High ping is the stuff of nightmares for gamers. Wanting to relax and play out a couple of matches only for you to never even get the chance to try and win because your ping is high is a type of frustration that’s hard to describe to a non-gamer. So how do you handle it on the fly when it happens? Why is your ping so high in Fortnite?

The most likely reason why you have such high ping in Minecraft is a poor internet connection and network stability. It almost always has nothing to do with the game itself. If you usually don’t experience high ping while playing, the cause might be that someone is sucking up all the bandwidth on your network, so there’s little left for you to play out your Fortnite match in peace.

Although the ladder is the most common reason why someone might run into high ping issues in Fortnite, it certainly isn’t the only reason. I’ll aim to list all the others in the rest of this article, explain how and why high ping affects your gameplay so badly, and explain the practical difference between high ping and low FPS.

Explaining ping

Ping or ms is the time it takes for the command you input to go through and actually play out through the servers. If you have 8 ping, that means that it will take 8 milliseconds for the command you input to go through, whereas if you have 100 ping, it will take 100 milliseconds. Although that isn’t a lot, in a competitive game like Fortnite, having a 100 millisecond command input advantage will make a whole world of difference between winning and losing.

How it affects your gameplay

Now that we know what ping actually is let’s look at Fortnite as a game and discuss how higher ping will affect your gameplay experience.

I would argue that the two most important things you do in Fortnite are building and shooting things. Building can provide you with a strategic advantage, whereas shooting will win you the game in the end when you’re the last man standing. A large delay in any of those things will set you back a ton.

The first thing to mention is shot registration. The higher your ping, the longer it will take for the server to register your shot command, leading to you missing your enemies and them killing you instead.

In regards to building, you want to build as quickly as possible, but due to the high ping, your edit or build might not be placed properly or at all because the build command you input didn’t reach the servers or didn’t reach it at the right time correctly.

Another common thing you’ll experience with high ping is called rubber banding, but that’s something you’ll experience in any game with high ping, which is where your character keeps going back into place and repeating the same walk command.

Other possible causes of high ping

A common reason for high ping is if you’re playing on a server that’s just too far for your location. To give you an example, If you’re from North America and are playing on a European server, high ping shouldn’t come as a shock to you.

A few more reasons for high ping are if you have multiple processes running in the background while playing, like downloading content, or just having multiple applications that use the internet running.

Nowadays, most of us like to play games on Wifi, but it can cause high ping for some. A wired ethernet connection is far more stable and will make sure that you take some sort of priority when it comes to resource allocation on your home network.

Of course, there are more reasons why someone might have high ping while playing Fortnite, but there are the most common ones, and one of these should be the reason why you’re experiencing it.

FPS vs. ping

Now that we know what ping is, what’s the difference between ping and FPS, and how do they correlate with one another?

Although both affect your gameplay experience, a high FPS will result in smoother and much better visuals. Ping, on the other hand, represents the responsiveness and interaction with game servers.

You can have amazing ping and still feel miserable playing because you have low FPS and vice versa. FPS, or frames per second, as the name suggests, is the number of frames that your device can display and process in one second. If you play with 144 FPS, your computer effectively handles 144 frames per second and every little thing that happens in that one second.

You can see much more details, and your reaction time will be better as a consequence. Although FPS doesn’t affect gameplay much, a player with low FPS will definitely be at a disadvantage over someone with high FPS.

At some point, though, the FPS stops mattering since the differences between the frames aren’t all that visible to the average human eye.

Checking your ping before going into a game

One way you can stop playing Fortnite with high ping is to check if your ping is high before you go into a game. You’ll have to access the command prompt for this, so let’s see how you can do it:

1. Press the Windows key + R key. This will open a new window for you.
2. In the dial box of the newly opened windows, type in ‘cmd’ and press enter.
3. In the window that you just opened, you will have to type in ‘ping’ followed by your IP address and the -t. It should look something like this ‘ping 192.098.73.90 -t’. Press enter.
4. Your ping will start popping up under ‘ms’

If you’re using a Mac computer, you will have to go into Applications in your Finder, then go into Utilities, and then Terminal. The Terminal is just another Apple’s own version of a command prompt.

