> And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.
Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target. Keep in mind that the target might be geo distributed.
Like driving, going over 2 highways might be fasted than going over a direct dirt road, or a longer road might be faster because the direct road is congested.
One case where I saw this was a friend who for some reason was being routed to game servers around the world when trying to connect to an Overwatch game, and a much closer server with the VPN.
Was this a bug in Overwatch? Almost certainly, but the VPN was an effective workaround.
I've seen it happen. Blizzard is quite notorious for having some weird network links, where a VPN is known to be a workaround. Example [1], and I've heard the same from WoW players.
Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target. Keep in mind that the target might be geo distributed.
Like driving, going over 2 highways might be fasted than going over a direct dirt road, or a longer road might be faster because the direct road is congested.