With Black Friday upon us, it's a great time to grab a VPN service for gaming at a cheaper price.
Having access to a VPN service has a number of benefits for gaming, with safety being the primary one. Using an active Virtual Private Network (VPN) service will encrypt and secure your data when you game online, which can stop advertisers and hackers from tracking your location or online history. And there are plenty of great deals around for Black Friday.
The best Black Friday VPN deals we've seen for gamers are from the likes of Private Internet Access, Nord VPN and ExpressVPN, which are all well-known, reputable options. The Black Friday VPN offers from all three range in terms of subscription length, so you should be able to find something to suit your needs. And as an added bonus, they're all throwing in an extra three months to their plans for free.
Why are VPNs good for gaming?
With some VPN providers, you can manually change your IP address, which offers even more protection as you can choose to make it seem like you're located in a different city, country or even continent. The ability to change your location manually using a VPN is a major benefit for gamers, particularly those who enjoy Call of Duty: Warzone 2 and other multiplayer titles.
Some players claim that changing your location with a VPN allows you to bypass the pesky Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) that developers use in online games. SBMM is a feature that aims to match players against opponents of a similar skill level.
SBMM sounds like a good thing on paper – particularly for casual players who don't want to play against opponents of a much higher skill level all the time. But for those players who have a higher skill level, it can make online matches incredibly difficult, and can even regularly match them against hackers, who often ruin the game for everyone.
Activision has never outright confirmed that SBMM exists in its Call of Duty titles, but since the release of Warzone 2.0, the merits of the apparent matchmaking feature have been the subject of fierce debate among content creators, streamers and professional Warzone 2.0 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 players.
Although there's no way of confirming this method 100%, some players claim that changing your location to a country with a different time zone, or a country with a fewer number of active players, can essentially allow you to bypass SBMM and play in easier lobbies. Because evenings are typically the times when these games have the most active players, changing your location to a country with a much earlier or later time zone is also tj0ought to increase your chances of playing against lesser-skilled opponents.
VPNs can also help you negate network throttling, which is a huge pain for gamers. Some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) slow down high-bandwidth users by monitoring their online activity, but if you're using a high-quality VPN, this activity will be hidden from your ISP and it's likely you'll have fewer of these issues.
