Predicting movement in League Of Legends

Lagging in League of Legends is one of the most helpless feelings a human being can experience. Being hit with abilities and rapidly losing your HP while your champion teleports around the map is a miserable feeling and every LoL player has encountered it at some point in his career. If you’re someone who often loses the game or dies in lane because of your connection latency, we’ve prepared an article for you where we’ll share a trick that will surely help you win more games when you’re lagging.

When should I use movement prediction?

Use Movement Prediction setting in League of Legends is a helpful feature that any player can turn on in the settings menu in the More Options section. 

It’s a mechanic that is only useful when playing on high MS (80+). At that point, instead of waiting for the champion to start moving after a second or two, the game itself moves the champion by predicting its movement. If you’ve ever experienced your champion teleporting around the map or teleporting to a lane with 300 MS, movement prediction fixes that by smoothing out the movement because of predicting your champion’s movement based on your last input. In general, by using movement prediction you’ll significantly reduce the number of unnecessary deaths and incorrect movements when lagging.

Does movement prediction on normal ping work?

Why you shouldn’t use movement prediction on low ping

In general, you should always keep the Use Movement Prediction setting turned off if you’re playing on low or even decent ping. It can cause your champion to uncontrollably stutter or move in weird directions because the client tries to assume your champion’s position without needing to. Keep in mind that movement prediction does not help you hit more abilities or juke better.

Riot has directly addressed this rumor by stating that: “This setting can help make things feel smoother on some pings. Most of the time you won’t need this setting on and it doesn’t affect abilities.” 

If you were hoping to get a competitive edge over other players by enabling this setting, I hate to disappoint you but using movement prediction won’t make you move or perform better than the players you’re playing against.

Why Faker used movement prediction

Some speculation rose around this setting being useful in a low-latency environment as well when Faker was seen using movement prediction back in 2017. People started wondering whether enabling movement prediction gives you a competitive edge over your opponents and if that’s the reason why Faker turned this setting on. The reason why Faker turned movement prediction on is likely because highly-skilled players like him that play on low ping regularly feel a difference whenever their ping goes up, even by a little. However, in this instance, there is little to no difference between having the movement prediction on or off because Faker plays on the Korean server that has 8-10 ping on average. If your ping is that low, having this setting on virtually doesn’t change anything because the latency between the client and the server is almost non-existent.

What is movement prediction in LoL? 

Understanding the technical aspect of movement prediction

Movement prediction essentially helps players with higher ping by making their champion more responsive when they’re constantly lagging and disconnecting. The setting also helps out players that experience lags or disconnects because of poor hardware as well.

Movement prediction works by using the client-side prediction programming technique known as extrapolation. Extrapolation is a programming method that re-routes the connection to a local server via the client once the connection to the global server is lost. At that point, the client briefly controls your champion even if you did not provide any input. Simply put, once you lose connection or you start lagging, the game predicts where you would move your champion if your ping was correct. 

Understanding how movement works in League of Legends

To understand this mechanic better, we have to take a look at how the movement is performed in League of Legends in general:

• The client receives movement commands from the player and sends them to the server

• The server sends back the most optimal route to the desired position to the client

• Your champion starts moving in the route you’ve chosen while the client keeps updating the server on your position

Keep in mind that throughout this period, the server is completely in charge of dictating the most optimal pathing route for your champion. Logically, once the connection to the main server is lost, the movement prediction kicks in and changes the way the player-client-server interaction is performed. At that point, the client stops waiting for the feedback from the server and starts locally predicting the game state and acting accordingly. Every action that is performed at that point is performed independently from the global server as if you were completely offline.

What we offer

If you’re tired of tryharding on your main account and you’re looking to have some fun, why not try playing on a smurf? If you’re looking for a fresh ranked experience on a new account, make sure to browse our wide offer of smurf accounts that are available for every League of Legends region. Our unmatched prices on the market as well as hundreds of satisfied customers are a testimony to our quality and dedication to bring you the best service.