Can it help my connection in games?
i.e if I’m trying to play on NA servers from EU, would it be better if I VPNed to where the game server is?
I guess I’m asking do VPNs generally have better and shorter routing than the ISP themselves.
I would say that 99.5% of the times you will not find a better connection for gaming than your ISP
VPN’s are just not good for online gaming
In a perfect world it shouldn’t.
The act of hiding your IP adds a step to the process of data up/downloading between you and your chosen gaming servers, so it’ll always be slightly slower than the ISP alone.
It depends, you can try a free trial and test it out. Here check this out: https://www.anonymistic.com/best-gaming-vpn/
Some games games have a cringe ass anti-cheat that activate if you use certain security measure (I believe a vpn to be among them). But yes, chosing a vpn in the same area as the servers will be faster… under ideal conditions. If the server is heavily populated it’s be better to use a different one. For instance whenever the protons free us server is bloated I’ll use the free japanese or free netherlands server.
If a VPN did give you an advantage in this way it would have to be enough of an advantage to overcome the extra time it takes to encrypt and decrypt data it is sending and receiving (which can be slightly improved by choosing a less powerful/effective different encryption protocol).