Talk:Ping (video games)

Factors
What factors affect ping? Why does one person have a high ping and another a low one? This article leaves a lot of questions unanswered. TayquanhollaMy work 14:08, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

It has to do with where you are in accordance to the server i.e if your in australia and the server is in the u.s your ping will be high (sombody correct me if im wrong)

Fireice2035 06:54, 14 October 2007 (UTC)fireice2035

Expert
I'm an computer programmer and enthusiast. I'm going to claim expert status on this and claim it is correct as of the date of signature. If you need any further assistance drop a note in my talk. I've done nothing to reference the article. EvanCarroll (talk) 01:41, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Also a programmer, specializing in online games. While EvanCarroll is correct, that's a bit of a generalization. There are many other factors (the article mentions some) that can affect ping besides just physical distance. For example I have a fiber connection and can ping a server on the other side of the world getting a time of 117ms, I could ping another server in the same city and get 300ms+ due to the quality of that servers connection, their connection speed, and other factors such as how much of a load the server is under (both CPU-wise and current connections). Then you also have traffic shaping that some ISPs utilize to downgrade the priority of a packet, thereby slowing down the connection. --121.162.45.7 (talk) 11:27, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I am going to say that as a systems engineer, not a programmer, this article is more wrong that right, and mr expert above has no more idea that the articles author. I submit:

A ping time is how long it takes to get a packet of a CERTAIN SIZE to complete a round trip. That trip is not always the same route and the size of the packet can change. How many people are taking the same route, how much data is taking that same route all have an affect on your latencey. The mb (megabit) speed of your internet means that at most youcan transfer say 5 mb = 5 megabits. That is the amount of data in a cycle. a 10mb connection would do double the data in the same time. Thats all. At most an online game will require 256kb to play. Most ISP's provide that. If you are running other traffic from your PC, say downloads, they are now competing with your game for bandwith. so yes you will see a reduction if you run out of bandwith. Games use unacknowledged packets, or UDP for communication. Therefore, it only goes in one direction to or from. When yousee lag, youare seeing some packets getting lost (dropped) due to congestion. They are not retransmitted. So you will see someone go from right in front of you to far away like a blip. this is congestion at your ISP, your house or on your nic on your PC. There is a huge difference in how UDP and TCP packets work kiddies.

If you reduce your resolution and your "ping" goes down, then you need a better viseo subsystem. A better video card will fix this since a better card will offload what your CPU is making up for with a "weak" video card. There is certainly a strong tie between video performance in games and cpu cycles. Don't listen to these morons.

Software firewalls use cpu cycles to inspect packets, as do other products. As a general rule in computer science, once you start hitting 50% utilization on any computer device: network card, hard drive, cpu, RAM, whatever ... it will begin to underperform. Anything else that is written here is total BS and probably written by some kid that thinks he knows what he is talking about. Want to learn for yourself ? wikipedia these things:

ping, tracert, UDP, TCP, IP, latencey. You will then understand for yourself. Please note that it is TCP or UDP then IP. TCP and UDP are controls for the IP protocol and are totally different —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.207.144.124 (talk) 21:04, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

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This is one of the most poorly-written articles I've seen on Wikipedia to date. I've just done a fair amount of cleanup and removal of redundant and nonsense statements, but this very likely needs more work. To the person who claimed "expert" status: thanks for the laugh. --Jason Stormchild (talk) 14:12, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Unencyclopaedic
This article is a just a duplicate of Lag (online gaming) and should be merged. (A mix of Ping, Network latency, Lag in the context of Multiplayer online game) and as such is unencyclopaedic. I propose merging into Lag (online gaming). Widefox (talk) 08:33, 27 April 2011 (UTC) Widefox (talk) 08:39, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

✅ Requires integration and other cleanup. ~Kvng (talk) 14:12, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Support - I have put up banners proposing a merge to Lag and directed discussion to this section. ~Kvng (talk) 18:51, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Support - I wouldn't consider the existence of this article unencyclopedic, but I would call it unnecessary. This would fit in well into Lag, especially seeing as ping isn't mentioned at all in Lag at the moment (and it should be). JaykeBird (talk) 03:46, 16 November 2017 (UTC)