Valorant Ping

Coopermar · August 8, 2020

I have been playing Valorant since first couple days of beta. The lowest ping I have ever gotten to a server is 43ms. That ping is to Illinois, I live in Eastern PA. Being where I am, I would expect to get much lower ping, around 15ms, to N. Virginia(Ashburn). However, I get 59ms to Virginia.

N. Viriginia is about 1/3 the distance to me than Illinois is, yet I get lower ping to Illinois.

My friend who lives nearby gets about 24ms to N.Virginia when we play together.

For context, I get 5ms ping in CS and 13ms in Siege.

My ping is constant in game. I have good enough down/up such that I do not get spikes.

I have seen people say it could be routing. I tried playing on multiple vpns/routing programs (Haste/WTFast) with no fix.

While I realize that 45-70 ping isn't bad, it is definitely noticeable and annoying. I notice myself having to lead shots a bit in DM.

Not sure if this is the right place for this post, but I tried posting on Valorant Reddit and they deleted it for some reason.

Mad153 · August 8, 2020

so you want a fix? I'm confused.

You can't really change your ping time...

Bombastinator · August 8, 2020

To elaborate on @Mad153’s statement.

I’m going to go with the “people”’answer. Ping is affected by the geography of the network, so distance means more network, but what is in the network can matter more than distance. That ping time includes every switch and router and connection between you and the valorant server. If the network owner (which isn’t you) have older equipment or a less direct route or more switching it’s just going to be slower. There are very high speed “backbones” for example and if the network you connect to happens to connect to one of those fairly directly you will get a faster speed regardless of where you are. College towns for example tend to have faster internet because colleges tend to have good back bone connections. How they connect and to what though, while not random, is not controllable. “Pseudo random” perhaps. I don’t think this one is even in the user controllable space. If there is more than one isp in your area changing that might change something. Or not. ISPs generally rent stuff from other companies and each other in a big tangled mess. If they’re all using the same junction and that junction is slow it wouldn’t make any difference. If you wanted to go super hardcore you could maybe find out where the signal from your house to the server actually goes, look for bottlenecks, and implore some gigantic company to upgrade a whatever in a particular place. Effect would be random, and probably very slow if it had any effect at all. Weeks of work, many phone calls, much searching, still could amount to nothing. Also there might be a really good reason a particular company does what it does and your proposal might actually make things slower if you weren’t just dismissed by someone who understands their network as “that idiot again”