How I Finally Beat Desync & Fixed Hitreg — The Real Game Changer

[zouhair_psi]

After years of trying everything to get rid of desync in every game I played — including wild ideas like pulling the CMOS battery, hoping maybe it would help — nothing worked.
So I made a list of every fix people have tried on these forums and on YouTube. I noticed we all had one thing in common — and almost nobody had removed it. Not because they didn’t want to, but because it’s not easy.

The Big Realization
If you remember the “good old days” before 2010, we had only a simple modem. No random desync, good hitreg, stable gameplay.
Then ISPs started giving us routers that control everything about our connection — NAT, firewall rules, QoS you can’t control, and firmware you can’t change.
I realized this ISP box was the bottleneck.

What I Did
After weeks of fighting to access my ISP hardware, I turned my ZTE ISP router into a pure modem (bridge mode).
This means: 0 ISP control over my connection — all routing, firewall, QoS now handled entirely by my own personal router.
Important: Not everyone can do this — most people either can’t access their ISP router’s full settings, or the option is hidden.

The Steps
- Bridge Mode on ZTE F680
- Logged into the admin interface (needed ISP credentials or root access).
- Found the active WAN profile, set connection type to Bridge.
- Disabled NAT/firewall. Bound only the port going to my router.
- Saved, rebooted until public IP was passed directly to my router.
- Get PPPoE Credentials
- Gained SSH access to the ZTE.
- Downloaded the config file, decrypted it to find my PPPoE username & password.
- (If you’re lucky, you can just call your ISP and ask — but most will refuse.)
- Set Up Own Router
- Created a new PPPoE connection on my OpenWrt router.
- Used the correct VLAN ID (for me: VLAN 53).
- Entered credentials, confirmed connection came up with public IP.

The Result
- 0 desync.
- Hit registration feels perfect.
- This was before I even set up DSCP tagging or opened game ports.
- Two weeks later, still rock solid. No “placebo effect” drop-off.

Impact on Gameplay
I started gaming in 2020. My career high was Platinum 5 in Overwatch 2 & Valorant — but I’d always bounce between Gold and low Plat. Sometimes I even dropped to Silver.
Now? Within days of the bridge mode change, I hit Diamond 5.
- I can peek snipers with confidence.
- I have time to strafe, aim, and shoot — something impossible before.
- No more “one shot or you’re dead instantly” situations.
- Game feels predictable — my inputs match the server.

Final Advice
If you have the skill (or can learn) to remove your ISP router from the equation and use only your own router, do it.
If not, I can make a guide/video to show exactly how to set the ISP box to modem-only mode.

TL;DR: Get your ISP router out of the way. Give full control to your own router. For me, it changed everything.

[Watchdog]

How is it on peak hours like night time? Did your speed get reduced after bridging it yourself? Can you revert this without having to contact your ISP?

Also a tutorial would be nice. My ISP router is HG6145F1. I can only bridge mode with IPOE on it.

[Misha1337]

After years of trying everything to get rid of desync in every game I played — including wild ideas like pulling the CMOS battery, hoping maybe it would help — nothing worked.
So I made a list of every fix people have tried on these forums and on YouTube. I noticed we all had one thing in common — and almost nobody had removed it. Not because they didn’t want to, but because it’s not easy.

The Big Realization
If you remember the “good old days” before 2010, we had only a simple modem. No random desync, good hitreg, stable gameplay.
Then ISPs started giving us routers that control everything about our connection — NAT, firewall rules, QoS you can’t control, and firmware you can’t change.
I realized this ISP box was the bottleneck.

What I Did
After weeks of fighting to access my ISP hardware, I turned my ZTE ISP router into a pure modem (bridge mode).
This means: 0 ISP control over my connection — all routing, firewall, QoS now handled entirely by my own personal router.
Important: Not everyone can do this — most people either can’t access their ISP router’s full settings, or the option is hidden.

The Steps
- Bridge Mode on ZTE F680
- Logged into the admin interface (needed ISP credentials or root access).
- Found the active WAN profile, set connection type to Bridge.
- Disabled NAT/firewall. Bound only the port going to my router.
- Saved, rebooted until public IP was passed directly to my router.
- Get PPPoE Credentials
- Gained SSH access to the ZTE.
- Downloaded the config file, decrypted it to find my PPPoE username & password.
- (If you’re lucky, you can just call your ISP and ask — but most will refuse.)
- Set Up Own Router
- Created a new PPPoE connection on my OpenWrt router.
- Used the correct VLAN ID (for me: VLAN 53).
- Entered credentials, confirmed connection came up with public IP.

