You can mess with the code all day long, but you're not getting away from raw latency.
The modern matchmaking approach groups people by skill not latency, so you get a pretty wild mix of latency.
It feels nothing like the old regional servers. Sure the skill mix was varied, but at least you got your ass handed to you in crisp <10ms by actual skill. Now it's all getting knife noscoped around a corner by a guy that rubberbanded 200ms into the next sector of the map already while insulting your mom and wearing a unicorn skin
Good thing they thought of that. Disclaimer: I was at Riot During some of the Valorant dev cycle and the stated goal in this tech blog [0] was a huge goal (keeping latency < 35ms).
This was only really doable because Riot has invested significantly in buying dark fiber and peering at major locations worldwide [1][2]
I've read those articles a couple of times over the years and always found it fascinating they actually built a backbone with dark fibre. That was ten years ago so it would be interesting to see an update.
> The modern matchmaking approach groups people by skill not latency
I work at a game studio and something I have seen is that nobody is on wired anymore. You are poweruser if you are on wired. Significantly the 99% of users will be on mobile or wifi and be 10ms to first hop or two hop.
I miss playing on consistent <10ms servers in the CS 1.6 days.
The Houston/Dallas/Austin/San Antonio region was like a mini universe of highly competitive FPS action. My 2mbps roadrunner cable modem could achieve single digit ping from Houston to Dallas. Back in those days we plugged the modem directly into the gaming PC.
The modern matchmaking approach groups people by skill not latency, so you get a pretty wild mix of latency.
It feels nothing like the old regional servers. Sure the skill mix was varied, but at least you got your ass handed to you in crisp <10ms by actual skill. Now it's all getting knife noscoped around a corner by a guy that rubberbanded 200ms into the next sector of the map already while insulting your mom and wearing a unicorn skin