I see some people are saying that high ping is an advantage. I always thought lower ping was an advantage. Which one is true? I am genuinely curious...
High ping is in general a disadvantage , that is undeniable . You have more delay to everything compared to a lower ping player , have worse hit registry etc. But when peeking , high ping causes worse peeker's advantage for both parties , the peeker and the one who is being peeked. So if the peeker has high ping , then that peeker will have more peeker's advantage on a person who the high ping player is peeking. This compared to someone with lower ping than the high ping player peeking the same person , will cause less peeker's advantage. Basically the higher your ping , the more peeker's advantage you have.
Refer to what val devs said: https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/game-updates/04-on-peeker-s-advantage-ranked/
---- PEEKER'S ADVANTAGE ----
How do you measure it?
It's <ENEMY'S CLIENT FRAMERATE> + <ENEMY'S 1-WAY NETWORK LAG> + <SERVER FRAMERATE> + <YOUR 1-WAY NETWORK LAG> + <NETWORK INTERP DELAY>
Some of the values are constant:
NETWORK INTERP DELAY = 7.8125ms (this is "buffering" to smooth out enemy player positions on your screen. It is tuneable with the "Network Buffering" setting in the options menu, if you have poor internet or bandwidth)
SERVER FRAMERATE = 7.8125ms (1/128th of a second, 128-tick servers)
Others are not:
1-WAY NETWORK LAG is based on game server locations, your (and your opponents) geographic locations, and Riot Direct routing paths. We are targeting <17.5ms for 70% of the player population. Closed beta is a time for testing and improvement, and we are on our way to hitting this target.
YOUR CLIENT FRAMERATE is based on how fast your computer runs; we are trying to optimize framerate as much as we are able to on our side, as a dev team.
The **sum of all the above values** is a player's advantage when rolling to you from an angle. It is the amount of time that a player sees you, without you seeing them.
Hence yes a high ping player (depending on how high the ping is) has an advantage on a player when peeking and it becomes worse with higher ping. But in general though a high ping is still a disadvantage overall , due to other reasons along with the fact that the high ping player will suffer from the same kind of worse peeker's advantage even when the low ping player is swinging .
Low latency is near always superior, as your player actions get to the game server faster than your opponents' actions.
The only tricky bit with a high ping player is that it does cause worse peeker's advantage, for everyone. But you as a low-ping player have just as much peek advantage on your high-ping opponent as they have against you.