With the Battle Royale mode in Fortnite being very competitive and fast paced, you obviously want to make sure you have little to no lag & ping. This article is primarily about internet lag, where your game commands feel a little slow.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t seem to know about a small setting which can be adjusted. This is your matchmaking region setting.
What this setting essentially does is chooses which server you’re connected to. The closer the server, the less network lag you get.
For example, if you are playing from Europe but connected to the North American server, you can expect over or close to 300 ping. For me at least, this is unplayable. At least in games like Fortnite that often require skill and battles.
In total, that 300 ping is a .3 second delay after you do an action. So if you aim your gun and shoot, it’s going to take .3 seconds for it to be sent to the server and registered. Your bullet won’t actually fire until that long after you click a button on your mouse or controller. Not a fun way to play at all.
It’s possible to see a lot of important information in-game, such as FPS, Ping, Packet loss and speeds as seen on the image above. You will need to go into the settings menu in Fortnite to enable this option. On the above image, you can see my ping near the top left corner of the screen.
You can check your ping and speeds in a service such as Ookla. Below, we’ll show you how to change your match making region and fix lag on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
Change Your Match Making Region
Whilst on the Fortnite Battle Royale home screen, open the settings area. You can do this by clicking the icon in the top right, which looks like 3 lines. Click the cog icon to open the advanced settings.
From the tabs at the top of the screen, choose ‘Game’. One option around halfway down will be called ‘Matchmaking region’. There are a few options you can switch between such as Europe, Oceania, North America & Asia. Each one will show you what ping you can expect.
Find one that offers the lowest ping in ms and save your changes. Hopefully, when playing Battle Royale mode in Fortnite, your lag and ping will be reduced! If this hasn’t fixed anything, we have a few tips below which can help.
Other steps you can take
Firstly, ensure that you aren’t downloading anything in the background. For example, make sure that your Steam client may not be updating games. If you’re on consoles like the Xbox One or PS4, do the same and make sure no games are updating or download.
Games working away in the background is usually a culprit. You’ll find that they will use up a lot of bandwidth and increase the amount of ping and lag you will get in Fortnite Battle Royale.
If it’s really bad or this didn’t help much, close any other apps or programs in the background. Especially programs that are using your internet connection and downloading data. This mostly includes live & video streaming services such as YouTube, Twitch & Spotify.
To go even further, you can also try closing other services such as web browsers, torrent clients, VPN’s etc. Anything that might be using some of your internet bandwidth. If you are running a torrent client, definitely close it.
Restart your router. One of the easiest fixes for lag and ping is to simply restart your internet. This can be done by simply switching your router off and back on at the wall. Forcing it to reset should help alleviate any problems.
If none of this helps, it could simply be server problems. You can look at the forums and see if anyone else is having these issues.
Otherwise, call up your internet service provider and see if they can help. If you share your house with other people, check that they aren’t downloading or using up most of the bandwidth. This happens in my house constantly!
