Regional Server Routing Inconsistency — Hawaii Player, Apex Legends
I'm an Apex Legends player based in Hawaii. I've noticed a significant and consistent gap between my in-menu ping (displayed as ~58ms on US-West-2) and my actual in-match ping (110-120ms), even with no other network variables involved (direct connection, no VPN, wired Ethernet, verified 400/400 Mbps bandwidth, all NIC power-saving features disabled).
I ran a traceroute to my active game server IP (216.244.46.130) during a live match and found the following path:
Tracing route to 216.244.46.130 over a maximum of 30 hops 1 1 ms 9 ms 9 ms 192.168.1.1 2 17 ms 19 ms 20 ms 72.235.192.2 3 56 ms 58 ms 59 ms 38.142.79.194 4 * * * Request timed out. 5 53 ms 58 ms 58 ms be2199.ccr42.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.2.173] 6 64 ms 69 ms 69 ms be2932.ccr32.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.45.161] 7 76 ms 79 ms 79 ms be5473.ccr22.elp02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.166.69] 8 87 ms 110 ms 90 ms be3846.ccr32.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.165.29] 9 87 ms 89 ms 89 ms be2764.ccr41.dfw03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.47.214] 10-23 * * * Request timed out (no further ICMP response, likely firewalled past this point)
As shown, my traffic is routed LA → Phoenix → El Paso → Dallas, despite being connected to what's labeled as a "US-West-2" server. This routing pattern suggests the West-labeled server pool may not reflect an actual West Coast physical data center, or that Hawaii traffic isn't being matched to the geographically closest available infrastructure. Latency climbs from 58ms (hop 5, Los Angeles) to 89ms (hop 9, Dallas) purely from this backbone path — a meaningful and seemingly avoidable increase if a true West Coast endpoint were used instead.
Could you clarify:
- Whether there is a server pool physically closer to Hawaii/Pacific players
- Why in-menu ping doesn't reflect real in-match latency
- Whether server tick rate or processing load scales in a way that explains the Training-vs-live-match gap I'm seeing (60ms in Training vs. 100-110ms in live matches)
I understand Hawaii's distance from mainland infrastructure is a physical constraint, but the routing inefficiency (LA→Phoenix→El Paso→Dallas for a "West" server) seems like something worth investigating on your end.
