After the update players in my region have worse ping than before.
If I had 50 ping with the person before now I have 70.
If I had 70 ping before now I have 120-140 ping.
People with whom I had 70+ ping before I have now easily above 150 ping.
I’ve talked to decent amount of folk in the community and majority of them had suffered from this issue. Today NONE of the players that joined my games had ping lower than 120 even though they were from my region.
Based on reddit I can safely say this is also true for China region and parts of the Europe too.
Just test-joined like 5 RU lobbies, none of the players had less than 110+ ping once again.
Based on my observation, they disabled P2P connections. All connections are made through steam relay servers. Or they just upgraded Steam API. Quote from https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/networking : “Our newest APIs relay packets through the Valve network by default”.
So for Moscow connections are made via Europe Steam servers hence ping increasing. For me and my friend it’s 35->75ms.
Relaying traffic via Steam servers can be good or bad. For those, who play with friends from the same city, it’s most likely worse, for random players it actually can be better. It mainly depends on steam relays availability in specific regions.