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Workaround for getting placed on the wrong servers
Hey everyone,
I am living in Stockholm, which is the capital of Sweden, and I've never before yesterday gotten a game with a server outside of Turkey, and I know many of you have the same issue, from what I've heard it's mostly in Sweden and the UK, but that's just from my experience. Before we begin I'd like to do a disclaimer, everything that I describe and explain in this post, is pure speculations which I believe are true based on the troubleshooting I've done and the responses that I've gotten from Valorant support, so do not accept it as facts.
Also, if you're looking for a simple click a button in Windows or Valorant to fix this, it's not going to happen, and this post won't do you any good, besides hopefully being interesting.
What exactly was my issue?
I've had this game since the first day in the beta, and I've enjoyed the crap out of it. During the entire duration of the beta, up until the very last hour of the last day, I didn't experience a single connection issue. From when the game launched, up until yesterday, I haven't played a single match of Valorant, without 80-100 ping, on Turkish servers with and against Turks who are averaging ~20 ping.
Not only does it happen when I SoloQ, but even when queuing with four Swedish friends without this issue, my presence would flag the entire party to play on Turkish servers, with all of us having a bad connection.
Besides that, I also got these Turkish servers in custom and practice lobbies that I was the leader of, additionally, I couldn't even join a custom game which someone else was the lobby-leader of. After they started the game, it worked fine until after the Agent-select stage, where I would just get completely stuck in the loading screen, and be forced to wait until the game was over until I could get back even to the main menu. Restarting my game instantly put me back into the loading screen.
What have I done to troubleshoot this?
First I did all the basic stuff, starting Valorant with administrator privileges, reinstalling the game, restarting my router and broadband (also disconnecting the power to the network devices for a complete reset), I even reset my entire router's settings. I also fiddled with my DNS settings, testing Google's public DNS, nothing worked.
After that, I wanted to rule out that it wasn't an issue with my computer, so I downloaded the game on my laptop and played with my WiFi, which differs from my desktop which has ethernet, but that made no difference. Then I started to think that it was an issue with my Valorant account, so I made a new one, same issue. So I knew it wasn't an issue with any of my hardware or software, I had tried to reset everything and even try it on different hardware, still the same issue, even my account wasn't at fault.
That's when I tried to play the game on my desktop, connected to the internet through my android phone's hotspot, which essentially just shares my phone-network to my computer as WiFi. Surprise! I got placed on the correct server! Obviously it was unplayable because my network was fluctuating to the left and right, but the problem that I was troubleshooting was solved.
After all this, I reported my findings to Riot, hoping they could point me in the right direction, or help them fix what was causing this.
So, why is this happening?
After doing more research on the topic, as well as speaking to the Riot supporters for about four days now, testing my network connection to their servers in custom games in different conditions, I've come to the conclusion that they are finding the best suitable server for you by looking up your IP in the GeoIP and then matches you to that region.
This isn't necessarily an issue, however, public ipv4 IP-addresses are running out in the world, thus, it's not uncommon for an ISP to set up a public shared IP which you access through them, instead of having your own public IP, here is a visualization of that
And if you're not tech-savvy, and wonder why your connection is bad just because you're playing on Turkish serves, that's simply because the data you're sending and retrieving from Riot's servers have to travel along a farther than intended route, it's comparable to driving a farther distance with your car than driving a shorter distance, Riot gave me an image to illustrate this which might be helpful if you don't understand this
Short really simple explanation of what GeoIP is.
How can you fix this?
It's quite simple, YOU can't, but you can do a workaround if you don't want to wait for Riot to change their way of finding a server for you, which isn't even certain that it is going to happen, if I were to implement a system which searches for the best possible server, I would've pinged the servers and measure the response-time to see which has the lowest, but I can't speak for why Riot has chosen to go a certain route, neither do I know why.
Anyhow, If you've read the entire post thus far (.. I know, it's a long one), then you understand that your resulting public IP is at fault for the terrible connection and the wrong servers, so what can you do? You can contact your ISP, and demand to get connected to a new public shared IP than your current, and hope that this one isn't in the Turkish GeoIP database that's at fault here, it's gambling essentially. If you don't mind having a public IP, you can contact your ISP about that, which was what I did, and it works.
Are public IP's as secure as a private IP that connects to a shared public IP? Nope, the risk is the same as the advantage, anyone can access your IP, so you have to wage the pros and cons. You can read more about that here..
Before and after statistics of my network transmission
I want to share some PingPlotter screenshots which show my network traffic between me and the target at Riot during all of these different conditions.
Here is the screenshot of my Laptop, connected through WiFi without public IP.
Here is when I connected my desktop to my phones 4G hotspot and got the correct server. As you can see in the screenshot, this works, which is obvious because I'm on the correct server, but it's also extremely unstable, and even more unplayable than Turkish servers.
Finally, here is the final result on my desktop, with public IP. This plot is also very interesting because you can see that my traffic with my ISP lessened with my own public IP as well since I don't have to get their shared public IP.
Final thoughts
I very much hope this helps someone as I know how annoying it is to play with this connection. Also, I have no idea why this problem occurred for me when the game launched, as it worked flawlessly in the beta, some things will just remain a mystery.
Have a good day!
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