Are you getting lag in Fortnite? You might not be connecting to your local server.
High ping or latency is only one of the many possible issues when Fortnite starts feeling laggy, although it is probably the most common. What is lag? It can be caused by a few things but the most common cause is connection distance/time between a players PC and the server the game is running on. The data being sent between the PC and server is being delyaed by a slow connection so both machines are often waiting for the next piece of information to arrive before being able to make decisions on that data. This ends up feeling like the game is reacting slowly to the players input.
Another possibility is that servers themselves are under load which can manifest as lag but more often than not you will notice this as in-game stuttering or as gamers have termed it rubber banding. In a third person shooter or Battle Royale like Fortnite, if an opponent is rubber banding the player’s character will make random jerky movements and can make them harder to hit. Often if someone else’s character is rubber banding then your own character will appear to be doing the same to them. It’s not a great experience for either party.
Another thing we need to take into consideration when discussing Fortnite servers is that Fortnite has inbuilt lag compensation. What is lag compensation? It is an inbuilt prediction formula that will let Fortnite guess where a player is at the time that another player takes a shot at them. What lag compensation isn’t is the throttling of fast connections to make everyone play on a similar ping. This is a myth that still prevails amongst some Fortnite players. Fortnite’s netcode and lag compensation is state of the art, while it will give the shooter priority and on occasion players will take damage or even dying behind cover. However, it is very rare especially when compared to other BR games.
Where are Fortnite Servers Located?
Fortnite and in fact most Epic games use AWS (Amazon Web Services) as the infrastructure to run games on. This cloud based service by Amazon is easily the biggest and most widely used cloud infrastructure at the time of publishing of this article. Although Google’s Cloud Computing Services is gaining ground on Amazon. What does this mean to the average player of Fortnite? It means that when connecting to Fortnite, there are a number of hops that every connections must take. Amazon’s world wide cloud computing distribution means that there are relatively few hops before you network packet finds its way to the entrance points of the Amazon cloud. Once inside the AWS infrastructure traffic flows across a very fast private fibre network. See the map below to find the closest epic games servers to you.
This isn’t the end of the story for a Fortnite players network traffic. Fortnite’s matchmaking will try and select the closest server to you when you load the game. This is not foolproof, occasionally Fortnite will try and connect a player to a server that is further away or the server closest you may indeed be laggy for some reason. If this happens the game can feel very laggy and you might want to try and reset the server connection. If this has happened to you do the following.
- Check the Fortnite Status and see if there is a problem with your region.
- Check your Fortnite Server Ping. This will show you which server has the lowest latency.
If one or both above checks are highlighting a problem with the closest region to you then you can change the matchmaking region in the game. Do this by doing the following.
- Enter game settings.
- Open the game tab.
- Select matchmaking Region.
- Apply the changes.
What are the Fortnite Server Regions?
Below we have listed all the known (as of publication) Fortnite server regions. Fortnite is constantly adding server capacity as the game’s player base is not reducing but holding steady and even increasing slightly in last few months.
Fortnite Server Regions (updated for 2020)
- Ohio, USA
- Virginia, USA
- California, USA
- Oregon, USA
- Tokyo, Japan
- South Korea
- Osaka, Japan
- Singapore
- Australia
- Canada
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Ireland
- London, UK
- Paris, France
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
We will be updating this list if Epic decides to change and/or remove any AWS regions. We will also update if Epic moves to another server provider.