There's a bunch of services that can moderately reduce latency by using better paths. Specially worth it if you want to play with friends in servers farther than 1000km away.

Can help routing induced latency as the other comment says (or force a new route if having downstream issues with your ISP peering), and some games in the past could leak IPs especially if using a p2p model and a VPN can mitigate that (especially one that only routes traffic for the game).

IIRC you also need one when playing from some countries, whether due to legal reasons or server restrictions.

> Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN..

Cheaters, which is why they’re getting banned in the first place

Using a VPN with WireGuard can actually reduce latency if your ISP has poor routing to the game server, as a VPN with better peering or routing paths can improve your connection. It’s not always the case, but with a decent provider, you might see lower ping in certain situations.

Lota of competetive players pay for a vpn to protect against DoS attacks.

My VPN is always enabled, including when I game

When I was in the dormitory (~6-8 years ago), I used VPN (OpenVPN on my private VPS) over UDP port 53 to omit the firewall which was configured to block big parts of ports.

Oh wow that takes me back. I remember complaining to the university that I couldn't download files via FTP. A few months later they answered me explaining file sharing protocols had no legitimate uses at a university. I was working in a research lab and needed to download standardized datasets to validate that the software worked as intended. At the time, only FTP was used.