dan1331 :
A friend brought his PC over to game and said the game was considerably less responsive on my network (keep in mind he is a very competitive person so making the game ANY more difficult would be noticeable to him). I was wondering if there was anything I could do to improve that with settings or buying a new cable modem or router.
Thanks!
That depends on what the latency was, and why it was that way.
You CANNOT control the route it takes across the internet
You CAN customize the security of your router, or clean up your cables in your home, change wireless channels, etc..
All of which are related to the total latency you have on a trip and if yours happens to be bad may help you improve it.
However, that said, I meet people everyday that claim they can tell the difference between 50 and 75 ms, and that's total horse crap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond
If it takes 134 ms for light to travel around the earth, gamers cannot tell the difference in times under under that, no matter how super human they believe themselves to be [last I knew we don't have the bionic eye thing out for random retail yet].
What is more likley causing his "bad" perception is a noise issue either on the wireless or the local house network wires [either cat5 cables or phone/cable lines to/in the house]. More likely intermittent packet loss may be present. Most of the people crying about their latency I run across, ends up being this. [Generally becasue they are on. 2.4 Ghz wireless in an apartment and have no idea how SNR works, nor how to download and use something like inSSIDer from metageeks which maps out your wireless spectrum and can help you choose a channel not already heavily in use if available.]