Games generally have come a long way; gone are the days of multiplayer games looking brand new and only working with Bluetooth or your friends having to come over manually.
Now, multiplayer experiences are a core part of gaming; basically, every game has some multiplayer function.
However, one of the major elements of online multiplayer games is ping, so what exactly is ping in gaming?
In gaming, ping describes the delay between a player’s input and the server’s response to that input.
This delay is called a ping; a lower ping is always better than a higher one, as a lesser ping means fewer delays between the game and the servers, hence faster response time and a smoother gameplay experience.
A lag, on the other hand, is a spike in the time it takes for an action to reach the game servers and register or for a message from the game server to register on your device.
Ping is measured in milliseconds, shortened to “MS”. Your game will display your ping to you on your game screen, mostly in the right top corner.
A ping of 15ms or less is considered the best. Anything between 15 and 45ms is playable. Anything above 100ms is not good at all; it will affect your gameplay. Anything above 250ms is trash.
If you play with this ping, your game input will take a huge amount of time before it carries out, and your opponent will capitalize on this and gain the upper hand before you even realize that online games like Fortnite, League of Legends, and Call of Duty rely heavily on ping to ensure the smoothness of the games.
MMOs and RTS do not rely too much on pings, while some games barely suffer from high pings.
How Does Ping Affect Online Gaming?
First, how does a gamer suffer from high ping? There are many reasons, one of the major being network issues.
When you are on a slower network, your ping becomes higher, or when there’s no game server in your region. For example, League of Legends doesn’t have an African game server.
Playing on a North American server from Africa will lead to tremendously high ping and will undoubtedly affect your games.
If you notice an unusual effect in your games, especially a slow response from your characters, or when you shoot and your bullet doesn’t make sounds of effect until seconds later, this could indicate a high ping.
You can always check your ping indicator, as most games always display ping or sometimes warn you when your ping gets higher.
Ok, Can I Lower My Ping in Games?
First, we need to understand something. As we mentioned earlier, there can be two major reasons why you get high pings in your games.
The first is the location, i.e., the distance between you and the game servers, which means the closer you are to the server, the less ping you’ll get. The second is your network issues, which is where you can have some control.
If you don’t have a good internet connection, you sometimes experience high pings.
Heavy household network activity can cause your network to experience a significant decrease in signal strength.
This is because your network connection is a limited resource, and if there’s heavy traffic on your network, your game traffic may not get transmitted reliably.
Wi-Fi is also not recommended, as Wi-Fi tends to bounce, creating unstable traffic; an ethernet cable is recommended since cabled internet is more stable.
Third-party software is sometimes used to reduce gaming pings, although some software isn’t entirely tested and trusted.
Most reduce network traffic and help shut down background apps that use bandwidth behind the scenes.
We advise you to be careful when using third-party software and ensure it is from a verifiable source; you can always check reviews before downloading.
