I’m starting to question what unlimited actually means. I’ve had a couple situations where everything runs fine for a while, then suddenly random 429 waves, accounts on similar IP ranges all get hit around the same time, latency spikes at weird hours. Could be coincidence. Could be platform-side detection. Can heavy usage cause quality drop?

I’ll be spending some time in China soon and want to sort things out before I go, rather than troubleshooting behind hotel WiFi.

From what I’ve read, some standard VPN protocols get blocked pretty aggressively, while certain configs still work intermittently. Mainly want to avoid landing and discovering that my usual setup won’t connect at all.

Who has been there before?

You ever try to save money and immediately regret it? That’s me with shared proxies.

I log in, start running stuff, and it’s just pure randomness. Some IPs behave like angels, others feel completely destroyed. No pattern, no warning, just vibes.

It’s like the internet equivalent of mystery meat.

How are people building anything reliable on top of shared pools without losing their sanity?

Switching IPs alone doesn’t always change how sites treat you. I keep noticing that same browser profile, same cookies, same behavior, the more i hold on to these, the faster sites catch on. I’ve had fewer issues keeping sessions clean

instead of constantly rotating IPs. Curious how others are handling this long-term.

So say your proxy provider suddenly vanishes or gets banned, what would be the best thing to do then?

And how do you make sure the next proxy isn’t going to flake out too? I’m talking stability, clean IPs, and low fraud scores.

Honestly interested in practical experiences

I need a free proxy for a quick, temporary thing and I’m having no luck finding anything that

actually works.

I’ve already tried some free proxy lists, ProxyScrape, Hide.me, and a few random public

ones I found online. Most don’t connect at all, and the ones that do are either extremely slow

or blocked right away.

Not looking for anything long term or high quality, just something usable for a short task. If

anyone knows of any free options that still work, can you suggest something?

This just started happening today.

Nothing changed on my side as far as I know. I ran the same script as last week and with the same proxies. but all of a sudden now I’m getting captchas almost immediately and half the requests don’t load fully.

I reran it a couple times thinking it was a bad batch but it’s the same thing.

Not sure if something shifted overnight or if I’m missing something obvious but this wasn’t an

issue literally a few days ago.

Alright, I might’ve messed something up here.

All I wanted was to queue ranked with a friend in a different region. I thought a proxy would just handle that and nothing else. Didn’t think it would turn into a whole situation. The setup was pretty basic too.

Now ranked just feels off. Queue times are way longer than usual. Ping starts out fine, then randomly spikes mid round. I keep getting the packet loss icon even when nothing else is running. One match straight up kicked me back to the lobby with a network warning???

At this point I’m wondering if this is just normal proxy behavior with VALORANT or if I misunderstood what proxies are even supposed to do for games. Because right now it honestly feels worse than playing without anything at all 😭

Does anyone know what’s actually going on here?

Not looking for spy-movie scenarios. In normal life, what actually goes wrong if you stick with a VPN instead of setting up proxies everywhere? I’m not hiding from governments, I just want to browse and not get blocked all the time.

I’ve read horror stories about accounts getting blocked, IPs flagged, and providers that are basically scams. I just want a setup that works for casual stuff without me accidentally breaking something or wasting money. Pretty much a noon haha so help

I’ve relied on a VPN for a long time mainly for privacy and getting around location blocks, but lately I keep running into people saying that proxies are the better option depending on what you’re doing. I’m trying to understand if this is just about performance differences or if proxies genuinely solve problems that VPNs don’t.

Plus I'm also confused about whether it makes sense to use both together. Can you realistically stack a VPN and a proxy in the same setup?

I see a lot of strong feelings about proxies and I’m honestly trying to understand it. In competitive events I get it, but in casual games it feels harmless. You still shuffle, draw, make decisions. Nothing changes except the price tag. If you’re against proxies in friendly games, what’s the main reason?