Playing online competitive games with real human teammates can be frustrating, but luckily, you only have yourself to rely on in Fortnite. Nonetheless, the experience of playing out a match of Fortnite is definitely more enjoyable when you know you’re playing with actual people of varying skill levels. It’s no news that game devs have started playing with adding bots to their games, and sadly, Fortnite is no different, but how many bots are there in Fortnite?

As mentioned before, bots were introduced into Fortnite quite some time ago, and to make queue times faster, they divided the games in which you’ll play against bots into three tiers. If there are a hundred players in the lobby, players can have 75, 35, or 20 bots in their game.

Now that you know how many bots you can run into in your games let’s see if it’s easy to tell which players are bots and how to do a little test before the game starts. I’ll also talk about the general problem of bots in online competitive games and when it all began in Fortnite and other online PvP games.

The beginning of bots in Fortnite

It all started in 2019 when chapter 2, season 1 of Fortnite, was released. Bots were announced prior to it, but they were supposed to help newer players improve their skills without that overwhelming feeling you get when you suck at an online game you just started playing.

It is said that bots play a crucial role in balancing the matches since they can do anything that a human can but only with little less accuracy. This gave newer players the feeling and sense of accomplishment and fulfillment when they’d win their battle royale matches while simultaneously improving their skills slightly.

Of course, you can only truly get better at the game when you experience playing against seasoned veterans, but this was the perfect way to ease noobies into the whole ordeal. But, of course, leaving it at that would have been utopia.

Sooner or later, bots also began showing up in seasoned players’ matches. If we are to believe the data, it’s not because Fortnite has fewer and fewer players. It does counter logic a bit because why would they then put the bots in games to avoid excessive queue timers if there are enough players to fill out the whole lobby?

Things are just not adding up at this point. Whatever the reason for Fortnite developers adding bots to players’ games, it’s definitely not a problem only Fortnite players face.

How bots work in Fortnite?

As I mentioned before, they can build, walk, and shoot at players just like any player can. They can even win a game if they manage to shoot you, and you’re a total noob. Of course, more skilled players will get bots that are harder to beat and vice versa.

Although players report being able to tell when a bot is in their game right away, that was over two years ago. With each passing update, the bots likely get better at the game because they learn to play it just like you and me.

Of course, there are still ways to tell whether a player is a bot, but I’ll discuss that further a bit later on in the article.

The bot problem in competitive online games

But why are bots even a problem in competitive online games? In a game like Fortnite, they’re a problem since it’s a PvP game. If people wanted to play against bots, they would play out a campaign mode PvE game. You’re selling the experience that players are to play with other players but give them bots instead.

What further complicates things is that high-skill players also get bots in their games, which kills the fun and challenging aspect of the game. Many high-skill players are also streamers. Streaming an almost exclusively bot game is not something people will enjoy watching since there’s no skill expression.

Many other competitive online multiplayer games are faced with the bot problem, and it becomes even worse when you’re given an advantage over the other players if your team consists of 5 actual humans, whereas the other team has 1 or 2 bots playing. It gives your team an unfair advantage, and the outcome of the game is already predetermined.

Forcing games with bots in Fortnite

If, on the other hand, you’d like to relax with a bot lobby game, there’s an easy way for you to do just that. You can actually add bots to your friends list, and that’s what you’ll use to get a bot lobby.

First, you’ll add a bot like 89.bot.lobbies to your friends list. The bot will accept the request, and then you just need to add them to your matchmaking lobby, choose the game mode you want to play, and begin matchmaking. You only have 90 seconds to do this since the bot will leave the lobby if you don’t after the 90 seconds have passed.

Once you’re in the pre-game phase, you want it to last for longer than a minute. This is a good indicator that you are in a bot lobby. If it doesn’t work, it’s highly possible that it has been patched, and you’ll have to add a different bot to your friends list for it to work again.

Telling if the players in your lobby are bots

Since bots aren’t perfect and they have to operate with some time of pattern present, you can learn about some of these patterns, skip them, and check if the player in your game is a bot and how many of them are.

The best way to find out if you’re in a game with bots is right at the beginning, before you even get out of the battle bus. Don’t exit the battle bus immediately; the bots will wait for you to jump out first and will only follow.

Bots also don’t tend to build structures. They usually build only one ramp or wooden wall. They also like to shoot from very long distances and aimlessly in random directions.