tl;dr: Low ping gives you a substantial advantage in reacting to ultimates (particularly rein ult) and large amounts of burst damage with abilities that grant invulnerability (cryo freeze/fade/wraith/transcendence), where they are unreactable on high (above 80) ping.

This is an incredibly frustrating part of the game, and it could be fixed, but Blizzard is a greedy company and won’t open up more server locations.

Basically, in game, whenever you want to use an ability that grants invulnerability, your game client has to “phone” the server and tell the server you are using this invulnerabilty. This adds a delay to when you press shift/q/keybind and when your game client actually shows the ability being used. This is very noticeable at high ping, as the delay scales directly with the ping the user has. Depending on player reaction time, this changes the threshold for where players can react to reinhardt ult before they get stunned by a significant amount (it has to be done this way, otherwise you could stun someone and then they suddenly get invuln after the stun hits them on your screen).

At 70-80 ping, I can get off cryo/fade/trans before getting stunned by rein like 20-25% of the time. At 30-50 ping, I get it off around 80% of the time. The difference is staggering and this has a massive effect on fights.

Maybe the response you give to people is “get better internet”, but blizzard only has 2 server locations in the US. People in the Southeast in particular get completely fucked by this.

Blizzard has opened east coast servers in the past but shut them down, likely due to “cost”.

There is a solution to this problem even without opening up new servers, but it makes the game feel worse for everyone. I wpuld not recommend doing it, but

1. Have a built-in delay programmed into the game (say, 200 ms) to cast any ability with invulnerability.

2. The client timestamps when the invuln ability is pressed.

3. When the server responds to the client, the server considers the users latency and the timestamp when the ability is cast, and subtracts that time from the normal 200 ms delay.

4. Once 200 ms passes, the ability is cast. This will then be consistant across all pings, unless the time is above 200 ms. Technically a client may be able to abuse this by having artificial ping and then lowering it when casting something like this, but players will always find ways to cheat.

This would make the game feel a lot shittier at low ping, but would make the gameplay consistant for players on high ping. Frankly, they should just open up more servers but Blizzard can’t cut into their $$$