The Result
- 0 desync.
- Hit registration feels perfect.
- This was before I even set up DSCP tagging or opened game ports.
- Two weeks later, still rock solid. No “placebo effect” drop-off.

Impact on Gameplay
I started gaming in 2020. My career high was Platinum 5 in Overwatch 2 & Valorant — but I’d always bounce between Gold and low Plat. Sometimes I even dropped to Silver.
Now? Within days of the bridge mode change, I hit Diamond 5.
- I can peek snipers with confidence.
- I have time to strafe, aim, and shoot — something impossible before.
- No more “one shot or you’re dead instantly” situations.
- Game feels predictable — my inputs match the server.

Final Advice
If you have the skill (or can learn) to remove your ISP router from the equation and use only your own router, do it.
If not, I can make a guide/video to show exactly how to set the ISP box to modem-only mode.

TL;DR: Get your ISP router out of the way. Give full control to your own router. For me, it changed everything.

Am using TP-Link Archer vr400 after using the ISP router for a decent amount of time my isp sends me the pppoe credentials and I use it to login but I still have desync

[themagic]

Same here tried many things already but I dont have this bridge mode in Fritzbox but i read about it and that it somehow need to be activated by ISP directly...idk how rly this works...???

I tried to use my Speedport as modem and there is just an Option there (Use as modem) and behind it i just tried Setup a TP Link Archer on LAN1 and connect with PPPOE...

Same something similar exist for Fritzbox and where you can click and do PPPOE Passthrough but i dont believe that this has something to do with real bridge mode or ?


Very complicated this shit all and dont know rly much about this and if this and such bridge mode even exist for ADSL2+ and possible to do...?

But all that what i tried with PPPOE...does nothing much at all on my problem and hitreg/desync...

[ChristophSmaul1337]

Disclaimer: I fully believe you and your workaround might actually have fixed the problem with your ISP router. However, this:

This means: 0 ISP control over my connection — all routing, firewall, QoS now handled entirely by my own personal router.

is not how it works. Just a little technical misunderstanding.

Your connection is still 100% controlled by your ISP. They have exactly the same amount of control over everything you've mentioned, as you had before. Imagine a world in which your assumption is true: Everything, including routing and QoS, is handled by a customer-owned device (like a router). It would be stupidly easy to manipulate and sabotage your ISP. In this case, one single user who's not up to speed about what he's doing, or someone with ill intent, with one bad entry in a routing table, or one wrongly configured device, can instantly disable the entire ISP's infrastructure, for example by forming a loop somewhere. This cannot, and therefore is not happening in the real world, and because of this, your local router at home doesn't have these capabilities. Routing is done in the ISP's backbone, far away from your home and your own router.

QoS is another example, and it's also done on your ISP's infrastructure. Let's take my connection to, let's say the BlurBuster server, as an example. According to my research, the server hosting this forum (or a relay/CDN server) is located in Frankfurt, and the hoster "Cloudflare" is with the ISP called "CenturyLink". I'm located near Hamburg and my ISP is Deutsche Telekom. Let's take my traceroute as an example and see what nodes my (your) traffic crosses:

1 [192.168.178.1]
2 [62.155.243.100]
3 [62.153.188.78]
4 [4.68.62.205]
5 [212.162.17.178]
6 [104.26.11.14]

Number 1 is your local router (the one you replaced). So far so good. Number 2 is the first node that's geographically somewhat close to you, and it's the first point of infrastructure from your ISP that your data sees. This is called a BRAS (broadband remote access server). This device's task is to manage the traffic between the ISP's backbone and the users connected to it. There's more than one user connected to this piece of infrastructure, and that can only mean one thing: There is a possiblity that this device becomes overloaded. Now, whenever this possiblity exists, you can bet your house on the fact that some form of QoS will be present here, controlled entirely by your ISP. This doesn't mean it's always active or throttling you, but just in case this BRAS is overloaded by something, QoS will ensure that data that's mission critical, for example VoIP packets or data from business customers, is always guaranteed to make it through.

