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.

Hacks in games have been used for decades now as the earliest examples of cheating date back to 1986. Over the years, hacks have only gotten better and their detection harder. Not all hacks are created equally, though. Some are created for players to have more fun, while others give you an unfair advantage over other players. One of the hacks that fall into the second category is the Soft Aim, so what is the Soft Aim in Fortnite specifically, and can you get banned because of it?

Soft Aim in Fortnite is a cheat that helps players aim better. Using the hack will result in more kills overall, but you can’t just mindlessly aim anywhere to get the kill. You still have to work for it. This is what makes the cheat harder to detect. Use of any cheat in a competitive multiplayer game will result in a ban if you get caught and such is the case with Fortnite as well.

Now that you know the answer to what soft aim is and whether it is worth getting it to win more, as a firm believer that cheats will ruin both your and other player’s experience, I want to explain what you can do to get better aim in Fortnite without cheats and get a bit more in-depth about cheats in games like Fortnite in general.

How games recognize hacks

If we’re talking about games in general, many games have anti-cheat systems in place that aim to detect cheats in a player’s system and ban them if the system detects a cheat. However, this system can often get surpassed by other software, so it’s up to the player base to detect if someone might be using a cheat and report it.

This help from the players also helps the cheat systems get better at detecting cheats. Fortnite, specifically, has two anti-cheat systems in place. They use Battle Eye and Easy Anti Cheat.

It’s said that the use of the two anti-cheat systems together has significantly helped players have fewer hackers in their games compared to other games of a similar caliber.

As I’ve said, the community plays an important role in detecting hackers Soft Aim as a hack will be much harder to detect since it doesn’t guarantee that every shot will be a hit; you still have to aim, just not as hard, so it might just be a highly skilled player playing.

Soft Aim vs. Hard Aim

As the names would suggest, Soft Aim slightly helps with aim, whereas with Hard Aim cheats, it’s blatantly obvious that you’re cheating since the AI in charge of aiming takes over completely, and your movement begins to look too robotic.

Why more and more players are using the hack

As with all competitive games, the main goal of Fortnite is to win naturally. Considering that the game has been around for quite some time, it’s only natural that there are a lot of skilled players around, and to surpass them, you need to invest a significant amount of time to make it happen.

Soft Aim is an easy way to improve your rating and overall score. It all comes down to a desire for rewards and a desire to make yourself known as a good player while unwilling or unable to invest the proper time in order to actually have the needed skills.

Most of the time, players are frustrated that they are performing badly, and instead of investing time to improve, they fall back on quick solutions to bypass skill development and achieve success immediately. It all comes down to psychology, but ultimately players use cheats to win instantly without minimal or zero effort invested.

When it comes to Soft Aim specifically, players often use it because it’s harder to detect than Hard Aim.

Getting better aim without the use of hacks

If you’ve found yourself suffering poor results in Fortnite matches, there are a few ways to improve your aim without resorting to cheating. It will take significantly more effort than just installing aimbots, but you also won’t have to be afraid of getting banned or mocked for using cheats.

The golden rule of just about any skill is a regular practice. Dedicate a portion of time each day to practice your aiming by playing, of course, and improvement is guaranteed. There will be some mean comments in the game, especially if you are particularly bad at aiming, but it’s nothing to worry about. Even the best pro players had bad days and “newbie” days. Do you think they remember every single negative and toxic comment they ever got?

Focus on the game’s base mechanics; without those, it’s unlikely you will ever advance in the game. Most players that are consistently bad skipped the tutorial and the learning part of the game and went straight to a competitive mentality, you can’t master anything without proper foundations, and this is especially true for aiming.

You should also, when you’re unable to play, watch pro players and their strategies. Watching skilled players’ streams and YouTube videos and observing their strategies, techniques, and decision-making will help you out a lot, especially if you’ve never mastered the basics of the game. They are pro players for a good reason.

Relax and forget about performance anxiety. This is the most crucial advice I can give you. You’re never going to advance in the game if you’re too anxious to make sound and rational decisions. Fortnite is a fun game, first and foremost, and keeping score is nothing to burden yourself with while you’re still learning how to play.

It might sound cliche, but if you’re consistently bad at aiming, chances are you’re not following even the most basic advice you can find online. Relax, practice, master the fundamentals, and watch other, better players, and you will 100 % improve.