Getting 200+ ping despite having selected the best Data Center
For months I've been dealing with this issue that is exclusive on Apex Legends. The fact that it never happens to any other matchmaking games I've played (CSGO, Valorant, LoL) is proof that the problem lies only on Apex Legends and not on our ISP. I've even done all the basic troubleshooting steps mentioned here over and over out of desperation to no avail. After a few more searches, what I found is that the most common cause of the high ping is that the game sometimes connects/routes me through US servers despite being from Asia (and having chosen Asian Data Centers).
I've used a connection tracking tool (LiveTcpUdpWatch) and found that I sometimes in a match am forced to connect to IP's such as these:
161.202.48.196
161.202.48.244
161.202.48.209
169.56.144.161
A quick lookup in infobyip.com reveals that these IP's are hosted in US by the ISP, Softlayer. I figured a band-aid fix for this would be to firewall block these IP addresses which was also the solution promoted in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=944kZCUqIXs
It became a grind to seek and block every IP connection that gives me 200+ ms which fortunately worked, however, I noticed an increased frequency in getting Code Leaf errors when finding matches (which results into me failing to connect to the server and being booted back to the home menu). It used to be around only 1 in 9 games, but after blocking a ton of IP's with 200ms, it rose to around 50% of all found matches. This isn't much of an issue for me when solo queueing, however, it's a big issue when forming a squad with my friends and my girlfriend as they're often left with 1 member missing.
CSGO has a variable called mm_dedicated_search_maxping which does well to prevent players from routing through IP's with higher ping. I'm wondering why Apex Legends never implements this. Is it because the devs are worried of longer queue times? Season 9 will definitely bring a ton of new players, so I'm hoping the devs will focus more on giving better experience than providing as much matches found as possible despite having horrible connections.
