Problem is localized to EU servers: When we join US or JP instances, the connection is often significantly better or flawless. The issue seems specific to the routing to your EU servers.
It’s not our local connection: These problems do not occur in other online games (even those hosted in Europe).
The VPN Fix: When we use a VPN service (even one routed through Europe), all connection problems in VRChat disappear instantly. The connection to EU instances becomes stable.
This strongly suggests a network peering issue between Deutsche Telekom’s network (AS3320) and the specific VRChat EU servers/hosting provider.
We are urgently asking you to investigate this matter. It is affecting a significant portion of your German player base and hindering their ability to socialize in their own region.
I am experiencing the same issues mentioned in the original message. However, the problem is not limited to Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile/T-Online). I am with 1&1, and several of my friends use Vodafone, and we are all encountering the same issues:
Lag spikes, high latency, and frequent disconnects when trying to connect to EU servers.
Voice chat issues, where the audio is choppy and voices keep cutting out.
The issues described also apply to various worlds in VRChat.
In addition to the above, we are encountering UI bugs where elements are not loading correctly. Some UI elements simply do not appear in certain worlds, such as buttons or texts that fail to load.
Furthermore, as a VRChat Plus user, I am also having problems with the Print Camera. When I take screenshots, the prints are completely blank – the images don’t appear, only a white screen.
Please address these issues as soon as possible. It’s incredibly frustrating, and we are all looking forward to a resolution. Thank you for your time and efforts.
Being in the same situation, I basically have to choose whether I want to be able to participate in conversations or be able to participate in mini games and watch videos.
VPN works for fixing the voice chat choppiness, but introduces new problems like latency and not being able to listen to world background music or watch YouTube content together.
Latency is already a problem in game worlds when playing with people from different regions. Introducing a VPN into the mix adds an additional source of latency, depending on the VPN endpoint.
The most annoying problem however is running into YouTube’s “bot detection” which apparently has whole IP address ranges of known VPNs and data centers “greylisted”, requiring the user to login to YouTube which VRChat can’t do with the current “yt-dlp” implementation.
Whether or not videos will actually load is a game of chance, requiring unfortunate Telekom customers like me to try every available VPN region and restart the game all the time until they can find one that works.
Recently, non of the EU based VPN endpoints would work anymore, with all of them being affected by more or less severe packet loss. I have to tunnel all the way to New York to get a usable voice chat experience.
This problem do affect players in Hungary also using Telekom (me and some of my friends who also using Telekom’s services) from the same time beginning last year, and to this day i do have the problems.
This issue is not limited to just users within the EU. As someone playing from the Asia/Singapore region, the above described issues and resolution methods of using a VPN is similar to what I face 90% of the time whenever I’m trying to join my friends who are on EU instances and this has been going on for almost a year now.
I’ve been experiencing the very same issue for a long time here in Italy with my ISP which is FastWeb, one of the most widespread Italian ISP and I know for sure other friends with the same ISP have this issue. Hope VRChat will fix it or they will star losing a lot of European users because being disconnected each time you join ad EU instance or hearing choppy voices is not nice.
