As the gaming industry has grown into a $178 billion global market in the last 50 years, with that number expected to increase by over 50% in the next four years, games have gotten more and more complex to create immersive and unique experiences to meet the demands of today’s market. I mean, how different is Mario to World of Warcraft?
Not only have the games changed, but so has the reason for gaming. What started off as a hobby that anyone could pick up during their spare time has grown into a professional sport with competitions that allow players to win millions of dollars of prize money.
This has led to the need for players to have a fast proxy to be able to play every game to the full extent in the way it was designed to be experienced. This article will help you understand what a proxy is, the difference between data center proxies and residential proxies, and the advantages of using a gaming proxy.
To understand why you need a proxy, you first need to understand what a proxy is.
Your IP is your online identity required to do anything on the internet and is usually provided to you by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). However, using your ISP-provided IP is probably the last thing you want to do when trying to game. It leaves your personal information vulnerable to hacking, and it leaves you at the mercy of your ISP as to what games you have access to and at what internet speeds your online connections perform.
A proxy hides your online identification by allocating an IP different from your ISP IP. This protects your personal data and comes with many other gaming benefits, which we will address below.
Datacenter proxies come from a data center. The IP’s location and ID data relay back to the data center, protecting your personal information. These proxies allow you to stay anonymous, enjoy fast proxy speeds, and are affordable to buy. However, websites can quickly identify when you are using data center proxies, making it easier to get banned.
Residential proxies are real IPs that are associated with a real residence. They protect your personal IP information and allow you to access information from different locations to your own. The advantage to residential proxies is that websites can’t recognize the difference between your ISP IP and a residential proxy IP, making it much less likely to get banned. However, they do not offer high-speed connections that datacenter proxies provide, and residential proxies are a bit more expensive to purchase.
Also Read: Guide to Improve your Online Gaming Experience
Now that you know what a proxy does, let’s look at why it is essential to invest in a proxy and the advantages of a gaming proxy that you can benefit from.
A major issue faced by modern-day gamers is network latency. Therefore, the first advantage of having a gaming proxy is that it has become more of a necessity than a nice-to-have to address latency.
In the past, rooms and even buildings were built specifically to connect players and the gaming server for the players to have a seamless experience. Now, with the gaming community spanning several countries across the globe, it has become impossible to stick to the old way of doing things.
However, now games need high-quality servers, and players need strong connections to those servers with dependable and high-speed internet connections. The problem with depending on your ISP is that your internet usage is in their hands, leaving you at their mercy to throttle your bandwidth as they please.
The advantage of a gaming proxy server is that it is available worldwide, which makes it likely that they are close to the gaming server players need to connect to. This shorter connection helps to provide fast speeds and reliable connections that give gamers the immersive gaming experience they look for.
In a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), players are required to do tedious and repetitive tasks to level up their gaming characters to unlock new features and abilities to progress further in the game.
The second advantage of using a gaming proxy is players use bots to automate these tasks in the game to help them level up. Using a bot with your personal IP will quickly get you banned. The player can use an assigned IP with a gaming proxy until it gets banned and switch to a new IP allocated by the gaming proxy server.
The game will never be able to trace this back to you as the gamer while you enjoy the game to its fullest extent.
Games are available based on location. This is a major hindrance to anyone trying to play the latest and greatest in the gaming world, as their ability to access the game has been blocked simply because of where they live.
The third advantage of using a gaming proxy is that you can conceal your true location from the game.
When signing up with a gaming proxy provider, you must ensure that they have servers in locations where the game has been released to. This way, the IPs that get allocated to you appear to be from an area where the game is currently available, giving you as the gamer the opportunity to play a game that was initially blocked from you.
By now, hopefully, you have a good understanding of why investing in a gaming proxy is the best way to experience a game to its fullest extent. Shed away the imposing restrictions that come with using your ISP-provided IP to try playing games. Instead, look into data center proxies and residential proxies that allow you to enjoy the type of gaming experience that suits your needs.