ARC Raiders is having a second moment. The extraction shooter from Embark Studios averaged around 26,216 concurrent players on Steam through October 2026, climbing again months after a launch that peaked at 481,966 on Steam alone in November 2025, and sales have passed 16.3 million copies (Beebom). A bigger, returning crowd means the same complaint keeps resurfacing in the game’s forums: a ping that sits at 120ms, 150ms, sometimes higher, on a connection that runs clean everywhere else.
Here is the part most fix lists skip. Your ARC Raiders high ping almost always traces back to two things that have nothing to do with your download speed: which of a handful of servers your match landed on, and the path your ISP takes to reach it. Sort those out before you touch anything else.
ARC Raiders high ping usually starts with the server you landed on
ARC Raiders uses dedicated servers, and it picks one for you. By default the game sets your server preference to Automatic, which Embark’s own matchmaking guidance recommends because it targets the lowest-ping option available to you (ARC Raiders Help Center). That usually works. It does not always work, and it quietly stops working the moment you queue with friends.
Crossplay and party rules are the trap. When you squad up, the match connects to the party leader’s region, not yours. If your leader is in Frankfurt and you are in São Paulo, you are now playing on a European server, and off-region play commonly adds 50 to 100ms on its own. The game did exactly what you told it to; you just did not realize you told it to send your packets across an ocean.
So the first question is never “why is my internet slow.” It is “which server am I actually on, and did I choose it on purpose?”
The six places ARC Raiders actually hosts matches
ARC Raiders runs matches out of six documented regions. Community server lists line up on the same six, and the city locations matter because distance sets a floor you cannot argue with.
| Region | Location |
|---|---|
| NA East | Virginia, USA |
| NA West | Oregon, USA |
| EU West | Frankfurt, Germany |
| EU North | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Asia Pacific | Tokyo, Japan |
| South America | São Paulo, Brazil |
Read what is missing. There is no Oceania node, so Australian and New Zealand players route to Tokyo. There is no dedicated Southeast Asia server and nothing in India, so a player in Mumbai or Jakarta also lands on Tokyo, or worse, gets auto-selected onto a European or North American box. There is no Middle East or Africa node at all. If you live in one of those gaps, “Automatic” is choosing the least-bad option from a list that does not include anything close to you.
That is the single biggest driver of ARC Raiders high ping for a large slice of the playerbase, and no setting inside the game changes geography.
Landing on a distant server every match?
If your packets are taking a scenic route to Tokyo or Virginia, WTFast reroutes your game traffic through optimized network paths and trims the avoidable part of the delay, often cutting ping by 30% to 50%.
What a cleaner route can move, and what it can’t
This is where honesty beats every “best server” page on the first page of Google. A game private network like WTFast changes the route your packets take between you and the ARC Raiders server. It does not move the server, and it does not break physics.
Start with the floor. Light in fiber travels at roughly two-thirds of its vacuum speed, which gives network engineers a reliable rule of thumb: about 1ms of round-trip time for every 100km of cable (M2 Optics). Sydney to Tokyo is roughly 7,800km in a straight line, and real submarine routes run longer, so an Oceania player on the Tokyo server is looking at a hard minimum well above 100ms no matter what anyone sells them. Mumbai to Tokyo is a similar story. Nobody reroutes that away, because the distance is real.
Now the part that is fixable. Consumer ISP routing is frequently indirect and badly peered, especially out of regions with no local node. Oceania traffic that gets flung through the United States before reaching Tokyo, or Southeast Asian traffic that detours across two extra carriers, is carrying latency that has nothing to do with distance. That gap between your actual ping and the physical floor is the avoidable part, and a cleaner route is the thing that recovers it.
So the honest split for ARC Raiders looks like this:
- A reroute can help: indirect ISP paths, congested middle-mile transit, packet loss that follows your packets all the way to the server, being peered poorly out of a region with no nearby node.
- A reroute cannot help: the raw distance to Tokyo when you live in Perth, server-side desync when a match is full, hit registration and rubber-banding tied to the game’s netcode, and launch-day login queues. Those are server and distance problems, and no route change touches them.
If you want the full version of when a game network earns its keep versus when it just adds a hop, we broke that down in does a gaming VPN actually lower ping. The same logic that applies to Aion 2’s missing Oceania server applies here almost word for word.
Check these before you blame your ISP
Run through the free fixes first. They cost nothing and they resolve more cases than people expect.
- Open your server setting. Click the gear icon, go to Gameplay then Server, and confirm it is on Automatic. If you changed it to a far region once for a friend, this is where it quietly stayed.
- Queue solo to test your true ping. If your ping is fine alone but terrible in a party, the leader’s region is the culprit, not your line. Rotate who leads, or have the person closest to a node lead the squad.
- Go wired. Ethernet removes the jitter and random spikes Wi-Fi adds on top of whatever your route is doing. This matters more than any in-game toggle.
- Measure the path. Run a trace to the server you are landing on and read where the latency and loss actually appear. Our walkthrough on reading a WinMTR report shows you how to tell a distance floor apart from a bad hop you can route around. If the loss starts at a hop deep in a transit carrier and follows all the way to the destination, that is the reroute case. If your ping is a flat, loss-free 140ms to Tokyo and you live in Auckland, that is distance, and the only honest answer is to accept it or play on a closer-but-emptier server.
Trace shows a bad hop, not just distance?
When your packets are losing time to indirect peering rather than raw kilometers, a game network can route around it. The cheapest way to find out whether yours is that case is to run a side-by-side test.
Where to point your effort first
ARC Raiders is a third-person extraction shooter where a quarter-second of delay is the difference between extracting with your loot and feeding it to someone else. If you are in North America or Europe, the odds are your high ping is a party-region mistake or a Wi-Fi problem, and both are free to fix. If you are in Oceania, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, or Africa, you are fighting a map that has no server near you, and your job is to figure out how much of your ping is unavoidable distance and how much is a route you can clean up. Trace first, then decide. The number you can actually move is the gap between your real ping and the floor, and that gap is worth knowing before you spend a dollar on anything.