Whatever the problem is, it seems to have something to do with my set-up in-house. Various speed test and ping test type websites indicate nothing any different than the results I got at my old house. (In fact–things are better at the new house in that regard.)
But in the games Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends I get wildly variable performance. My ping (as measured in-game) varies from less than 50 to over 400. It seems to come in “spikes”–it’s less than 50 for a while, then suddenly jumps up to 4** and slowly drops until the next spike.
In-game, the effect in Heroes is that the game screen freezes for large fractions of a second every few seconds. In League the effect is that every now and then the entire game state will “jump,” i.e. characters will suddenly “teleport” (so to speak) to spots where they were not previously heading, as a result of my laptop suddenly receiving new information that had been delayed. This happens right at the same time I get a “ping spike.”
I don’t know if it’s all games or not… Guild Wars 2 seems fine but I only just started playing that, basically just finished the tutorial and for all I know all of that is handled directly on my own machine.
On the other hand it’s not a generalized problem with my internet connection–pages load super fast, I do not have problems watching video, etc.
So what could be happening here? How can I troubleshoot this problem to discover whether there’s anything I can do to improve the situation?
I haven’t been able to play in a week or two, but my experience with HotS was the same as yours. Their servers are really wonky and there are times when my lag makes the game completely unplayable to the point where I have to abandon the game, reset my router, and hope that if I manage to make it back in time to finish out the game I’m able to do so with a better connection.
OP, are you the only one using your connection? There are times I notice my speed lagging, then I see my SO is downloading an OS update on her tablet while using Facebook on her phone.
Frylock, is your computer connected to your router by Wi-Fi by any chance ? That’d be the first place I’d look for the cause of intermittent but short lag spikes, which could in that case be caused by interferences on the frequency(ies) involved - microwave ovens, cell phone calls, TVs, your neighbour logging on to his own Wi Fi network…
Which is why I stick to copper, personally.
That said, I don’t play LoL or HotS ; they could have shitty netcode to begin with for all I know.
One thing to keep in mind is that your internet connection is really a connection to your ISP’s network.
So it’s entirely possible that you could have a super-fast awesome internet connection at your house, and that there’s an overloaded router or something between you and the game servers, and that’s why your ping sucks for gaming, but nothing else.
Run a tracert to the gaming servers and see where your actual bottleneck might be located- it should list out each hop on the route with some info about timing. It may be worth watching your router as you try and play the game so that you make sure and get the right server; the public address may not be where the actual game communicates with the servers.
I don’t know squat about HoS, but LoL is hugely popular, and it’s entirely possible that you’re just trying to play at peak times also.
Looking up how to run a tracert, it looks like the command is “tracert yourdomain.com,” but I don’t know what to put in place of “yourdomain.com.” Can you help me out with that?
Nevermind, I see it’s supposed to be the domain I’ve been communicating with and which I’m curious about, in other words, the domain that hosts the games (if “host” is the right word here…). I’ve asked on the HotS forums what the right domain name should be.
How do I watch my router to find out whether the public address is the same as the one where the actual game communicates with the servers?
Using an ip address supplied on a forum post at HotS, I ran tracert, and it’s giving me at least 16 hops (not including a bunch of “request timed out” lines," with individual pings ranging from 7ms to 398 ms. (Median value seems to be around 100ms.)
Basically what you’re looking for is some kind of situation where your average ping might be 300 ms, and all hops but one are less than 50, and that one is huge- like 400.
Then you know that there’s a particular bottleneck between you and them. Not that you can really do much about it (save switching ISPs, and even that might not do it), but at least you know it’s not you and it’s not the game.
My router at least, has the ability to look at the current connections. So what I’d do is fire up a connection with the router on my wife’s laptop or my phone, while I played the game, and see where my PC is actually connecting to.