Question High Pings ONLY on Valorant.

[Shaimasu]

Been an ongoing issue for a couple weeks now, majority of the time im trying to play im fluctuating between 100-400ms. Seems like certain times of the day the pings will go back to normal(around 23ms) but always when i get off work and go to play they are sky high. I've troubleshooted with riot themselves to try and see if the issue is possibly isolated to my pc and everything they've instructed me to do didn't fix the issue, my fiance also experiences the same issues on her pc. The pings are fine on any other game so it is isolated to specifically valorant itself. I've also spoken to my ISP and they said there was an issue with something, a tech came out to fix it and the issues still persist. Currently awaiting the Tier 2 tech to contact me back to discuss with them. Wanted to see if anyone else has ever experienced this same issue, it is so confusing. Have a 500mbps down, both on LAN cables.

 

[bill001g]

Where are you getting ping times from. Are you running actual ping tests or are you using some number from the game they call ping.

The ones in games tend to tell large lies. If the game say gets busy processing video frames and then finally reads the "ping" response it will blame all time taken on the network even though the response packet was sitting in a buffer waiting to be processed.

That though does not fully explain your issue. Time of day issue tend to always be other people traffic. These are the worst issue because it means something is overloaded. Unless you have all 20 of your kids coming home and overloading your internet it tends to be outside your house. You generally can not fix if some fiber is overloaded between ISP or in this case if a server farm is overloaded at some riot data center. No company will admit they overloaded stuff and they generally can't fix it quickly because they must spend money to do it.

You can do some more detailed testing but I suspect it will just confirm it is a issue with RIOT. Your best test is to leave constant ping run to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1. These will confirm that everything in your house is good and the path through your ISP to google or cloudflare is good. You could try some of the servers at RIOT but many times there are firewalls that block ping and trace and the game traffic might follow different paths inside riots network than ping traffic does. Everything is virtual now days and thing that seem like routers are actually some kind of load balancing server. Only RIOT can say for sure and they really don't care about 1 customers. If many thousands of users are having issue and complaining on social media "maybe" they will care.

 

[Shaimasu]

Where are you getting ping times from. Are you running actual ping tests or are you using some number from the game they call ping.

The ones in games tend to tell large lies. If the game say gets busy processing video frames and then finally reads the "ping" response it will blame all time taken on the network even though the response packet was sitting in a buffer waiting to be processed.

That though does not fully explain your issue. Time of day issue tend to always be other people traffic. These are the worst issue because it means something is overloaded. Unless you have all 20 of your kids coming home and overloading your internet it tends to be outside your house. You generally can not fix if some fiber is overloaded between ISP or in this case if a server farm is overloaded at some riot data center. No company will admit they overloaded stuff and they generally can't fix it quickly because they must spend money to do it.

You can do some more detailed testing but I suspect it will just confirm it is an issue with RIOT. Your best test is to leave constant ping run to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1. These will confirm that everything in your house is good and the path through your ISP to google or cloudflare is good. You could try some of the servers at RIOT but many times there are firewalls that block ping and trace and the game traffic might follow different paths inside riots network than ping traffic does. Everything is virtual now days and thing that seem like routers are actually some kind of load balancing server. Only RIOT can say for sure and they really don't care about 1 customers. If many thousands of users are having issue and complaining on social media "maybe" they will care.

Thanks so much for the response, I’ve mainly only been going off in game “ping” which is completely awful. Funnily enough there is nobody other than my Fiancé on the internet as well so theoretically should be less congested. It probably is something at Riot it’s just so strange im the only one dealing with it, my luck though I suppose.

 

[Shaimasu]

Thanks so much for the response, I’ve mainly only been going off in game “ping” which is completely awful. Funnily enough there is nobody other than my Fiancé on the internet as well so theoretically should be less congested. It probably is something at Riot it’s just so strange im the only one dealing with it, my luck though I suppose.

also for reference not sure if it helps with the issue but a vpn does stabilize my ping when i am experiencing ping spikes in game.

 

[bill001g]

In general a vpn should always make the ping higher due to the extra distance the traffic must travel to first go to the vpn data center as well as the overhead in the encryption.

In theory the vpn might follow a different path to the game company servers and this could have different latencies that are lower. This is more something you see out of asia where some ISP do not pay for access to the most optimal undersea fibers.

All you can do is try it but no way to predict which if any VPN provider would help. You likely would have to test multiple and it could get rather costly to test. Do not use any free VPN services since there is always something that makes then not actually free.