Achilles7
Banned
Is using a VPN allowed?
- Thread starter Threeofseven
- Start date
I know there are a few, but I think like most games, Frontier purposely does not advertise here. There are a few Chinese and Hong Kong player minor factions. It's very unfortunate but the level of cheating, hacking and Bots that occur among Chinese Gamers turns a lot of Developers off. Before I played an air combat game called Aces High for several years before moving to China in 2008. After playing in China for about a week the developers banned me, they said it was just too risky in their opinion. A bit unreasonable IMO.
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I have seen posts asking why there isn't localisation for Chinese in the game.
I didn't see any game where using VPN tunnel would be forbidden.
But I've seen countries where using VPN is illegal! So be sure to check yours isn't one of them, OP. Although VPN prevents your ISP from seeing your traffic, it doesn't prevent them seeing you're using VPN.
But I've seen countries where using VPN is illegal! So be sure to check yours isn't one of them, OP. Although VPN prevents your ISP from seeing your traffic, it doesn't prevent them seeing you're using VPN.
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I back when I played COD4 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 I knew of several servers that would pre-ban Russians and some Eastern European countries because hackers were so prevalent from those countries. I used to see some of that myself when I ran a BFBC2 server. Though I still remember when my server was getting a steady level of players that when I logged in I saw flags from Asia, South America, Europe and Australia... I thought it was so cool!
no. when you connect to VPN your IP address changes. Elite tracks your IP address throughout yournplay session as this is a p2p game. there are a myriad of technical reasons why your IP address can't change including some very nasty exploity amd security ones.
Hey CMDR. I am from India, GMT+5.30, hit me up if you wanna team up...although you might have to wait until the weekend as I am returning from Colonia right now.
Alright, sad news: that thing they are using couldn't help instancing at all, in fact it makes things even worse [facepalm].
Cheers mate, and safe flight. I’ll look you up.
I’m based in Tokyo. Haven’t managed a CQC game in over a year.
I guess I’ll have time resort to Discord.
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I have no idea what this is supposed to be saying; VPN is a point-to-point (typically encrypted) connection that is established between a computer and another device. What this will do, is cause matchmaking to apply potentially different instancing rules because it 'sees' the connection point as being where the VPN terminates; not the source.
What it won't do, is magically become cached, proxied or any other store-and-forward method because this requires that the traffic type is compatible with such a thing. It's not. I presume this is confusing potential lag -- induced as a consequence of routing traffic over a defined link that may not be optimal and increased in hop count -- with ISP shenanigans.
ISPs seldom have the infrastructure (or will) to attempt to break and syphon or man-in-the-middle such data flows. So none of what you are saying, even well intentioned makes any sense. Any latency from a VPN is the encryption overhead (which is minimal on a modern CPU which often accelerate that no less) combined with traffic routing over potentially 2-3 extra hops (packets also have to return over the same path).
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It's fine. The ToS does not specify such a service is a violation, and Section 4 of the agreement effectively refers to tampering only, which would be difficult to argue in a VPN sense: https://www.frontierstore.net/ed-eula/
It took Frontier ~4 years to fix an ongoing fragmentation problem (the game literally did not understand fragmentation of packets properly) breaking p2p badly (near-empty open instances and busted wings). I used a VPN to a dedicated server I rent in SJA (San Jose) for a long time to 'help' Frontier help itself.
Lately their matchmaking has become borderline intolerable again and is applying quite strong geolocation rules meaning Open is often Solo for Australians, unless there are other APAC players present. I'm not sure if I can be bothered with VPN again; as much as I love this game, Frontier are managing to help me not want to play it much due to matchmaking being unhelpful.
So yes, use a VPN conenction; all you are doing is routing traffic via an egress point in another location; and solving Frontier's endless instancing problems, for them. Despite being the same distance you always were, it will suddenly work "as intended".
Go forth, profit and enjoy. But I'd recommend not using a cheap and cheerful VPN reseller. Locate one that's a bit particular about performance and how they build their network; the game doesn't need much capacity, but does rely on low latency. I built my own because I could, not everyone will be in that position, obviously. YMMV.
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Part of the issue there my dear Kofeyh - is that at least some of the people persuaded to use VPN don't understand what VPN does, or how it's actually implemented, and how that actively affects traffic and transitions, the seeming and actual routing, and of course the transit paths.
VPN does NOT solve transit. Even the freshest network god straight out of primary school knows that.
The tyranny of distance. Physics. Light takes a deterministic period to transit n distance over y time via a physical medium. So no; one cannot bend time or solve the (current) constraint that is the speed of light.
However; Frontier's matchmaking system? That is a whole other kettle of fish. Matchmaking will essentially only see the egress point (the client does hole punching and forwarding via uPnP or via manual router config) ergo if you happen to egress from a network that is identified as being in the US, or UK, matchmaking will apply rules based on that.
Latency can and will affect robustness of any p2p session; but that's seperate to matchmaking thinking you are in the UK, for example, and showing just a ton (presumably many people are still playing? it's hard to tell) of other UK players.
Note that winging up, actually seems to bypass at least some of the MM rules as I can magically see US people when I do that. But since I can't wing up with an entire instance, that has limited value for visibility. I do understand why Frontier might be doing this; but it does make the universe seem very empty as a result. VPN simply solves Frontier's desire to segregate people, in a game that ostensibly encourages group play. Just one of the many oxymorons of Elite.
It would probably help if Frontier used p2p purely for wing related activities, and server-based for all other traffic (ie use the servers as peers as well as[/S] commanders so that instances have an anchor point that doesn't rely on any one commander); because at least then Open would be Open, rather than (many) Open. Opens? But I imagine they are stuck with it now. Ultimately, it's like anything. Enough arbitrary hurdles and people start to disengage.
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If you'd have said "player" there you'd have been completely correct. FD's servers only get involved when "significant events" occur, and even then they have proven to be less than 100% reliable. Shoving non-winged CMDR's into their tender ministrations would likely lead to much more hassle, as things get exploited for lulz - as there wouldn't be the weight of the "wing" for determining events.
It's certainly not an easy problem to solve, whichever way it's approached.
As far as I know. FD is using Amazon infrastructure. Does anyone know what datacenters are used? Or, is a single datacenter used (not counting redundancy here), since every interaction relies on P2P in "normal" space?
Also, I think that matchmaking takes into account also if you are friend with certain CMDRs and tries to place them all in the same instance?
Also, I think that matchmaking takes into account also if you are friend with certain CMDRs and tries to place them all in the same instance?
Brett C
Frontier
Amazon's AWS Ireland.