How to Show Ping in League of Legends

You’ve sat to spend some quality time playing League of Legends, but your champion is not moving when you tell them to, while everyone around the map seems to be teleporting? What gives?

The first step in troubleshooting potential problems with LoL is to look at your ping and see how you can improve it. Thankfully, RIOT has made simple analytics data, such as FPS and ping, fairly straightforward to display in-game, without needing to load online speed and ping-testers to do it for you.

Here’s how you can display your ping and FPS in League of Legends.

How to Show Ping and FPS in League of Legends

By default, the game has a simple keybinding to display your current ping and FPS numbers on the top-right of your screen. Simply press “Ctrl + F” to toggle the ping/FPS display. It’s that simple.

How to Fix Ping Not Showing in League of Legends

The game has certain default keybindings, but some programs and settings can overwrite or unbind them completely. Some players may use different keybindings for the game, and the default keyboard shortcut might clash with their intentions.

If your ping is not showing when you’re mashing the keyboard shortcut, the keybindings were possibly set incorrectly. Here’s what you can do to change these keybindings:

1. Log into the League client.
   
2. In the client, click on the gear icon on the top right to enter settings.
   
3. Go into the “Hotkeys” tab on the left-side menu, under “In-game.”
   
4. Scroll a bit down and click on the “Display” section.
   
5. You’ll see a line called “Toggle FPS display.” Click on the first cell on the right to change the keybinding. By default, the cell should read “Ctrl + F.”
   
6. Once you click on the cell, a pop-up menu will open with keybinding allocation. Enter the key binding you want to use, then press “Save.”
   Alternatively, you can press “Unbind” to remove the current keybinding and leave it empty. This is useful if you don’t want to have two different keyboard combinations for the same action.
   
7. Click on “Done” to confirm changes.
   

How to Show Ping in Game in League of Legends

If you’re already in the game, you can still access the settings to make a hotkey change:

1. Press “Escape” to enter settings.
2. Follow Steps 3-7 above to change the hotkey.

We recommend changing hotkeys and game settings outside of the game, simply because some changes can take a bit of time to implement, so your gameplay might get disrupted if you’re away for too long tinkering with settings. If you want to test out how your game settings work inside the game and make further changes, we recommend getting into Practice mode to test those out:

1. Click “Play” on the top left.
   
2. Select the “Training” tab just below the “Play” button.
   
3. Select “Practice Tool.”
   
4. Click “Confirm” on the bottom.
   
5. The game will display a practice lobby. You can set up an AI-controlled opponent and press “Start game” when you’re ready.
   
6. Choose a champion in the selection screen and get ready to test settings, items, or strategies out.
   
   

How to Show Ping in Chat in League of Legends

There are a few reasons you may want to show how high or low your ping is in the team chat. The most important one is to give your teammates a heads up if you’re experiencing some technical difficulties. It would be unwise to enter a match-deciding fight when everyone teleports around you and you can’t react at all.

Alternatively, you can show your ping to get some advice or assistance from team members. Some players even use the option to brag about how low their ping is and how fluid their gameplay is as a result.

Whatever the reason, there’s a simple option to display your ping in the game’s chat. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Toggle on your FPS display. By default, the keybinding is “Ctrl + F”, but you can follow the directions above if it doesn’t work and needs to be changed.
   
2. Hold “Alt” and then left-click on your ping number. You have to be somewhat precise with this one, as the game will ping the map below if you don’t get it exactly right.
   
3. The game chat will display a message with your username, champion, and current ping number.
4. Enemies won’t see this message.

How to Show Just FPS in League of Legends

Your FPS indicates how fast your game refreshes the current state. A good FPS (above 60) means that you’re looking at the image on your screen in nearly real-time and can react accordingly.

The only way to show your FPS is to use the “Toggle FPS display” keyboard shortcut. It’s “Ctrl +F” by default, and it will also display your current ping alongside your FPS on the top-right screen. Currently, there is no way to display just the FPS.

Additional FAQ

What Is Ping?

Ping is the amount of time a packet takes to travel between your device and the server it’s trying to reach. In LoL’s case, the ping tracks the travel time between your PC and your region’s server location. Ping is displayed in milliseconds (ms).

A ping of below 60 ms will result in smoother gameplay. You won’t notice a massive difference between 30 and 50 ping. However, if your ping starts climbing above 100 ms, you will notice an immediate shift in how clunky the game becomes to play and interact with. Anything above 100 ms is simply not recommended if you want to maintain top gameplay performance.

Don’t confuse this terminology with game pings. In-game ping alerts are used by players to communicate between the team and have no relation to this article’s subject.

What Can Affect My Ping?

Several things can influence a sudden increase in ping:

• Most notably, ping is proportional to the physical distance between your home and the server. The longer packets need to travel physically, the higher your ping will be.

• Your ping can also depend on how you’re connected to the internet. A cabled Ethernet connection is more stable than a household Wi-Fi.

• If you’re using more programs that require an internet connection to function, they can siphon your bandwidth away from LoL and cause a lag spike.

• If multiple people in your home are connected to the same network, each of your pings will increase slightly due to only one line out to your ISP and all devices competing for it.

• Weather conditions and technical difficulties can have a negative impact on your ping. Sometimes, one of the local routing platforms will crash due to reasons beyond your control and your packets will need to be rerouted through more distant servers, which increases your ping as a result. These events are rare but have been known to happen on occasion.

How Can I Reduce My Ping in League of Legends?

If you’re noticing a sudden spike in your ping, there are a few ways to troubleshoot the problem and try to get it under control:

• Close other programs that use the internet. Programs and platforms that are downloading files or streaming content are commonly the worst bandwidth hogs and may be causing problematic gameplay.

• Check if the game is experiencing technical difficulties. You can go to RIOT’s server status page, then click on LoL’s picture and input your server location to check for current issues.

• Connect your PC to your network modem with an Ethernet cable. A Wi-Fi connection can slow down or be interrupted by walls and distance, where a cabled connection is more reliable and faster. If you can’t use a cable, move closer to the modem.

• Reset your internet connection. It will disrupt your game for a while until you reconnect, but it can be a viable option to remove sudden hiccups in connectivity and reset your routing pathway to a more efficient one.

• Change to a closer server. This might not be the best, easiest, or the cheapest option, as changing a server region in LoL will cost you RP, but it might be the only way to get a permanent decrease in ping. Use this only as one of the last resorts, as you can’t revert it without paying again.

• Change your internet provider or package. Modern providers and packages offer faster and more reliable connections that can be somewhat immune to bad weather and don’t have as much downtime.

Ping It to Win It

In League of Legends, a match’s outcome can be decided by the player who has the most reliable connection and can respond to events fastest. If you’re noticing a sudden decrease in the game’s performance, it’s easy to toggle on the FPS and ping display and start troubleshooting the issue. If you get the game working flawlessly again, you’re much closer to victory.

What is your ping when playing League of Legends? Do you have any tips for lowering ping we haven’t covered in the article? Let us know in the comment section below.