VALORANT gameplay on almost 2,000 ping looks like a fever dream

We’ve all had our own weird and strange encounters playing games online, and some of the ones that I’ve seen or experienced in VALORANT are truly the most bizarre. But nothing has been quite as brain-scrambling as watching what the game looks like during an otherworldly ping spike.

During a harmless game of Swiftplay on Pearl, one player’s ping got all the way up to 1,960 milliseconds (ms), just a few short of reaching 2,000. High ping is the bane of any multiplayer shooter player’s existence, and VALORANT is no exception.

For those unclear on what ping exactly means, it’s the time it takes for a set of data or inputs to go from your device to an online server and back again. In VALORANT terms, it’s how long it takes for the game server to register your movements or actions and then relay them back to you. Measured in milliseconds, most players look to play between the five to 50 ping range, which even at the higher end only translates to 0.05 seconds.

But 1,960 ping converts to 1.96 seconds, meaning this player’s inputs were taking almost an entire two seconds to get from their computer to the VALORANT game server and back. Because of their exceptionally high ping, the game was having trouble registering their inputs, which allowed them to spam Jett’s movement abilities several times in a row. It’s also what caused the enemy players in front of them to seemingly disappear, why they got revealed by Fade’s Haunt despite not being in range when it “hit,” and why their Cloudburst smokes weren’t deploying.

As strange as watching this was, apparently this isn’t even close to how bad it gets for this player. The player said in the comments of their post that their ping was “only” about 2,000 milliseconds but said the highest they remember having was around 16,000. That would mean it would take 16 seconds for information to go to the server and back to their computer, which would make the clip above feel like playing on LAN in comparison.

Please, for your sake, reach out to Riot support if you’re playing like this—or at least check your internet connection.