What is a good ping for gaming? Numbers for shooters, MOBAs and more
UPDATED
What ping is good, what is playable and what is unplayable, by game type. Plus why distance sets a floor that no setting can beat.
Ping is the time a packet needs to get from your device to the server and back, measured in milliseconds (ms). Lower is better. But “good” depends heavily on what you play: a ping that ruins a CS2 duel is perfectly fine in a strategy game.
Good ping by game type
| Game type | Great | Playable | Painful |
|---|---|---|---|
| Competitive shooters (CS2, Valorant) | under 30ms | up to 60ms | over 80ms |
| Battle royale (Fortnite, Apex, Warzone) | under 40ms | up to 70ms | over 100ms |
| Fighting games (rollback netcode) | under 40ms | up to 80ms | over 120ms |
| MOBAs (League, Dota 2) | under 50ms | up to 90ms | over 130ms |
| MMOs, strategy, card games | under 80ms | up to 150ms | over 200ms |
Rekt-al Net judges by shooter standards: under 60ms ping and under 15ms jitter, with no packet loss, is a clean connection.
Why ping alone is not enough
A steady 50ms is better than a ping that swings between 20 and 90ms. The swing is called jitter, and it is what makes games feel inconsistent. Lost packets are worse still: see packet loss.
The distance floor
Light in fiber travels at about 200,000 km per second. A round trip over 1,000 km of cable therefore takes at least 10ms, before any router has touched the packet, and real cables never run in a straight line. Playing from Vienna on a server in Frankfurt (around 600 km) can be very fast; playing from Europe on a US East server (over 6,000 km) can never get much below 80 to 100ms. No setting, router or VPN beats that physics. Pick the closest server.
Run the Rekt-al Net test and pick the server region you play on to see where you stand.