Deadlock lag and high ping: causes and fixes

Deadlock is fast: lanes, guns, abilities and movement all at once. A connection that's fine for a slower game can feel sticky here. Here's where Deadlock's lag comes from and which parts of it you can fix.

How Deadlock connects you

Deadlock is a Valve game, and it plays over Valve's own network like CS2 and Dota 2. Your traffic enters that network at one of Valve's relays and travels inside it to the match server. In Europe those relays are in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw and Madrid.

So the stretch that decides your ping is short but important: from your PC, through your home network and your provider, to Valve's nearest relay. Most of the difference between a good and a bad Deadlock connection lives there.

Deadlock is also still being developed, and Valve changes it often, menus included. The reliable way to judge your connection is to look at what it does over a whole match, not at one number on one screen.

Find out which kind of lag it is

• Everything a little late, all the time: a high, steady ping. Distance, or a long road to Valve.
• Fine, then a burst of rubberbanding: spikes. Something on the way is queueing, often on your own line. What causes ping spikes shows how to tell where in ten minutes.
• Shots and abilities that don't land, enemies that jump: packet loss. Even a little hurts in a game with this much happening.
• Stutter in big fights with steady network numbers: your frame rate, not the network.

A simple test tells home from route: run a ping to a Frankfurt or Amsterdam server while nothing else uses the line, then again while the evening lag is there. If the home part (your router) stays low and the rest climbs, it's the route.

What helps

1. A cable instead of Wi-Fi. The biggest single fix for spikes and loss. Wi-Fi or Ethernet explains why.
2. A quiet line. Downloads and uploads elsewhere in the home make game packets wait.
3. Router queue settings (SQM, or QoS that's actually configured) if several people share the connection.
4. A better route when the ping to a nearby Valve hub is higher than distance explains, or gets worse every evening.

What doesn't help: a faster plan (Deadlock uses little bandwidth), "ping booster" settings that change nothing on the path, and a general VPN that moves all your traffic through a server chosen for privacy. Gaming VPN or game routing explains the difference.

Where NoSpike fits

NoSpike's Deadlock entry is verified: it uses Valve's own published list of servers, so NoSpike moves only Deadlock's traffic and leaves everything else on your normal connection.

It measures your own route and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes the game only when a relay is faster. It checks again every minute, never moves you in the middle of a match unless the route fails, and when your own route is already the best, the app says so and leaves it.