Connection Time Out - Use a VPN!

[Titus]

I live in Taiwan and I had to use a VPN to Hong Kong in order to connect to a Scum server in Taiwan (Official #1547). It's strange because connecting from Japan won't work. Also, my friend uses NORDVPN, connects to Taiwan, and can play. I use VPNAC and I cannot play when connected to a Taiwan VPN node; hence the connection to Hong Kong.

[flitzpiepe0815]

Are you also on Chunghwa Telecom?

[Titus]

Yes, I am, but my friend is not. We both live in Taiwan. So, is it an ISP problem, not a Scum issue?

[flitzpiepe0815]

Originally posted by Howdy Doody:

Yes, I am, but my friend is not. We both live in Taiwan. So, is it an ISP problem, not a Scum issue?

It could be. According to my research Chunghwa sometimes has disputes with the other Taiwan telcom companies about the traffic they are exchanging internally ("peering dispute"). This is not a "Taiwan only" problem and happens at times when two peering carriers have an agreement to not charge each other for exchanging traffic provided that both sides exchange about the same amount of data and then one side exceeds that amount.
The side that has to transport the additional traffic is then often charging money or blocking / slowing down the traffic while the other side might chose a different route to transport its data. It's a common problem with background internet infrastructure and happens a lot while not making it to the public that often.

I'm not saying this is the problem but it's definitely worth considering.

You and your friend could use a little tool called WinMTR which follows the routes of the data packets to the destination (game server) to check and compare if the packets are delayed on their way which may cause lags, high pings and / or connection losses or timeouts.
You could get the server's IP address by checking https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/scum/
Make sure to tick "Resolve names" in the program's settings.You may also raise the query interval to reduce the chance that any intermediate station is slowing the packets down due to a high number of requests.

If you don't want to use 3rd party software you could still use Window's ping, tracert or pathping to see if anything is odd but WinMTR actually combines these three and can be easily run for a period of time for better comparability. It's also lightweight and doesn't need to be installed.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/winmtr/files/Latest/WinMTR-v092.zip/download