Network status
Live health of each region's game server, straight from the server itself. The hub figures are the real in-game round trips of the players connected at that moment. Your own ping is timed separately, from this browser to each hub, so you can see where you sit against the room.
The route optimiser clause 8.5 permits
Some of your ping is the route, not the distance. Only one of those is physics.
Your traffic does not go straight to the hub. It goes wherever your provider hands it off, and that is regularly the long way round. Wherever this page catches a route doing it, it prints what the same trip costs routed properly in green, beside what you are paying now - and ExitLag carries the traffic over its own network to go and get it.
Ping from around the world
What each hub costs from where people actually live, measured on home connections rather than in datacentres. Shorter bar wins. Where a route is going further than it needs to, the green figure is what the same trip costs once it goes the short way - and ExitLag is how you go and get it.
Europe
North America
South America
Asia
Oceania
Africa
Every green figure in this table is a route somebody is not taking. ExitLag is the League's permitted way of taking it, and the only one clause 8.5 allows.
Your ping is the distance, plus whatever detour your provider picked.
ExitLag carries your traffic over its own network to a server beside the hub rather than leaving the route to whichever hand-off your provider happened to choose, and its optimiser picks that path in real time. It is the only one the League permits - clause 8.5 names ExitLag and no other tunnel - because it changes the path and nothing else, so a player using it and a player who is not are competing on equal terms. ExitLag state the service complies with game rules and carries no ban risk.
Measured detours, worst first
- Seoul to Europe296164ms
- Vancouver to Europe211142ms
- Dubai to Europe173105ms
- Vancouver to North America8658ms
4 of the 108 routes measured for this page - 54 cities against two hubs - are going further than they need to. Where it happens it is worth more than every other setting in the game put together: Seoul pays 132 ms for its detour to Europe. Your own city is marked in the table above, and your own connection in the check at the top.
A bent route does not just cost you milliseconds. It can cost you a region.
Which hub you queue in is decided by which one you can actually reach, and a route going the long way round can put the nearer hub behind the far one. The League then sends you to the far one, and from there it is not a ping problem - it is the wrong queue, the wrong hours and the wrong half of the ladder. Straighten the route and the nearer hub wins again.
Manual optimisation is what makes that a thing you can actually do: rather than taking the automatic pick, you choose the route and the server your traffic leaves through, which means choosing one on the near side of the detour.
Measured on this page today
- Seoul is sent to North America
- Europe is the nearer hub and costs 296 ms today against 181 ms to the other one. Routed properly it is 164 ms - and both queues open up.
Route optimiser
Chooses the path for you in real time, with servers and configurations held per region.
Manual optimisation
Or overrule it. Pick the route and the server your traffic leaves through yourself instead of accepting the automatic answer.
Multipath
Sends your data down as many as four routes at once, so congestion or loss on one of them does not have to reach the server.
Traffic Shaper
Prioritises the game and caps what everything else on the connection is allowed to take while you play.
Multi-Internet
Runs up to four connections at the same time and fails over automatically if one of them drops.
Permitted outright
Clause 8.5.2 allows it in every CSL match. Nothing to declare before a scrim, no referee call to make, no risk to a result.
Where it will not help. Most routes already go the short way, and then your ping is simply the distance - a tunnel is one more machine in the middle, so on those it costs you a little rather than saving you anything. No green figure beside your city means there is nothing here to recover, and this page will not invent one: the green number is the ordinary cost of that distance on an honest route rather than the speed of light, because no real route has ever reached the floor.
Which is what the trial is for. Run the check at the top of this page with ExitLag on and with it off, and keep whichever number is lower - the 3 days cost nothing and take no card, and refunds can be requested within 7 days of subscribing under their terms. The ExitLag links on this page are referrals, so taking one up supports the League at no extra cost to you. Using ExitLag is never required to play: no match, region or ranking depends on having it, and clause 8.5.3 forbids using it to appear to be somewhere you are not.
Reading this page
- My ping is much higher than the median
- Then the hub is not your problem - the other players on it are getting the lower number on the same machine at the same moment. Distance is usually the whole story: someone in North America on the EU hub is paying for the Atlantic crossing, and no amount of server tuning shortens it. Queueing for the other region is the fix.
- The median itself has jumped
- That is the hub, and everyone on it is feeling the same thing. The dashed line on each chart is what that hub normally runs at, so a spike above it is real rather than a matter of who happens to be playing.
- Why my ping here differs from the one in game
- The check on this page is an HTTPS request answered by the hub itself, so it travels the same route to the same machine - but the game speaks UDP on its own port, and the two are not obliged to agree exactly. Expect it to be close and to move together; trust the in-game number for the precise figure. If the check cannot complete at all, that is the check being blocked on your network, not the game server refusing you.
- Where the city figures come from
- Volunteers around the world host small measurement probes on their home connections, and we ask the ones in each city to ping both hubs. That means the numbers include the last mile - the broadband or fibre hop at the end - which a datacentre-to-datacentre test leaves out and which is usually the difference between a figure and a figure you can actually get. They are still someone else's connection rather than yours, so treat the table as what to expect from a city and the check above as what you personally have.
- Would ExitLag help my ping
- Where your route is going further than it needs to, yes, and this page tells you exactly what it is worth rather than asking you to take anyone's word for it. That route gets a second figure in green beside the one you are paying - on your own ping test and in your city's row - and the green figure is what the same distance costs when the traffic goes where it should. The gap between the two is what a shorter path hands back, and on a badly bent route it is worth more than every other setting in the game put together. It can open the other region up as well, where a straightened route would make the nearer hub the better one, which is a whole queue you had been written out of. ExitLag is the League's permitted way of taking that path - clause 8.5 names it and no other tunnel - and the free trial is long enough to settle the question against the numbers on this page. The page watches for the temporary version too: if a whole city starts measuring far above its own normal it says so at the top, and the figure to aim at there is what that city was getting yesterday. When there is no green figure beside your city, there is nothing to recover - your ping is the distance, an extra hop can only add to it, and this page will say so rather than sell to you. Either way, prove it: run the check at the top with it on and off, and keep whichever number is lower.
- Server frame rate
- Rust hubs run at 60. When this drops the server is deciding what happened later than it should, which feels like lag even on a perfect connection - and unlike ping, it is entirely ours to fix.
- Still think something is wrong
- Take a screenshot of this page at the time it happened and post it in the Discord. A report with a timestamp against these numbers is one we can actually chase.
Settle it against the numbers on this page.
Run the check at the top with ExitLag on and with it off, and keep whichever number is lower. The 3 days cost nothing, so the answer does too - and if your route was already going the short way, this page would rather you found that out than paid to discover it. Using ExitLag is never required to play.