Latency/Ping Guide

Ping is what’s described as latency. In an online first person shooter game, it will likely give you an advantage over the battlefield. Notice that if you have a 400+ ping, you can likely be pumping lead to your enemies dead on but wont hit and getting you killed instead by the lower pinged player.

The process is calculated as 1000/th of a second. So a 999 ping in Call of Duty 4 or any other online game will likely get you a half second delay until the server recognizes you have fired a shot and half a second again until the server broadcasts to you that you have fired a shot. Most even only have a 999 threshold on pings so you will likely be lagging more than a second. In short, ping is the round trip time of the packets of data used in gaming.

"The average blinking time of the eye is 1/10th of a second which translates to 100ping as comparable ingame."

Your ISP is the first thing to check if other players on the game will be compatible. In the Philippines, Bayantel and PLDT are incompatible like oil to water. I have a Bayantel connection and even if the server is just 50 miles away, I get 800+ ping… no thanks.

Here is a guide to know what your hit ratio will be with your approximate ping:

• Below 50 > You get great hit ratio
• Below 100 > You still get a great hit ratio.
• 120-140 > You won’t hit a running opponent sometime
• 170-240+ > Horrible lag, stutter, and teleporting just disconnect and look for another server

There are also hardware limitations in which it can induce lag (onscreen) on servers like:

• Low system specs and hosting more than a host can handle *ie. a 32 player server + a host getting over 70+ ping… a sign of his system getting choked because his system can’t handle it.
• Low system specs and alt tabbing
• Spamming the smoke grenade
• Already on a post lag state and staring at a lag smoke ball
• Incompatible cross ISP’s

How to troubleshoot to limiting Lag overall:

• Set your preferred graphic settings, create a game over Shipment, take note of your starting ping, look up the sky, if your ping is dramatically lowered, you can tweak it to your hearts' content to get the "sweet spot".
  
• Open the Lagometer and FPS counter. Type in cg_drawlagometer 1 and cg_drawfps 1 for gauging purposes.

Some can be remedied by:

• Tunneling
• Lowering graphic settings including sound *Guide HERE
• Restart or Get new hardware or new connection as a last resort

If you want to lower your ping with tunneling, you can do so HERE. But only on Garena, otherwise, you may want to buy a tunnel client that will cost more

If you want to get a better hit register, you can follow the Bash and Slash guide although I haven’t tried it but it may as well give you an edge over your gaming.

So the next time another player says “Lag… Log… Who joined last? …” you might know what goes around and probably solve the problem.