Valorant: How to fix your high ping problem

Latency and FPS drops are two of the greatest evils for any tactical first-person shooter, whether it be CS: GO, Overwatch, or in this case, Valorant.

The closed beta has been out for more than a month now and many lucky beta-key holders have gotten access to the games through Twitch drops by watching a tonne of Valorant streams. However, as expected of a closed beta release, the Valorant servers are plagued with bugs, errors, and more often than not, high ping and latency.

And though the error codes might be a fault on the part of Riot and the downtime of their Valorant servers, the high ping, on the other hand, might just be an issue at the end of your ISP.

What causes these large lag spikes in Valorant?

COVID-19 is a major reason for higher latency in games (pic courtesy: Micky)

Internet connections which are wireless or have a high number of active users will often give you large lag spikes and higher ping. Background online applications might also be another thing that’s eating up your bandwidth and causing you to miss your head-shots in Valorant.

In a recent developer's take, Dave Hieronymus had stated that “The biggest problem is the same one hitting everyone else: there’s massive amounts of internet traffic and players are coming in from many, many different ISPs,”

Due to the recent developments surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic; social distancing and stay at home orders have caused local internet providers to face high amounts of online traffic.

Having to allocate enough bandwidth to all users might just be stretching your connectivity and making you face higher in-game latencies at times.

Solution to the problem

To be honest, the permanent solution to this is in the hands of your local internet provider. However, there are certain things that you can try on your end to try and mitigate the problem as much as possible.

• Upgrading your internet plan to the one that gives more speed and bandwidth.
• Optimizing your router settings.
• Limiting the number of active connections on your network.
• Setting VALORANT to “high priority” in the network column of the Task Manager.
• Restricting background applications and downloads.

Pic Uploaded by WTFast

If none of the above seem to work, you can always subscribe to a latency reducing software such as WTFast.