Why Lag and High Ping Are Deadly for Competitive Gaming

With the Esports community surging in popularity, competitive gaming no longer seems like a seasonal fad. Despite worldwide fame, what exactly hinders the performance of RTS, RPG, and FPS-powered games? The seven deadly sins: Lag, latency, ping, FPS, packet loss, inadequate bandwidth and jitter.

Consider Call of Duty (FPS) and League of Legends (RTS/RPG). In both games, you face a triggering ping, but the in-game performance differs for the two. A solid 200ms ping in Call of Duty causes an immense shooting and bullet delay in-game. While in League of Legends, players face slow movement, and delayed ability casting in a 200ms ping.

The same ping affects the reaction time of both games, but it is much worse for Call of Duty. Why? Since FPS gaming entirely depends on quick reaction time, hence RPG games are slow paced unless you are poking the enemy team with Karthus’ Q and it just won’t seem to land.

Both scenarios are significantly agonizing, but what can you do about them? If you are fed up with lagging like the boss you are, here are a few possible causes of high ping in competitive gaming:

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The Ol’ Vicious Circle Of High Ping

The time your system takes to communicate with any given game’s server determines in-game latency levels. A common cause of latency and ping proximity is caused by geographical location. Just take the example of MOBA games. In a MOBA, servers are scattered in varied regions. So, EU inhabitants should stick to servers located near them. If they choose one located in North America or Far-East Asia, the induction of lag and high ping becomes frequent. Another recurrent cause is playing with in-game teammates with a farther geographical location than yours. Therefore, if a single player lags down, the overall gaming experience is affected.

Excessive Bandwidth Distribution

It’s every gamer’s nightmare that whenever they plug in to play an FPS game a family member or two always picks on streaming Netflix and the binge-gaming marathons goes in vain. Before you dial in a call to the support center of your spectrum phone service, understand that you could be facing a lag due to excessive distribution of bandwidth. The more devices you connect, the further your bandwidth gets distributed. So, if you have someone at home downloading or streaming, your gaming sessions will be frequently muddled.

Packet Loss and Jitter

Jittering and packet loss are two spawns of evil, both in effect with high ping. The precise reaction time to land the last hit to a minion or secure a Pentakill goes to waste when your internet speed starts to jitter. Jittering,commonly called stuttering, is one common calamity of RTS-based gaming and it’s responsible for fluctuating in-game latency and slowed down reaction time.

Packet loss is a similar notion. When the ire of slow internet hits and you enter a team fight, your in-game commands face a delay that’s because the packets sent by your internet connection are lost while en route to the game server. If the speed is too slow, you also end up being disconnected from the game. Before you begin the game, you should check your internet speed and connection stability by running a speed test.

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What Can You Do About It?

Don’t be disheartened if constant lag made you overthrow your ranked game series. You will get out of Bronze elo hell if you switch to Ethernet for standalone gaming. A wireless connection tethers in your in-game connectivity and is more prone to causing packet loss, high latency and jittering. Gaming wifi router connectivity to your system will leave no marks of disruption.

While tweaking your current rig proves costly, it’s one way to boost your in-game performance. Your game’s FPS (frames per second) shouldn’t be any less than 30-fps. The moment the frames drop low, they cause a jam in game interface, movement delay and reaction time. In worst cases, even your system starts to overheat.

This doesn’t have anything to do with your internet speed though. Before you go on a downloading spree on Steam, make sure you go through your chosen game’s system requirements. If your system complies with the requirements, consider updating your Windows, drivers and ensure your graphics card is updated to the latest version.

Up and Away!

Both pro and habitual gamers shouldn’t bedispirited. Now you know your fluctuating internet speed, ping instabilities and FPS lag wasn’t happening at random.