Gaming: previously low ping suddenly became higher than Cheech and Chong

[joezilla29]

I have a few favorite servers I frequent on a couple of games because in them, my latency is reliably under 100. Literally, this changed overnight. Now, I see that my server ping in one of the games is peaked at 999 (although it's probably even higher than that) when it was previously at 60-70, and another game wouldn't even display the name of the server. I checked with a friend to see if he had the issue as well, but he could see and join it, whereas I couldn't even see it all.

I have unplugged/reset my modem and router many times (which worked before), but the problem persists. I ran Malwarebytes but no malware was detected, and I even tried some solutions posted for those specific issues for those games, but nothing has worked.

Would this have something to do with my ISP? I have a suspicion they might be throttling me, because this happened overnight, and I haven't tweaked my router settings in years. Have any of you had this particular issue before?

Thank you. All help is appreciated!

 

[bill001g]

Games use almost no bandwidth so its not likely a game would cause throttling. If your internet plan has a CAP some ISP will reduce the speed when you hit that cap.

First run speedtest and see if you are getting the rates you are suppose to.

You then want to run tracert to a ip like 8.8.8.8.

You then want to ping hop 1 your router, hop2 the first ISP router and the final IP. What you hope to see is no issues to hop1 which means all your equipment in the house is fine. If you see issues in hop2 but not hop1 then you have a issue to the ISP. You can continue to ping hops to find the one that causes the issue but generally the farther you get from your house the harder it is to get fixed because the ISP has some issue in their network or with the connection to other ISP.

 

[joezilla29]

Games use almost no bandwidth so its not likely a game would cause throttling. If your internet plan has a CAP some ISP will reduce the speed when you hit that cap.

First run speedtest and see if you are getting the rates you are suppose to.

You then want to run tracert to a ip like 8.8.8.8.

You then want to ping hop 1 your router, hop2 the first ISP router and the final IP. What you hope to see is no issues to hop1 which means all your equipment in the house is fine. If you see issues in hop2 but not hop1 then you have a issue to the ISP. You can continue to ping hops to find the one that causes the issue but generally the farther you get from your house the harder it is to get fixed because the ISP has some issue in their network or with the connection to other ISP.

Thanks! I ran tracert, but I'm afraid my understanding of the data displayed was rather elementary. I found out it was a problem of my router, which was connected to my modem. After I plugged my ethernet directly into my modem, everything was back to normal.

 

[bill001g]

So the best method is to reset the router to factory and reconfigure from the start and hope it was a config issue. Next check to see if there is newer firmware.

After that you look to buy a new router. You could also see if third party firmware supports your router dd-wrt or tomato. Tends to be kinda a pain but if you are going to toss it in the trash you have little to lose.