Not only in League of Legends but also in other competitive online games, you might have heard players talking about their “ms” levels. Ms stands for “milliseconds” and is, or at least should be, important to everyone who plays online games.
With ms, players can understand how delayed they are from the game. Being delayed due to an internet connection is one of the worst things you can encounter as a competitive gamer. Therefore, you need to clearly understand what ms means and then look for ways to reduce it.
In our article, we clarify what ms means in League of Legends and show you the possible reasons why you would have bad ms rates.
Just like in the context of other competitive online games, ms stands for “milliseconds” in League of Legends. This can also be called “ping” which is a technical name for the delay. You can see your ping rate in terms of milliseconds in the upper right corner while you are in the game.
If you do not see your ping level, simply hit CTRL + F. This will toggle FPS display that also allows you to see your ping. If this does not work, you should go to options and set a hotkey for toggling FPS and ms display.
So, what does ms mean in League of Legends? In short, it simply shows how many milliseconds you are delayed from the game server. For instance, if your ms (ping) rate is 30, then you are 30 milliseconds delayed.
In this case, you would not feel any delays and play the game comfortably. However, if your ms rate is above 100, this would highly affect your gameplay since the opponent champions would be able to outplay you by casting abilities earlier. 100 milliseconds may seem very less in real life but in the world of faster clicks and abilities, it is a huge number.
Your ms rate in LoL will not be a constant number. This is just the nature of internet connections. The important thing is that your ping rate should be stable; it should not jump and dump 15-20 ms constantly. Another important thing is that it should be lower than 60-70ms. This way, you can get the maximum performance in your games. In the end, you would want to minimize your average ping, the less the better (See our article on “What are good pings in LoL”).
A major factor that would affect your ms rate is your location on Riot Games' server. As you get closer to a server, your ms will decrease and you will be able to play more comfortably.
If you live in the European region and want to play on the Japanese server, this will not really work in terms of your LoL ms rate. Since the server will be on the other side of the world, your ms rate will be so high that the game will be almost unplayable, and you frustrated as ever.
All in all, as a wise man once said: "Games don't cause violence, lags do"
No player would want a high ms level, but any player can encounter this issue. First things first, if you are skeptical about your current internet connection quality or you are about to go into a very important game, check your ms beforehand. If it is higher than the average, look for solutions:
Wait a little while before queuing. There can sometimes be connection troubles or maintenance caused by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If this is the case, the high ms would be temporary and you will be able to continue to play with low ms rates minutes later. Simply monitor your network tab or visit one of the websites that allow you to check your internet connection, like this one: https://www.speedtest.net
Choose a closer game server: As said earlier, this can help reduce the distance your game data has to travel and lower your ping. You can do it in the drop-down menu of your Riot Client.
Check if someone connected to your network or something auto-started for downloading. Any kind of VPN will also slow down your internet connection. The burden on the network causes higher pings and delays that would reduce the quality of the game.
Check your router. Sometimes, Wi-fi signals do not work properly so you can switch to an ethernet connection and maximize your network power in your PC.
Contact your ISP. They might have a technical solution to solve your problem so that you can play on lower ms rates.
Lower game settings. League of Legends tries to automatically detect settings suitable for your hardware, but it may not always be right. If your computer is struggling to run the game smoothly, lowering graphics and other settings can help reduce the strain on your connection and improve performance, which may lower your ping.
If you're experiencing ping issues and have tried to take care of all the above, there's still hope left -- a simple technique you can try called flushing your DNS.
To do this, open your command prompt (cmd) (available when you click the Windows logo key) and execute the following commands:
Type "ipconfig /release" and press Enter.
Type "ipconfig /renew" and press Enter.
Type "ipconfig /flushdns" and press Enter.
What it does is clearing the cache of your name to IP entries and reloading them from the connected DNS server.
This approach has been reported to help reduce ping for many LoL players.
