The links in the hub connect directly to the ip of the server, but since most ISPs can't be trusted to give their users good international routing links, there is a non-trivial benefit to having oversees users connect to a local node, that then tunnels the traffic to the actual server.

You can't do such a feature under IP based connections without geocasting, and that requires actual ownership of your IP as well the ability to directly send broadcast packets to the internet at large. Something that puts the bill of such a system in the thousands of dollars a year range.

However, geo-dns is cheap as fuck now and days. I can do a 5 node regional network for under 30 bucks a month. (try it, byond://bagil.aws.tgstation13.org:2337 and you will download resources from a local node(DE, US-west, US-east, AU, (fifth region tbd)) before being redirected (this doesn't tunnel yet) to the real game server (US-Florida)).

So if we had some way to control what address the hub uses to connect to the server, we could solve that issue.

Abuse can be handled by having the hub attempt a connection to the given address and verify its a byond server running the same hub with the same hostname specified.

Note: /tg/ doesn't need this feature directly, we aren't on the hub (and i could trick it for if we were by using NAT routing to a redirector) but our forks do.