Node #3 is another piece of infrastructure from Deutsche Telekom, and it's likely located within Frankfurt's biggest datacenter, the DE-CIX. This is where the so-called peering happens: The data will leave your ISP's network (Telekom) at this point, and enter another ISP's network at the next node #4, which belongs to the ISP called "CenturyLink", Cloudflare's ISP. There's a recurring theme here: Node #3 and #4 have multiple devices/"users" connected to it, which means... you guessed it: QoS. To make it full circle, node #5 also belongs to "CenturyLink" and is likely the BRAS at the "other end", and node #6 is the server you're on right now. Node #5 also has QoS enabled, because as with your local BRAS for your home, this one also has multiple users connected, so QoS is a necessity. You get where this is going.

All of this is of course very, very similar to a connection for a game server. As you can see, there's a metric sh*tton of QoS happening along the way, and you disabling QoS on the ISP router, or replacing your router, is not going to make a dent. The only possible scenario where local QoS on your router might've been detrimental is this: You're constantly uploading something to the internet with 100% of bandwidth, which your router's QoS also thinks is highly important traffic. When you're playing a game, the game packets will be delayed intentionally because QoS thinks the other traffic is more important. Apart from that, QoS won't do anything, especially not if your router and/or connection was never fully utilized.

Each of these devices of course also have a stored routing table, and you and/or your home router obviously can't access and change these. Your ISP's default router also doesn't have some bugs in its routing table, because if it had, there wouldn't be a possibility for your router to "know" where your BRAS was located at, so you wouldn't even get an internet connection in the first place. Routing is like an "on/off" switch. It either works, and then it works 100% of the time, or it doesn't, and then your internet is dead. Nothing in between.

firewall

This is correct, yes. Virtually every somewhat modern router has an integrated firewall, and it's a good thing.

To all other users reading: This might be worth a try, because ISP routers are usually hot garbage. There's a non-zero chance your ISP router has some weirdness, bugs or glitches going on and it's impacting your connection. However, I myself used a custom computer with 10 cores, 20 threads and a 2000€ 8-port PCIe network card, and virtually every router/firewall/ operating system underneath the sun, to no avail. Getting a good router can help, but it's not guaranteed to be a solution.

Same here tried many things already but I dont have this bridge mode in Fritzbox but i read about it and that it somehow need to be activated by ISP directly...idk how rly this works...???

You can't change your FritzBox to be in bridge mode directly. You can reset it to default and then never configure it at all. That means you don't even open the web configurator after resetting it. After resetting, you connect the DSL cable with the FritzBox's DSL port as usual, and the dedicated router's WAN port with the LAN1 port of the FritzBox. Input your credentials in the dedicated router and it should work.

For customers of "Deutsche Telekom" it's a little convoluted but you can manage it. The login details given to you by Telekom will always consist of 4 numbers: "Anschlusskennung", "Zugangsnummer", "Mitbenutzer" and "Kennwort". The "Zugangsnummer" can either have exactly 12, or more than 12 digits. If it has exactly 12 digits, your username would be:

Anschlusskennung+Zugangsnummer+Mitbenutzer @t-online.de, all in one string without spaces. "Mitbenutzer" usually should be 0001 if it's not specified otherwise.

If your Zugangsnummer has more than 12 digits, it's like this: Anschlusskennung+Zugangsnummer+#+Mitbenutzer @t-online.de, again in one string without spaces. Same here, Mitbenutzer should be 0001 if not otherwise specified.

For the password you just input the value from "Kennwort".

This is how you'd do this on FritzOS 6.XX, but I'm not sure if this still works (and I can't test it because I'm on fiber now).

Same something similar exist for Fritzbox and where you can click and do PPPOE Passthrough but i dont believe that this has something to do with real bridge mode or ?

This depends on ISP. Some allow multiple PPPoE sessions, most won't. "Deutsche Telekom" for example won't and this checkbox does nothing. It's not a real bridge mode, because this checkbox will allow additional sessions to be created, on top of the already existing one that's been established by the FritzBox.

