Ping
Ping is the round-trip time between a player and a server, the number shown in most in-game network displays. It measures distance and routing quality, not bandwidth. A fast connection to a distant server can still produce a high ping, which is why server placement likely matters more than connection speed.
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What Does a Ping Number Actually Measure?
A ping number is one round trip, to one destination, at one moment. The client sends a small message, the other end replies, and the time between the two is the figure in the corner of the screen.
That makes it useful, and narrow. It says how long the last trip took. It says nothing about the next one.
Two other measurements fill that gap:
Jitter is how much the round trip varies from one packet to the next. A steady connection is easier for a game to work with than a fast but erratic one, because the client's smoothing is tuned to a rhythm.
Packet loss is how many packets never arrive at all. A low ping says nothing about the ones that went missing.
That is why connection tests report ping and jitter side by side. Each answers a different question about the same connection, and a player can have a good ping and a bad match at the same time.
In Practices - Insights from Edgegap's Blog
Article's key insights
Region selection is a player complaint, not a feature request: When players ask to pick their server region, they are reporting a latency problem they cannot see or control. The feature they request is one possible answer, and on a smaller playerbase it trades bad matches for unfilled ones.
Latency-based grouping solves the issue that region locking attempts to mitigate: Regions are administrative boundaries. Latency is measured. Grouping players by measured ping keeps distant players out of the same lobby without partitioning the queue by geography.
Relaxing rules over time is the lever most matchmakers underuse: Activision's published research loosens skill constraints faster than connection constraints as queue time grows. The same graduated approach applies to any pooling rule.
Queue time is negotiable when the tradeoff is visible: Players in several communities volunteer to wait longer for better connection or a more filled match. The waiting is not what frustrates them. Not knowing what it buys them is.
Transparency and agency shorten the feedback loop: A visible ping figure and an opt-in to wait for a closer server turn vague blame into something a player can act on, at the cost of exposing numbers you may not want exposed.
How Does Ping Shape a Game's Netcode?
Netcode is built around the delay that ping measures. Two techniques scale directly with it:
Client-side prediction runs ahead of the server by roughly that delay. A higher ping means bigger guesses, and bigger corrections when a guess is wrong.
Lag compensation rewinds the server by the shooter's delay to check what they saw when they fired. A higher ping means a longer rewind.
The rewind is where one player's ping becomes everyone's problem. The shooter's hit counts, so the cost lands on the target, who reached cover on their own screen and was hit anyway.
Respawn put it plainly in its April 2021 servers and netcode deep dive for Apex Legends: "This nonsense can't be eliminated, only transferred between one player or another, because of the simple reality that ping is real and players have different amounts of it."
Riot measured how large that transfer can get. In July 2020, Matt deWet and David Straily calculated that in VALORANT, under baseline conditions, "peekers have ~141ms longer to react than defenders." Network delay is only part of that figure, alongside tick rate and buffering, but it is the part neither player chose.
Netcode decides who pays for the difference in ping. It cannot make the difference smaller.
Why Does the Ping Gap Matter More Than the Ping?
A match is only as fair as the gap between its players. Two players at the same ping meet on equal terms. Two players with the same average but very different pings do not, because every rewind and every correction leans toward one side.
That holds under a ceiling. Two players who both have a poor connection are equal, and still in a poor match. Quality comes first. Fairness is the second test.
Edgegap's 1v1 study (2020) defined fairness exactly this way, as the difference between the two players' round-trip times, and measured what per-match server placement did to it. Choosing the location for each match narrowed the gap in 66% of matches, by 31 ms on average (1v1 case study). The same study names the balancing act: the location that gives one player the lowest ping can widen the gap, and the fairest location can cost some ping.
Competitive 1v1 is arguably the hardest context for that balance, and Rivals of Aether 2 makes it explicit. Its placement chooses "the server maximizing responsiveness (lowest ping for all players on average) and fairness (balanced ping for all players)." The game also shows each player's ping in its main UI, so the players are watching the same number.
What Can a Developer Actually Control?
Not the route. Once packets leave a player's home network, the ISP and the backbone networks behind it choose the path. In 2015, Riot Games' engineering team found that those networks "prioritize a cheaper route over a faster route." No setting in a game changes that.
Two decisions do belong to the developer.
Who is in the match. Put six players from NA-East and one from Europe in the same lobby, and no server location treats the seventh player fairly. The match is decided before it starts. The fix sits in the matchmaker: rules that keep distant players apart, at the cost of match size or queue time.
Where the server runs. A matchmaker can only balance ping it has measured. Measuring each player's round trip to candidate locations before the match forms lets the server start where the gap is smallest. The more locations there are to choose from, the more often one sits on a short, even route for every player.
Edgegap's regional matchmaking deep dive works through both: measuring latency to ping beacons at matchmaking time, and deploying below maximum fill rate, "starting a 6v6 as a 4v4 instead of pulling a seventh player in from another continent."
A word from our sponsor (ourselves!)
Most lag comes from distance, not from code. Edgegap's Edge Cloud is a distributed network with up to 615+ locations available on demand, so each match runs at the best available location for its players. Independent replays of live studio traffic measured a 58% drop in average round-trip time compared with public cloud.
Edgegap's Take (just our opinion, take it with a grain of salt!)
Fair Ping Is Decided Before the Match Starts
By the time a player sees their ping, the two decisions that set it have already been made: who was put in the lobby, and where the server started. Everything netcode does afterwards decides who absorbs the gap, not how big it is.
So when a match feels unfair, look at the matchmaker before the netcode. Check how far apart the players in that lobby were, and how wide the gap was between the best and the worst connection. A rule that keeps distant players apart, and a server placed where that gap is smallest, usually do more for fairness than any lag compensation setting.
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