First of all, I am deeply grateful to all my past and present users. You are the people who put food on my table. I have wanted to leave this industry for a long time. Since last year, I have largely stopped being involved in running any accelerator services and have only retained shares in a few companies with accelerator businesses. I will gradually divest all those holdings this year as well.

The only service still run by a company under my own name is tt, mainly because it has so many longstanding users. I actually no longer wanted to run it last year. I suspended operations for quite a while while trying to transfer it, but the transfer fell through; see the previous post for the details. To avoid getting a reputation for taking the money and disappearing, I had to come back and take responsibility myself. There was no other way: disappearing like that is something I simply cannot do.

In this post, I want to speak to you as a friend about why I strongly recommend against using online game accelerators and how to choose one if you do need one. This should not affect anyone's interests. Why? Simply because national policies mean there is still a substantial market for accelerators in China, and not everyone has the spare time to work out how to set up their own accelerator or replace it with something else. Besides, tt does not need to turn a profit, and I have no intention of making lots of money from tt. Personally, I would love it if nobody used it, so I could leave this industry entirely sooner. That is unlikely, though: as long as you run one, people will use it, and you absolutely will not lose money. If someone manages to lose money on an accelerator that costs 2-3 yuan per user per month, that takes a special kind of talent. So I lose nothing by advising you not to use one. With both considerations in mind, I published this post and added a pop-up notification.

Before using an online game accelerator, you first need to know what it does and what it is useful for.

What does an online game accelerator do? In plain language, it uses proxy technology—various VPN protocols or socks5 processes and LSP intercepting your game's network connections—to route your game traffic through the accelerator's network. It has three main functions: 1. acceleration; 2. getting around regional restrictions; 3. avoiding some account bans or locks caused by shared IP issues.

1. Addressing fluctuations between networks by allocating network resources.

Generally speaking, an ordinary player's network is like a national road or a country lane. An accelerator lets you get onto the expressway.

But in extreme cases, if your own road is too bad—the road being the network used by your console, computer, phone, and so on—an accelerator cannot help you either. For example, I have encountered users on oilfield broadband, Great Wall Broadband, and Aipu Broadband, as well as a banana farmer deep in the mountains using a hotspot. Their connections were terrible, good grief. The prerequisite for an accelerator to help is that your local network must first be reasonably stable.

2. Getting around regional restrictions imposed for commercial or other reasons.

As games on overseas servers have become popular in China, getting around regional restrictions has also become one of the main reasons people use accelerators.

Take League of Legends as an example: there are American, Korean, Japanese, mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and various other servers. When you want to play, you may find that even after downloading and installing the game, you still cannot get into it properly. Those are regional restrictions imposed for commercial or other reasons: connections from other regions are prohibited by blocking IP from outside the country. It is not because your own connection is inadequate.

3. Resolving problems such as account bans and locks.

Many accelerators now offer dedicated access, but you may not know that I was the first to introduce dedicated IP packages on an accelerator. The point of dedicated IP is that it solves many games' problems with banning or locking accounts on shared IP and provides greater stability. To put it plainly, the difference is that with dedicated access, you are not squeezing onto a shared bus and will not run into a bomber... Thanks to the television series Reset for giving me that analogy.

Let me also discuss the different ways accelerators charge users.

1. Annual or monthly subscriptions. These accelerators are generally capable of making a sustainable profit. The average cost of bandwidth, hosting, and so on is 3 yuan per user per month. I do not know about others, but for the accelerators I have run or been involved with, the cost was 3 yuan per person per month. The selling price is usually around 20 or even higher. After marketing and other costs, they generally do not lose money. As long as they have some marketing capability, I have not heard of anyone losing money—apart from one person I know.

2. Metered time that can be paused. This cannot generate effective, sustainable profits. The longer a company using this billing model stays in business, the worse its acceleration generally becomes. That is simply because its profit model is unsustainable, not for some other reason. But this model has a major advantage: it is an attractive selling point, and its user conversion rate is very high, because people naturally like a bargain. If you buy it for occasional use and play games where latency does not matter, it is not much of a problem.

Accelerators using this billing model generally share the same problem: they advertise like mad to fill the holes left earlier. That drives the acquisition cost per user to at least a little over ten yuan, so their packages generally start at several dozen yuan. First they get you to top up a few thousand hours, and then that is the end of it.

3. Traffic-based billing, which I was the first to use on an accelerator. This is a rational billing model, but unfortunately many people simply do not understand it and think charging by traffic is expensive. Most people reject it out of habit as soon as they hear about traffic. At present, only Xiaoming, in which I once held shares, still uses it. What I want to say is that this billing model makes more sense than annual or monthly subscriptions or pausable time. It can even be cheaper than pausable time, while also allowing more sustainable profits. Unfortunately, people's habitual thinking has wasted such a good business idea.

4. A pausable model with an expiry date. This is an innovation on the time-based model and currently seems to be a more rational way to make sustainable profits. We still need to see, because it has not been around very long; it will take a few years to judge whether profitability is good. But because there is a time limit, many people reject this too. Ugh—why do people refuse the sensible models but love buying the ones that rip them off? That is human nature, I suppose.

That covers the basics of accelerators. So why do I not recommend them? 1. They are expensive; spending the same money on an alternative will definitely give you a better experience. 2. Their functions are too limited. Accelerators restrict your understanding of the world, and that is the main point: they limit what you can learn! 3. They are generally non-refundable.

1. Because of policy restrictions, accelerators do not accelerate game websites blocked by the firewall: doing so would be illegal. Websites that are not blocked can generally be accelerated, although some accelerators still do not support them because of maintenance problems. So you pay but still cannot play, because you cannot even reach the official website—what the hell are you supposed to play? Then you join groups, search for tutorials, and buy various accelerators: one layer after another, an endless vicious cycle. After spending hundreds of yuan, you finally get into the game.

2. Even if the official website is not blocked and your accelerator can accelerate it, there generally has not been any special optimization for the game you play. You also cannot use the accelerator's network to look up information. Information for overseas servers is generally hosted outside China, so whatever overseas game you want to play, you are completely in the dark. You can only join a pile of groups, and the endless layers continue.

3. Refunds: accelerators can generally refuse all refunds. They are virtual goods, you know! They are protected by law, you know! Even complaints to 12315 are no use.

That covers my reasons for not recommending accelerators. Mainly, they limit your understanding, and using one does not necessarily let you play the game you want without problems. Refunds and the like are not really the most important issue.

Do you only know how to use an accelerator, or simply find one convenient? In that case, how should you choose one?

1. Choose a major provider first. What counts as a major provider? Surely that needs no explanation.

2. Are major providers too expensive? Then choose one that has been around for many years and costs at least 50 per year. Avoid pausable billing, and you generally will not have much to worry about.

3. Or just use a dedicated-line proxy. It can accelerate games and bypass internet censorship, so why not use it?