service protocol. Whether it passes through a protected connection depends on how that connection is built.

• An IP-level tunnel — WireGuard and AmneziaWG, which Mayak runs on — carries any IP packet whole: game UDP and ICMP alike. That follows from how such a tunnel is built, not from a separate setting.
• A SOCKS5 proxy does not carry ICMP: by its specification (RFC 1928) it relays only TCP and UDP.
• Some protocols carry UDP inside TCP. For a game that is the worst option: TCP retransmits what was lost and keeps packets in order, so a single loss holds up every packet behind it. A game needs a fresh packet more than a resend of an old one.

Where ping can be fake. Some apps with a virtual network interface answer ping themselves without letting it leave the phone. Then a reply comes from any address, even a non-existent one, and says nothing about the path to the game. We checked ourselves: through the tunnel we pinged 192.0.2.1, an address reserved for documentation and assigned to nobody on the internet. No reply came — so the replies in the table came from real servers, and ICMP really does travel through AmneziaWG.

Encryption adds almost no delay — and a “fast protocol” does not lower ping. In a lab comparison at the University of Amsterdam (2020 report, 1 Gbit/s network) the median ping through WireGuard was 0.42 ms, through OpenVPN 0.38–0.41, through IPsec (strongSwan) 0.21–0.22. WireGuard was not faster than its neighbours there, and the difference between protocols is a fraction of a millisecond. Low latency rests not on encryption but on two things: game UDP travels as UDP, without TCP-inside-TCP resends, and the exit sits close to the game server.

A case study: Delta Force in players’ own words

This shooter shows well how three different troubles get mixed up: the game’s own ban, the network, and ping. Below is what the press and players wrote, by date. This is an analysis, not instructions: we do not explain how to get into a game from a country it is closed to, and we advise against doing so.

First the ban — and it was the game’s decision.

• On 14 October 2024 players from Russia lost access to the demo on Steam and complained on the forum, iXBT.games reports.
• On 5 December 2024, at the game’s Steam release, the makers of Delta Force, iXBT.games reports, filtered players by Russian IP addresses rather than by account region.
• On 23 April 2026, according to players, the game appeared in the Russian Steam region.

When a game’s makers close it to a country, that is the game’s rule. The network is fine, and there is nothing in it to fix.

Then the network: the game is there, but a match will not finish. Since the spring of 2026 the complaints on the game’s Steam forum are different (quotes translated from Russian):

• 23 April — 13 May: “loads to 85%, kicks me out”, “10 matches fine, the 11th won’t start”; some write that a VPN helps.
• 9–10 July: loading stalls at 82–91 %, “Network error, check your connection”. On the same days, 9–16 July, players of Diablo IV, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Marvel Rivals also complained about outages — the trouble was not in one game.
• 20 July: “Error id 4/28”.
• 23 July: “PING 200+ HELP… it was 60”. 14 September: “ping near 300 in a match”.

One line from the forum holds the whole trade-off of this article: “With a VPN it works, but ping is higher and the connection drops for a few seconds now and then.” Most likely the tunnel changed the road and the game started launching, while the detour through the exit added ping.

The picture “the launcher and websites open, but the game drops” is a typical sign of loss on the path to the game server. A website makes do with a short exchange, a game needs a long-lived connection, and when its packets get lost it breaks on a timeout. Checks that watch whether websites are reachable do not see this: they measure websites, not game protocols.

This is a computer, not a phone. All the complaints above come from the forum of the PC version. Our own Mayak app is for Android and Android TV, we have no own Windows client, and we have not tested the mobile Delta Force.

Risk to your account: what the rules say

• Steam Subscriber Agreement, section 3.A. Using IP proxying or other methods “to disguise the place of your residence” — for game content closed to your country, for another region’s pricing “or for any other purpose” — is not allowed, and for that Valve may terminate access to your account (the agreement). The wording is broad: it is not only about closed games.
• Bans. On 19 April, 21 and 24 June 2026 players reported waves of 10-year bans on Russian Delta Force accounts. Any link to VPNs is only players’ guesswork: the official anti-cheat page does not mention VPNs. It speaks of penalties of up to 10 years and of IP address bans for cheating and other violations.

So, plainly: we do not promise that nothing will happen to your account, and we do not consider a tunnel a way to lift a publisher’s ban. If a game is closed to your country, that is a question for its publisher. Talking about a tunnel makes sense where the game is available to you and the path is what gets in the way.

What to check before turning on a tunnel for a game

1. Compare in pairs. One game server, neighbouring minutes: ping and drops with and without the tunnel. A single number on a mobile network means nothing — neighbouring runs there differ several times over.
2. Steady without the tunnel — this game does not need it. You do not have to switch protection off entirely: the game can go around the tunnel. In Mayak open “Settings” → “Split tunneling”, mark the game and reconnect (more in the help centre). The game goes direct, everything else stays in the protected connection.
3. Loss and drops without the tunnel, steady with it — pick the exit closest to the game server. In Mayak’s country list tap “Ping”: the numbers next to the countries show the road to each of them. Keep in mind that this is the path to the exit, and the game’s ping will be higher by the leg from the exit to its server.
4. It drops with the tunnel too — look at the signal. On a mobile network with a weak signal latency jumps by hundreds of milliseconds before any tunnel is involved. Try Wi-Fi or a spot with better signal. If it is the tunnel itself that switches off when the game starts, that is a different problem, with a separate piece about it.
5. It is broken for everyone at once — check the game’s news: the outage may be on its servers or in the cloud they run in.
6. Mobile internet is limited to allowlists or switched off — games may not work with a tunnel or without one. Under such limits on MegaFon, Habr wrote on 25 April 2026, ping and ordinary web requests reached the allowed addresses while UDP went silent: ping looks normal and the game does not connect. We cannot promise games will work in that mode.
7. Nothing helped — write to us: which game, which server in it, ping with and without the tunnel, mobile network or Wi-Fi. We have no test on the games themselves yet, and such emails are the best way to get one.

