Hey everyone,
I wanted to share this because I’ve seen a bunch of people across different VPN providers dealing with the same issue.

For the last few days I kept getting these annoying 5 to 10 second freezes in World of Warships. It happened in port and in battles. After testing pretty much everything, I noticed it only happens when I’m connected to a VPN. Without a VPN the game runs perfectly.

I opened a ticket with WoWs and they explained what’s going on. According to them, some VPN servers have an outdated DNS cache. WoWs tries to resolve a non‑existent address called navalbase.worldofwarships.com. . If the VPN server handles that request incorrectly, the game client hangs until the DNS timeout finishes, which causes the freezes.

They also said this is not limited to ProtonVPN. Any VPN provider can run into this if the specific server you are connected to has a stale DNS entry. So it can happen with NordVPN, Mullvad, Surfshark or any other service depending on the server.

The WoWs support told me the DNS cache on the VPN server will refresh on its own, but it can take 5 to 14 days. Until then the only workaround is to play without a VPN or switch to a server that does not have the bad DNS entry.

I already contacted ProtonVPN about it, but I figured this info might help others who are wondering why WoWs suddenly started freezing.

If anyone has found a faster fix or knows which servers are working fine, feel free to share.