High latency with nearby friend

Basically, my friend and I, who live 2km away from each other, have a latency of around 200ms whenever we join each others games, and we both run the game at a constant 60FPS.

These are our network specs:

  • Same ISP.
  • Same package: 500Mbps download speed and 50Mbps upload speed.
  • On speedtest.net we both have a ping of around 12ms.
  • Both of us are connected via an Ethernet Cable.
  • We live in Israel.

Additionally, when people from Europe (Britain and Sweden so far) have joined our games, they had a much lower latency of around 120-130. The same happened when we joined games of people from Europe.

The final nail in the proverbial coffin was when my GF (who also lives near to me, though a bit farther), who uses a laptop and sat at her living room next to her router, joined our game - she had a latency of ~60! Then, when we joined her game, we also both had a ping of ~60.
It seems as if something is very wrong only with our connection to each other, since she had a good ping with both of us as hosts, and we had a good ping with her as a host.

Weā€™ve been scratching our heads at this issue for weeks and couldnā€™t figure it out, and only yesterday did we see her ping improve so drastically and basically eliminated more suspects to this issue, which prompted me to write this post.

Weā€™re desperate to solve this issue so Iā€™ll be happy to provide any additional information. Thank you.

Additional information which may or may not be relevant:

  • Iā€™m using a public IP address, so Iā€™m not behind a NAT. I have opened all the ports that Steam asks to open in this page: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8571-GLVN-8711
  • Itā€™s worth noting that my GFā€™s ping was as bad as ours when she was playing from her room (not next to the router) and that it improved significantly when she sat next to it (this was yesterday). This is also what prompted us to join her and see that the ping also improved for us when she hosts (itā€™s usually worse).
  • We are both using Avast Antivirus, we tried disabling it for 1 hour but it didnā€™t change anything.
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Do you all have the same antivirus?
If I recall correctly some AVs can cause ping-issues, might be worth including that.

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We do have the same antivirus, itā€™s Avast.
We tried disabling it for 1 hour and it didnā€™t change anything.
Iā€™ll include that in the post, thank you!

Even though you have a public IP the ISP could be doing some unwated stuff. Check with wireshark or similar if the game actually uses the public IPs of your friends.

Have you seen what I wrote about mine and my friendā€™s connection to our GFā€™s game when she hosts and vice versa?
We both managed to host my GF with minimal ping, and also had minimal ping when we joined her. We only have high ping in each others games. Iā€™m not sure the public IP is the culprit here.

I dunno if it is related, but I had some issues with my brother a few days ago:

Game 1: He is hosting, all is fine, our pings are low, the game runs smooth, our friend from Germany has no issues.

Game 2 (after a disband): He is hosting, I have ping of about 100, but it feels like 2000, our friend from Germany has no issues.
Game 3 (after everyone joined my lobby): I am hosting, my brother has ping of about 100, but it feels like 2000, our friend from Germany has no issues.

We could not solve it by restarting both Steam and VT2 that day - we just gave up. I then proceeded to play a couple more QPs with my German friend with no issues whatsoever.

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Small update:
We tried playing Modern Warfare 2 together on a private game and the ping was low, so this seems to be an only an issue that happens with Vermintide 2.

I got this kind of problem quite often too. The players are in close area, but the ping goes suddenly skyhigh. Sometimes this causes team wipe too.

This isnā€™t sudden, however, itā€™s always like this.

Update:
It looks like using ProtoVPN to VPN into the same country weā€™re already from resolves the issue for some reason. I would still like to resolve the issue so I wouldnā€™t be forced to use VPN each time I play.

We are discussing this internally - but are unable to come to a conclusion as of yet. Will update accordingly.

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Been a while since this happened to me, but now recently with one host from I think NL or DE all of us clients complained about lag and ping was around 100. As a clear example, at one point I picked up a bomb and didnā€™t get the ā€œdinkā€ sound to confirm and just as I turned back to grab it I got it added.

Have had this happen plenty of times in the past, but not that much recently, usually low ping == all is fine. I am quite sure I have experienced this at least since WoM came out, but possible earlier, cannot say for certain. So whether 2.0 that brought a lot of ā€œinvisibleā€ changes have something to do with this canā€™t unfortunately remember & help narrow it down at all. What I am certain of is that 2.0 brought the through block with lowish ping hits with it, which in my mind could be a symptom from the same cause.

This is distinctively different from having a constant higher ping (like 150-200). Could be the low ping but ingame lag is lag spikes on the host / route which donā€™t show when you quickly check the number after something odd like picking up an item that doesnā€™t update inventory happens.

When I was experiencing this more, I turned up the bandwidth limit in the .config file to 8 megabits (and more) which seemed to help, but not sure. Around the same time switched to small network packets to be sure the game doesnā€™t hoard data to fill a a full 65k frame (or anything larger than the MTU to be safe, though as the console logs say there is still another network buffer that is calculated to be 150ms ā€œlongā€ until you raise the rate limiter to beyond 4 or 8 megabits). The packets/s are still low and at least on my end quite surely donā€™t cause issues.

Edit: my log says for some random situations, first client next as host:
23:13:09.504 [Connection] Setting transport socket buffer size to 65536 for 16384.0 kbps, this may cause a buffer latency of 0.032 s
23:13:09.504 [Network] Setting artificial MTU limit to 576

23:32:58.945 [Lua] [GameNetworkManager] Network caps: min/peer 5461 kbps, total 16384 kbps
23:32:58.945 [Network] Setting artificial MTU limit to 576

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Please see the response from development below:

Itā€™s impossible for us to diagnose the root cause, but all the provided evidence is pointing towards the routing between you and your friend being faulty somehow. Contacting your ISP about this issue might help provide an avenue for identifying the faulty element. Beyond this advice, it doesnā€™t look like there is anything more we can do to help unfortunately. Apologies.

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Another thing, are you guys using the mod, ā€œplayer list plusā€? It can cause a lot of the issues youā€™re describing. Low ping but extremely laggy, mobs hitting through block, desyncing, etc.

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Ah yeah, something about using that mods while also using the ā€˜use small networks packetsā€™ vermintide setting option caused issues.

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Some time to to the past yes I had it, but disabled all UI mods semi-recently to rule out FPS sinks. Never te-enabled it.

I understand. Thank you for your response. I tried contacting the ISP but they said thereā€™s nothing they could do.
It is truly a puzzling issue, especially considering the ping in Modern Warfare 2 seems good.
I appreciate the effort.

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