Can someone help me read a traceroute?

[Ausar]

So I play League of Legends and I usually have anywhere from 20-50 ping. And its fine, but today I have been encountering ping of over 200 making the game unplayable. Natuarally I do the usual, restart everything, flush dns, release/renew, none of it helping. So I manually pinged their servers and got replies in under 40ms. But then I decided to do a traceroute. And got this: Tracing route to riotgames-17.ext1.lax.pnap.net [216.52.241.254]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 10 ms 15 ms 9 ms 173-219-194-109.suddenlink.net [173.219.194.109]

4 * 507 ms 370 ms 173-219-227-72.suddenlink.net [173.219.227.72]
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms ae-20.r01.dllstx04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.20
3.77]
7 11 ms 12 ms 11 ms ae-2.r22.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.6.1
20]
8 42 ms 41 ms 46 ms ae-5.r22.lsanca07.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.7.6
9]
9 40 ms 38 ms 40 ms ae-1.r01.lsanca07.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.3.1
23]
10 42 ms 38 ms 40 ms ae-0.internap.lsanca07.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.25
0.203.98]
11 40 ms 41 ms 38 ms riotgames-17.ext1.lax.pnap.net [216.52.241.254]

Now, I am a tech geek, but I dont know what exactly im looking for. I have to assume the 507-307 to suddenlink is suspicious but I dont know enough about this to make a call. Help?

 

[bill001g]

You need a lot more data to show anything. Lets look at hop 2. It says all traffic is being lost at this point. If this were true then all traffic would be lost at hop 3 and beyond because it can't get past hop 2.

This is where traceroute implies issues where there are not. So if hop 4 is having issues you would see every hop past there having issues also which you do not so it is again false information.

Now lets pretend the 40+ ms in hop 8 is problem. As you can see every location past there gets more that 40ms so that means hop 8 is the cause of the added delay. In this case the extra 30ms is likely because you are going a long distance and can not be fixed even if you wanted to.

What you are looking for is a error that starts early in the trace and continues to the end.

Intermediate nodes show strange stuff because they configure to not respond (ie hops 2 & 5) or they may be too busy passing actual traffic and delay their response to things like ping and tracert. Also traceroute only shows the path to the end node the return path may be different and the return path may be different for each of the intermediate nodes. It is extremely hard to figure out why only a intermedia node has high times unless you have access to this equipment. For a general user who has no access it is better to just ignore strange stuff that does not actually have a impact on the end device you are interested in.

I would run a constant ping in the background cmd window to the servers causing the issue...make sure you get the correct ip, When your game show 200ms check to see what the real ping says. Ingame ping is not actually ping it represents delays in the game client and the game server. It can be affect by things such as video driver settings. This is where the game companies need to stop calling this metric ping because it can get poor performance because of non network issues.