Matt deWet, now Senior Software Engineer at Raid Base and previously at Riot Games, and David Straily, previously tech lead at Riot and now Engineering Director at a new studio, highlighted the importance of netcode and peeking mechanism in this article from July 2020.

Indirectly, this highlights best practices that any game studio, big or small, can add to their multiplayer to help improve its online architecture. Let’s “peek” into their insights.

VALORANT’s netcode aims to give every player a fair shot. Pun-intended.

From the very beginning, the team at Riot built a server‑authoritative system that prevents clients from ever dictating outcomes, addressing peeker’s advantage head‑on while delivering near‑instantaneous hit registration and tightly synchronized simulations. It sets a high bar. The result is a foundation that balances smooth, responsive movement across a wide variety of network conditions and hardware profiles, ensuring that matches feel like true tests of skill rather than tests of connection quality.

Key Design Goals: Fairness for eSport

Fairness was non‑negotiable to ensure an eSport-ready level of online experience.

Riot’s developers committed to a vision where the only factors that decide a match are planning, precision, and teamwork, rather than unpredictable network hiccups or performance gaps. As such, they built a suite of technical and design objectives around preventing cheating, smoothing out movement under variable conditions, rewarding clean gunplay, preserving holder’s advantage, and making the game accessible even to players on modest machines. Each goal was carefully balanced.

The overarching principle is simple: invest in infrastructure, code, and design to make every encounter feel just, intuitive, and satisfying.

Fairness is not only developer-controlled, studios can invest in network orchestration to deploy closer to players – which, with platforms like Edgegap game server hosting orchestration, instantly improve fairness by 28%.

Tickrate: Mitigating Peeker’s Advantage

Peeker’s advantage can skew every encounter. By modeling reaction times, round‑trip latencies, and buffering delays, Riot’s engineers derived a formula that revealed roughly a 141 ms head start for attackers peeking around corners under typical conditions.

From there, they deployed Riot Direct for faster routing, rolled out 128 tick servers worldwide, and trimmed client‑side buffering to shave off nearly a third of that window. Numbers spoke volumes. As a result, the raw timing gap shrinks by dozens of milliseconds, making split‑second duels far more dependent on aim and awareness rather than on who has the better ping.

However, an increased tickrate means a great network bandwidth usage (i.e. “Egress”) for every match.

That extra cost isn’t trivial.

As such, we at Edgegap argue that full‑fidelity simulations and lower network requirements for a diverse, global player base is key, but needs to remain manageable to be affordable.

All this optimization and development is costly. Fortunately, there’s orchestration services like Edgegap which handles the “plumbing” for you. By orchestrating the game server hosting of multiplayer games to all, on demand, of its 615+ locations worldwide (the world’s largest, and first region less network) across 17+ providers. Deliver +58% latency reduction on average by deploying closest to players. Given integration takes minutes, there’s a reasons AAA to indie developers use Edgegap for their multiplayer game server hosting orchestration.

Minimizing Simulation Divergence

Riot felt critically, diverging simulations break immersion. Riot enforced fixed 128 Hz physics timesteps on both server and client so that every movement tick aligns perfectly regardless of frame rate, preventing slow clients from drifting away from the server’s authoritative timeline.

They then implemented a move‑queuing system that slots inputs into precise update slots and predicts missing updates based on previous inputs, smoothing over network jitter with minimal speculative assumptions. Corrections are inevitable. But by limiting misprediction magnitude and hiding reconciliation artifacts from other players, only the affected player sees an occasional rubber‑band snap instead of ten.

Combat Resolution and Player Support

All combat decisions live on the server. When you pull the trigger, the server rewinds game state to the exact simulation time you saw, matching your view and delivering near‑perfect hit registration even against fast‑moving targets which helps with player’s impression of precision.

Riot also caps how far back the server will rewind to prevent extreme latency from becoming a weapon, balancing forgiveness with fairness so no one can abuse the system which means players aren’t left in the dark. Built‑in performance monitors and customizable buffering settings empower everyone to diagnose network or hardware issues and fine‑tune their own latency trade‑offs for the smoothest experience possible.

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This article is based on and cites the original article by Matt deWet and David Straily, published on Riot’s official blog. All rights in the original content are owned by their respective owners.