Slow hands, or bad ping?
Five rounds of pure reaction, then a real ping to your game's server — judged together, so the blame lands where it belongs: on your hands, or on your network.
Your record
Recent network tests
Reaction time vs ping: what actually costs you the duel
Reaction time is the delay inside you and your desk: see the enemy, decide, move the mouse, click. For a visual cue, the average person needs about 250 ms; trained FPS players sit around 150–180 ms. It decides who fires first in a fair peek, whether your counter-strafe stops in time, and whether you can dodge a flash or a hook you did not know was coming.
Ping is the delay outside you: how long your click takes to reach the game server and be confirmed. It decides whether a shot that looked on-target actually registers, and how much peeker's advantage the other player gets. The two stack. What you feel in a fight is reaction + input and display delay + ping — a sharp 180 ms player on a 90 ms connection effectively moves at 270+ ms, which is why "I clicked first" and "the server disagrees" are both true at once. This test separates the two, so you know which one to fix.
How to get faster
- Sleep. A rough night costs 20–40 ms of reaction — more than most hardware upgrades buy back.
- Warm up for five minutes before ranked. The first rounds of the day are measurably your slowest.
- Cut display delay: a 144 Hz+ monitor, low-latency mode on, and V-Sync off can remove 10–30 ms between your eyes and the game.
- Go wired twice over — mouse and ethernet. Wireless is good now, but every hop is a few milliseconds you chose to spend.
- Pre-aim and predict. Pros look superhuman partly because they react to cues earlier in the chain — sound, timing, habit — not because their raw reflexes are alien.
- Lower the ping you cannot train away: pick the nearest server, and if your route is bad, a different network often beats a faster plan on the same bad route.