Vainglory Forums

My matches are commonly lagged, sometimes with 10000ms or greater pings. At best, this wrecks the game. At worst, I go AFK and abandon the match. This thread is a presentation of my evidence and my proposed root cause.

I play using an iPad Mini Retina. This is recommended hardware for playing Vainglory. It has two-band WiFi, 5GHz and 2.4GHz. I use an Asus dual-radio WiFi router. I used an Ubiquiti spectrum analyzer to select the channels. The 5GHz channel is otherwise vacant, and the 2.4GHz channel only has distant interference. My ISPs are Comcast Cable and AT&T ADSL. The iPad also has 3G/LTE with AT&T. I live in the Midwest, USA, near a major metropolitan area. I experience very little bandwidth or throughput issues when audio/video streaming, cloud storage, VPN, etc.

When I experience very bad lag (>5000ms) on Vainglory over WiFi, I quit Vainglory (double-tap the home button and terminate the Vainglory task), switch to 3G or LTE, and restart Vainglory. This re-routes my game pings through a different network (i.e. switches from Comcast Cable to AT&T 3G). In late game, the respawn cooldown period allows plenty of time to adjust network settings after I die. Sometimes, switching networks fixes the lag, but not always. Other times, I try up to three different network routing during the course of a single game (WiFi, 3G/LTE, and VPN) without any improvement. This suggests the problem is not on my local routing (since three distinctly different routings were attempted), but on the Vainglory local routing. I go through several games with no noticeable lag at all, but when the lag appears, it appears on all network routings I attempt. I lose most of these games because my character gets killed to much, or my character is intermittent. The most infuriating aspect is hitting an ability icon, but if activated during a lagged ping, it doesn't register with the server. During a team fight, this means certain death, and usually, also one or more of my teammates.

I used a Kali (Linux) laptop to confirm that Comcast and AT&T communicate over different Tier 1 routing. In addition, I subscribed to StrongVPN that has servers in several USA locations. This allows me to tunnel my Vainglory feed directly into Tier 1/Level 3 routing without going through the AT&T or Comcast networks (VPN "pokes through" Comcast).

Additionally, I have played Vainglory on several other (unknown) networks, using hotel WiFi in various USA and European cities. I used both native hotel WiFi and VPN. With the VPN, I either used the VPN setting on the iPad, or generated a VPN hot-spot using my Kali laptop. In this case, my laptop was connected to the hotel's Ethernet cable and created the hotspot with a dual-radio travel router. Admittedly, hotel internet isn't the best benchmark, but it is another datapoint nonetheless.

In summary, I have played and pinged and poked at the Vainglory servers from all sides, and the lag still affects gameplay. I have never voluntarily abandoned a match (Karma lv. 18) but have plenty of games where my gameplay is involuntarily interrupted. Luckily, I have multiple connectivity options, and can switch ISPs in a few seconds, which sometimes alleviates the laggy condition. My conclusion is the lag originates locally from the Vainglory server side, not on my local side.

Note: this effectively makes the Karma ranking irrelevant. Since high-Karma players are equally vulnerable to connectivity interruptions as low-Karma players, there is no benefit to Karma levels.

Please don't respond to this thread with "you are full of nonsense, I never have lag!" Instead, figure out your routing to the Vainglory servers and post your findings. Indeed, there are probably some routing options that have higher throughput or fewer bottlenecks to the Vainglory servers. I'd love to know your routing if you are playing Vainglory lag-free. I've tried many routing strategies, and haven't found a good one yet. If we find one, there's probably a VPN provider that can pipe nearly straight there.

I play vainglory through VPN because my university network wifi blocks online gaming, i use iPad 4 and Onavo VPN. I dont face lags, my pings around 200-350, it only lags on a sudden like the game freezes then i have to switch off my wifi and VPN and then back on and restart game then it works fine.

And I am in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, but I play in North America region.