Online Gaming Ping/Lag/Latency Reduce Checklist 18

About the Checklist:

This checklist talks about almost everything that can affect your ping/lag. Going through this can help you in identifying the reason for high ping. This is targeted to fix ping issues you come across when playing real time online games. As a league of legends player these tips helped me a lot in reducing the ping. I had an article on reducing ping for windows users’ long time back. I got so many feedbacks and I have collected everything in to a single page.

This Checklist is divided into 3 parts, high, medium, low. This refers to the effect of the issue on your ping. And just after the issue in brackets there is a letter (Easy, Medium, Hard), which represent how easy the fix for the issue

Key:

• Priority Level – How serious the problem
• Fix complexity – How easy it is to apply a fix

What is Lag and will this help to reduce it [don’t skip]:

Without knowing what is lag, you cannot know whether it is possible to reduce it. In simple terms, it is the round trip time taken to the server from your computer. This depends on so many things including physical distance and link congestion. This simply means, if you an Asian trying to play in a North American server you will get a large ping even with best configuration possible. Try everything in the checklist if you still have the same ping, that simply mean you can’t reduce it of your own, you need the help of ISP (internet service provider) and the Server hosting organization (in League of Legend sit would be RIOT games)

Checklist

Disable Automatic Updates (Easy) – These days almost all programs has automatic updates available and enabled. As an example, your virus guard updates every day. If it happen within a game, you are done. So stop automatic updates and do them manually when you need them.

Close any bandwidth intensive programs (Easy) – This point is straightforward but i have mentioned this for the sake of completeness (Example bandwidth intensive programs: bandwidth intensive programs, Voice over IP programs: Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo or Teamspeak, Video Streams: YouTube, Instant Messenger Video Chat, LiveStreams, Steam Game or Patch Downloads). You can always use resource monitor to identify the bandwidth intensive programs.

Disable Firewall/Add Game as an exception (Easy) – Your firewall is checking most of the packets sent from your computer and received by your computer. This process takes time (may be several milliseconds). Disable you firewalls (there is a windows firewall and there might be a virus guard firewall) or add the Game as an exception in your firewall settings. Adding game as an exception within the firewall will allow sending the packets from the game freely.

Move to a wired connection from a WI-FI (Medium) – I used to play the game with WI-FI connection and moving to LAN made a huge difference. This is marked as medium as this might need long LAN cables and some resources to setup. However if you are sitting near your router this is an easy process.

Overheating (Medium) – This is again an issue I had and from the firsthand experience I know this can lead to high ping. Overheating can mainly happen in two places. In your computer or in the router/other network devices. My computer over heats due to the hot weather and I have to buy a cooling pad. Routers are overheated due to continuous use and some hardware issues. Power off the network for several minutes before start of the play if it gets heated soon again there may be an issue with your network hardware.

Setting up Quality of Service (QoS) setting in router (Hard): This is very important but still it is listed in medium priority, as this is not useful in many cases. What is QoS? This is like tagging packets with the priory levels. We can make some packets to high priority and router will give them a VIP level power. These packets tend to go quickly within your network as they have higher priory over other packets. Know one thing; this is useful only when you are other internet using programs with the game. I strongly advise you to close those programs rather than setting QoS settings. How to setup QoS rules (GO HERE)

Temporary Connection issues (Easy) – Restart the router. Most of the time there can be temporary issues due the router and internal congestion. Restarting the router will solve most of these issues.

Contact your ISP (Medium): This is again an important thing. I had several ping issues in past and I tried everything I know. After sometime, i got to know there was a big issue in the ISP lines. This might not work but simply give a call to them (line it total free right ?) and tell you are having a lag issue and ask them to check in to any problems in their side. They might look into it, or might not. Still it worth a try.

Is your internet connection enough (Hard): Sometime our internet connection is not enough to play online games. RTS (real time strategy games tend to use less bandwidth compared to the FPS (first person shooter) and driving games). You need to look into several aspects of the connection like reliability (QoS), speed and bandwidth.

Uninstall Pando Media Booster (Easy) – Pando Media Booster is a peer-to-peer program that was used to download League of Legends. After it finishes its job, it stays active in your computer and seeds the league file. This uses up precious bandwidth, and thus should be removed. Pando Media Booster can be removed by going to the “Uninstall Programs” section of your computer and uninstalling it there. On Mac, Pando can be uninstalled by opening Pando, choosing “Reset Pando…” from the Pando menu, clicking “Reset Pando” and waiting for Pando to quit. Then, find the Pando application in your Applications folder and drag it to the trash. Some games may use Pando Media Booster to install, therefore you should make sure that you’ve downloaded your Pando games and closed Pando before uninstalling Pando.

Graphics Lag (Hard) – The granddaddy of all lag, this is the result of a general slowdown in graphics, and is a common occurrence for any gamer. Basically, your system just can’t produce enough Frames Per Second (FPS) to make everything feel nice and smooth. Anytime graphics lag happens, you’ll typically get a reduction in the responsiveness of your controls. Your actions take a fraction longer to be reflected in the graphics on-screen because it takes your system a bit more time to create each new frame of graphics and send it to your monitor. This can be fixed by lowering your resolution, lowering texture resolution, disable anti-alias and anisotropic filtering, etc.

Keep the drivers up to date (Easy) – It is important to keep you drives (Graphics drivers, network drivers, etc) up to date.

Hardisk problems (Medium): Defragment your harddrive(s) (Easy) – Some issues in the harddisk  can affect your whole computer. If you tend to hear some sound near your hard disk, area and you feel like whole computer freezing when accessing large files, there can be an issue in your hard disk.

Disable unnecessary drivers and windows services (Easy) – You might have to search on this as stooping windows service without knowing about them can be harmful.

Conclusion

Hope you have better ping right now. I will contentiously update this page and will make sure you there is nothing left-out. If you have tried everything I mentioned and if you ping is same, you might need to think of another closer server or might need to learn to play with the lag.