[dermodemon]

I have an optic cable in my house which is going to the Fiber Media Converter box. Then a regular ethernet cable comes out of this converter box and goes to the openwrt router. I don't have any kind of PPPOE. Just direct connection.
Can i do all of this? Would you mind record a video or some kind of faq

[dervu]

I had bridged GPON and then forced by ISP during another installation (when switching back from ISP2 to ISP1) to have non bridged setup and saw no difference at all, but firewall might be crappy on some routers or like ChristophSmaul1337 said some bugs.

[zouhair_psi]

I’m really sorry, but this doesn’t work anymore. After almost three weeks without desync and with good hit registration, things have started to revert back. I thought three weeks would be enough for testing before posting on this forum, but unfortunately I’m now experiencing desync, bad hit registration, and packet loss again.

[Bobo]

I`ll make a contribution to this as well, in case it helps others.

Download NetworkTrafficView (free app), run it as administrator, after you`ve done that, open your game and start playing.
The app will tell you exactly what ports your game is using.
Once you find out what ports the game is using, you open those ports in the router`s firewall, so you won`t have any issue with traffic through those ports.

Another thing you can do, if your router has the option, give your gaming pc/console priority, so it will get all the bandwidth it needs and all the traffic coming and going from it, will be prioritized over any other device in the network.

An even better option would be to install OpenWRT on the router if it`s compatible.

[ChristophSmaul1337]

Once you find out what ports the game is using, you open those ports in the router`s firewall

Your router's firewall is blocking incoming traffic from the internet on all ports by default. This is to prevent unsolicited connections to your computer from the internet. Connections from "inside" your home network to the "outside" (internet) are always allowed anyways. The only reason why you would open ports in the router's firewall would be if someone from the outside (internet) would want to connect into your home network and access a service on that specific port, without your service establishing a connection first. A good example would be a web server. Let's say I host a webserver on my computer on port 80. If you wanted to connect to my webserver, you'd enter my server's IP into your browser. By entering the address you're initiating the connection to my server. My server doesn't know that your computer exists, so your request is denied by the firewall's default ruleset. However, your client has to make the initial contact with my web server. Without port forwarding, this simply doesn't work. What I would need to do is what you've described: Configure my router to forward requests on port 80 to the computer the web server is running on. With this rule in place, you could now access my web server on port 80.

So far so good. Let's look at modern games and how they handle the connection. Virtually any modern game has a server-client structure. That means that there's a central game server that your client (and all other players, too) connects to. In this case, your client is initiating a connection to the server first (by connecting to it either via matchmaking, or direct connection via console), and the server responds to that request. Outbound traffic is allowed by your router by default anyways, so this works without you touching anything. There is no unsolicited connection coming into your network from the internet, and therefore, port forwarding isn't needed here. If you've paid attention you'll notice that the server would need port forwarding, and I'd bet my house on the fact that at there's some form of port forwarding happening at the datacenter. The majority of modern games, at least the major games like Battlefield, Counter-Strike, VALORANT etc., all are based on this server-client structure, so port forwarding isn't needed to play modern games at all.

Good rule of thumb is this: If you're just participating in an online game and you're not providing or hosting a service, you likely don't need port forwarding. Only when people try to connect to your computer or server(s) is when port forwarding becomes important.

Another thing you can do, if your router has the option, give your gaming pc/console priority, so it will get all the bandwidth it needs and all the traffic coming and going from it, will be prioritized over any other device in the network.

Good suggestion, definitely worth a shot. However, this will only help when the internet is already being used up to capacity by something/someone else, and also only in the upload direction. As long as the internet isn't used by something else, this will do nothing, because there's no other traffic which the router could prioritize your game packets against. If something/someone is constantly running an upload at full speed, this might be worth looking into. The router obviously can't control what's coming into it from the internet, so if you have something/someone downloading at full capacity all the time, this won't help and the download needs to be stopped entirely.

There are attempts at solutions for this, it's called ingress shaping and it attempts to prioritize download traffic. This approach is very heavy on the router's hardware though. For example, I need a somewhat modern 6-core i5-8400 to fully ingress-shape my 1 GBit/s download speed without losing any bandwidth. Your average consumer grade router won't be able to do that.

Also keep in mind that this will only help balance/prioritize traffic within your network. As soon as the packets leave your router towards the internet and encounter the first piece of infrastructure from your ISP, any DSCP/ToS values you might've set will instantly be nuked by the ISP.