What we do not know

We try to make sure nothing more can be read out of our text than is actually in it.

• Ping to Delta Force servers. The publisher does not publish their addresses; we measured to hosting sites in the same countries, and took the countries themselves from a third-party site.
• How it will be on your phone. The test was run from a server, not from a subscriber’s phone, over one night, 50 packets per pair. The phone numbers in this article are tests from late July 2026 on one mobile network in Moscow.
• The game’s own ping. We measured with ICMP service packets; a game measures its own way, and its number may differ.
• How games behave through Mayak. We have not tested Delta Force, its mobile version or any other game through our app.
• Whether the bans are linked to VPNs. Nothing official has been said about it; players have only guesses.
• What happens under allowlists and mobile internet shutdowns. Not measured, and we promise nothing.
• Computers and iPhone. Our own Mayak app is for Android and Android TV; on iPhone and on a computer the access works through the third-party Happ app with the subscription link from your account. Happ is not in the Russian App Store; there incy (publisher LLC ITDEV) works instead on iPhone, checked on 22 September 2026.

Short answers

“Is Delta over in Russia? No way in without a VPN?” In 2024 the game was closed to Russian addresses by its own makers — that is the game’s rule, not a network fault. According to players, since 23 April 2026 the game has been available in the Russian Steam region. If a game refuses you precisely because of your country, a tunnel breaks the Steam agreement and puts your account at risk (what it says); we advise against it.

“Loads to 85%, kicks me out.” If the game opens but the connection to its server breaks while loading, that looks like loss on the path to the server. Compare with and without the tunnel, as in the section above.

“Network error, check your connection… even though my internet is fine.” “The internet is fine” and “the path to the game server is fine” are different things. Websites and the launcher make do with a short exchange, while the long-lived connection to the game breaks first when packets get lost on the way. In July 2026 such complaints from Delta Force players coincided by day with complaints about other games.

“With a VPN it works, but ping is higher and the connection drops for a few seconds now and then.” Higher ping is the expected price of the detour through the exit; a country closer to the game server adds less. Drops of a few seconds with the tunnel are a reason to check the signal and whether the phone puts the app to sleep (our piece on drops).

“They can ban you for a VPN, I think.” There is no official confirmation that Delta Force bans for a VPN: the anti-cheat page says nothing about it, and the link between the ban waves and VPNs is players’ guesswork. But the Steam agreement (section 3.A) plainly allows Valve to close the account of someone who disguises where they live through a proxy. We do not promise that nothing will happen to your account.

“PING 200+ HELP… it was 60.” If it was 60 yesterday on the same server and 200 today, the path changed: at the provider, at the game or on your side — say, protection with a distant exit got switched on. Check without the tunnel first. If it is 200 without it and less through a nearby exit, the direct path has gone roundabout, and that is the case where a tunnel helps.

“Ping near 300 in a match.” A detour through a neighbouring country does not add that much: in our test it was tens of milliseconds, not hundreds. Look for loss, a weak signal or a busy link (ping under load).

“You have been disconnected from Photon. Reason: ServerTimeout.” Photon is a network service many online games run on. ServerTimeout means the server went too long without hearing from the game on your device. The cause is the same as with “Network error”: loss on the path or a dropped connection on the phone.

“Ping in Marvel Rivals 999+ on all servers.” 999+ on every server at once most likely means not “far away” but “replies do not arrive at all”. If the numbers become normal through a tunnel, packets were being lost on the direct path; if not — check the game’s news.

Does a VPN affect ping in games? Yes, and almost always upwards: in our test the tunnel itself added 1–2 ms, and the detour through the exit on a healthy path added 10–30 ms. Ping gets lower only when the direct path is roundabout or loses packets.

How do I lower ping in games on my phone? Pick the nearest server in the game itself, do not download anything during a match, play with a good signal or on Wi-Fi. A tunnel usually does not lower ping: it helps when packets are being lost on the direct path.

What makes AmneziaWG good for games? It carries any IP packet, ICMP included, and game UDP travels as UDP, without TCP-inside-TCP resends. It does not make things faster through encryption: in a lab comparison WireGuard did not beat OpenVPN, and the difference was a fraction of a millisecond.

Do games work under allowlists? We cannot promise that. In the MegaFon case described on Habr, UDP did not reach the allowed addresses under such a limit, and games that talk UDP will not connect without it — with a tunnel or without one.

What about a computer, on Steam? There is no Mayak app of our own for Windows (the third-party Happ app exists there, but we have not verified it with a live connection), our own is only Android and Android TV; on a Linux computer a settings file from your account works. Everything said here about ping and the path is just as true for a computer as for a phone.