How to fix high ping in League of Legends
UPDATED
League is more forgiving than shooters, but spikes still cost you Flashes and skill shots. How to check your ping in LoL and how to bring it down.
League of Legends tolerates more latency than a shooter, and many players are fine at 60 to 80ms. What hurts is instability: a spike at the wrong moment and your Flash goes off late or your skill shot fires where the enemy was half a second ago.
Check your ping in game
Press Ctrl+F in a match to show your FPS and ping in the top right corner. If the number jumps around a lot, you have a jitter problem, not just a high-ping problem.
Why your ping depends on your server
You play on the server of your account's region, and the data center is fixed. Players in Eastern or Southern Europe naturally have higher ping to the EU servers than players close to them. Nothing in your settings changes that distance. What you can fix is everything between you and your ISP.
What is good enough?
Under 60ms is great, up to 90ms is fine for League. Jitter should stay under 20ms. Rekt-al Net judges every result by shooter standards (60ms, 15ms jitter), so a League player can get a Rekt-al Net verdict on a connection that is perfectly fine for League. Run the test against the AWS region closest to your League server.
The fixes that work for every game
- Use a cable. Wi-Fi adds a few milliseconds and, worse, random spikes whenever a neighbor's network or your microwave interferes. See Wi-Fi vs Ethernet.
- Stop everything else using the line. Cloud backups, game updates (Steam, Battle.net, consoles in rest mode), 4K streams and video calls in the same household. If your ping only goes bad when someone else is online, that is bufferbloat.
- Restart the router and modem. Boring, but consumer routers do degrade after weeks of uptime.
- Turn on QoS or SQM in the router, if it has it. Smart Queue Management (often called “fq_codel” or “CAKE”) is the single best fix for lag that appears under load.
- Pick the closest server region the game lets you choose. Every 1,000 km of fiber adds roughly 10ms of round trip.
- Check the route. If your ping is high only to one region while everything else is fine, your ISP may be routing badly. A gaming VPN (ExitLag (Werbung), WTFast and similar) can help in exactly this case, and only this case. If your own line is the problem, a VPN can't fix it.