What we capture — and what we don't
To rebuild Blades after it shuts down we need to record how the game talks to its servers. We went out of our way to capture the minimum — only Blades and its arena servers, never the rest of your phone. Here's exactly how, in the open.
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We route the minimum, on purpose
A VPN could send all of your phone's traffic to us. We deliberately don't. We reverse-engineered the game's own matchmaking protocol so we could whitelist precisely the servers Blades uses — and leave everything else (banking, messaging, browsing, every other app) on your normal connection, untouched.
*.blades.bgs.services— login, characters, matchmaking, the asset CDN- The AWS GameLift ranges for the 14 regions arena matches can run in
- Everything else on your device bypasses the VPN entirely
- Non-Blades HTTPS that does route here is passed straight through — we can't decrypt it, only
blades.bgs.services
Why arena needs more than one IP
Arena PvP runs on Amazon GameLift. Before a match, the game pings 14 AWS regions and reports the latencies; GameLift then places your match on whichever region is fastest and has room, and hands your phone a different server IP for every single match. There is no fixed arena IP to whitelist.
So to reliably capture arena we route those 14 regions' GameLift ranges — and only those. We confirmed the exact list of 14 three independent ways (the client's built-in endpoint table, its latency-probe targets, and the live matchmaking requests we captured), so we can be confident we're not missing a region and not over-reaching into one we don't need.
The complete IP list is written in plain text into every .conf we hand out — open it and read every line.
Real arena ping, measured by the game itself
Everyone argues about arena lag. Here's the truth: these are the actual latencies Blades measured to each region, pulled from 18,799 captured matchmaking requests. Measured from where our contributors are (today mostly Europe & North America), so Best is the realistic floor for someone sitting near that region; Typical is the median across all our samples.
| Region | Best | Typical |
|---|---|---|
Europe (London) eu-west-2 | 10 ms | 61 ms |
Europe (Frankfurt) eu-central-1 | 16 ms | 60 ms |
Europe (Ireland) eu-west-1 | 18 ms | 72 ms |
US West (N. California) us-west-1 | 20 ms | 200 ms |
US East (Ohio) us-east-2 | 23 ms | 153 ms |
US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 | 30 ms | 138 ms |
Asia Pacific (Sydney) ap-southeast-2 | 32 ms | 309 ms |
US West (Oregon) us-west-2 | 33 ms | 186 ms |
Canada (Central) ca-central-1 | 36 ms | 134 ms |
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-northeast-1 | 119 ms | 280 ms |
Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-1 | 124 ms | 220 ms |
South America (São Paulo) sa-east-1 | 133 ms | 257 ms |
Asia Pacific (Mumbai) ap-south-1 | 137 ms | 180 ms |
Asia Pacific (Seoul) ap-northeast-2 | 155 ms | 281 ms |
When is arena busy?
Inferred from how fast the global top-100 leaderboard gains cups between observations — so it reflects the wider playing population, not just us. Darker = more matches. Times are UTC. We can only sample when a contributor has the leaderboard open, so coverage is still patchy and limited to top-100 players — it's a real signal, not a complete census.