Everyone knows that your private information can be at risk when you’re clicking on weird ads or when you’re shopping online. But should you worry if you’re just gaming? Unfortunately yes, gaming online can expose you to a few major risks – most of them related to your IP address.
If your IP address gets exposed, you might be a target for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, which can force you offline.
Also, don’t forget that your internet service provider (ISP) can see your gaming traffic. If they think you’re gaming “too much,” they might throttle your bandwidth, slowing down your speeds in the process.
That’s why choosing a VPN protocol to game with is essential if you want to protect your personal data and stop ISPs from snooping on your connections.
In this article, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of using the SoftEther protocol for gaming.
The Advantages of Using SoftEther
Here is the main reason why we recommend using SoftEther for gaming:
Speeds
The SoftEther protocol is very lightweight, so it’s faster than most protocols, allowing for smooth gaming.
In our speed tests, we only experienced a 25% slow down when gaming – we gamed with low ping even on distant servers and we never experienced freezes or connection drops, which is pretty good!
Privacy
SoftEther is an open-source protocol so, if you are tech-savvy, you can inspect its code to check for any security vulnerabilities.
But if you don’t know how to code – don’t worry! SoftEther’s code has already been audited, and all minor security issues that were found were quickly patched.
Security
SoftEther supports bank-grade encryption like 256-bit AES, which is nearly impossible to break.
So once you’re connected to the VPN server through the SoftEther protocol, your ISP can’t see what you’re doing on the internet anymore. And even if they look at your internet traffic, they can’t see anything but gibberish – a long string of numbers, letters, and special characters. And if they can’t see what online games you’re playing, they can’t selectively throttle your bandwidth.
The Disadvantages of Using SoftEther
There is one main issue with SoftEther:
Availability
SoftEther’s biggest drawback is that the majority of top VPN providers don’t support it.
So if you want to use this protocol, you’ll have to look for specific VPNs that have built-in support for SoftEther, like hide.me which is secure, very fast, user-friendly, and even comes with a decent free plan.
There are a few other VPNs that support SoftEther, but not in-app. If you want to use the protocol with those providers, you’ll have to perform a manual setup via a third-party app. Even if it takes 5 minutes, those are 5 minutes less you spend gaming.
What Other Alternatives to SoftEther Can You Use?
A great alternative to the SoftEther protocol is the WireGuard protocol. It’s just as fast (we only experienced a 20-25% slowdown in our tests) and secure as SoftEther. Plus, almost every top VPN provider supports WireGuard – like NordVPN and Surfshark, for example. So you don’t have to install any third-party app and waste your time on additional, complicated setups.
Conclusion
SoftEther can be a good protocol for gaming, but since almost no top VPN provider supports it, it might be difficult to use it. hide.me is the only VPN provider with built-in support for SoftEther. But if you’re not a fan of that VPN, you’ll have to use a different protocol – like WireGuard which is just as fast and which most VPNs support.
Have you tried to use SoftEther for gaming? If yes, share your experience in our comments section and tell us your opinion about SoftEther!
