What is Ping? Ping is the amount of time for information to go from one PC to a designated server and receive a response. If you’re from South African why do you not play on Australian servers, it is closer to you meaning you have the lowest ping possible, right? If only it worked that way. Instead, for South Africans playing online games without local servers find their best server to be the European server. This means most players will range somewhere between 130-240ms to the European server. As a result, any actions done will have a much longer delay than a player playing from Europe. Having been playing competitively since 2016 I have a great deal of experience playing with higher ping over different game genres. Most notably Starcraft II, Overwatch, and Valorant.

Starting in 2016, with Starcraft II, it was my first taste of competitive online games as well as the big issue of playing online from South Africa. In the lower ranks, I never really felt a difference since I generally felt the games I lost were down to my opponent having a bigger army than me. Once I got to diamond, the high ping started to impact my gameplay. There were often games where I felt like I could not outplay my opponent in the small micro engagements and multi-prong aggression, as no matter my reaction speed, my actions would only reflect later than normal.

As a result of this, I decided to focus mainly on the macro-management side of Starcraft II, ensuring that I would always be able to out-muscle my opponent through sheer army size, no matter the lack of ability I had to micro my units in engagements. This did have its downsides when it came to games where my opponent was quite defensive and forced the game to come down to late game engagements where micro became incredibly important.

Once I got to masters I started to realize that I could no longer just rely on overpowering my opponent with sheer army size and decided that I would try and improve my micro and preempt a lot in fights which worked mildly well. My next move to improve was to increase my knowledge of the game and try to outsmart my opponents with either build orders or faking out certain moves to gain an advantage. This would once again help but still, there were a lot of struggles.

Throughout my time in Starcraft II, my biggest struggles always came against early game aggression where it did not matter how well you could macro, if you got out microed, a lot of the time you would lose, so with the ping disadvantage I struggled a lot with dealing with it, and once I put so much focus on micro, my macro went out the window.

Moving on to Overwatch, I could feel the ping difference pretty much instantly. With heroes like Tracer and Widowmaker, it was the most evident. With Tracer a lot of the time you would use blinks or recall and would still end up dying in the same position as if you never used the ability at all. Whereas with Widowmaker, in the 1v1 duel with the enemy Widowmaker there would be a lot of occasions where you would shoot but it would not register on their screen since for them they shot you first. Another hero that I’ve felt it with is Genji, where you very often use deflect and get the sound cue but it still ends up with you dying and the ability still not being used.

Ultimately with Overwatch, I have not found the high ping to hamper my play as much as it did with Starcraft II. Maybe it is down to the fact that I got used to dealing with high ping already so my transition with Overwatch was a lot easier. There are some moments where I do feel that had I had lower ping, I would not have died but those are few and very rarely have a massive impact on the rest of the game.

One positive from having higher ping is that sometimes you can use your ultimate as you are about to die, and because of the high ping it does not register you using the ultimate meaning you still manage to keep it. In situations where losing the ultimate could be game-changing, this can help but it is not something that is incredibly important.

Last but not least, is Valorant. Out of all the games, I have felt the pain of having high ping the most in Valorant. Very similar to how Widowmaker works in Overwatch, you feel it with Valorant all of the time. There are numerous occasions in a Valorant game where you can be standing very close to the enemy shoot at them a few times but only end up hitting them once and sometimes not at all. Yes, not all shots are going to hit because of spread, but there have been times when I’m less than a meter away and my shots still do not register.

Furthermore, peaking with higher ping is a lot harder since the enemy is very likely going to see you first in general, and now adding in the factor of high ping you have to be very quick when peaking. Even when holding angles you do not really get a peaker’s advantage since you’ll see and shoot at them, in pretty much the same time frame that they would.

As time has gone on, much like with Starcraft II and Overwatch, playing with high ping has gotten a bit easier now that I’m used to it. I think what made it a bit harder, is having played Counter-Strike, where there are local servers, moving to Valorant which does not, was quite an adjustment to make.

Overall, having higher ping makes playing online harder and serves as a hindrance in certain regards. However, it is not something that is going to completely prevent you from ranking up if you do deserve to rank up. The higher your rank gets the more it will impact you and very likely your climb will be slower but do not use this as an excuse to say, I’m gold because of ping, no, rather finds ways to work around it and still try to get better at the game!