How do I reduce my Latency for online gaming?

[Kitana88]

Hi There,

This is probably an age old question and I have seen multiple post on this. But I thought I'll take a slightly different approach to verify if there is anything I can do from a hardware, configuration, download a program, make a sacrifice to the online gaming gods perspective, beside moving closer to where ever the server is.

Ok, so I am a massive WoW player and I live in Australia. Yes, downunder on the other side of the world, far away from Blizzard and it's gaming servers. It is no secret that Australia has one of the worst internet services for a 1st world country. Cause even India, China and probably most of the 3rd world Asian countries have better internet than we do. Anyway, my in game latency on a good day is about 250ms with the new PC I recently built about a month ago. I use to get under 200 to low 200 with my old PC, but since I had my new PC, the latency has gone up.

So I am wondering if there is something I have missed or did not do right when I built the new PC. It was my first hand at building a new PC and it turn out great. My internet service where I live is only ADSL so I know that is not like the greatest, but I can't do anything about that. I also thought changing from using a CAT5 cable to a CAT6 cable may help, not too sure if it has. I have tried a trial program design locally for the Australian gaming community called Reduce The Lag (you can Google it) but there don't seem to have much improvements either to what it claims to do. I have also tried adding some kind of file (if you can call it that) that has something to do with Nagle's alogorithm ( I just Google for some solutions and found this) but it also don't seem to have made much of a difference.

Would changing/upgrading my modem/router help. I am using quite and old modem/router provided by my ISP (Telstra) when I first signed up like 8yr ago. Is there some form of booster available? network card? or maybe some form of setup I need to do which I have not. I have checked my network/LAN driver and it says it's up-to-date. Kind of running out of ideas.

If anyone has some great suggestions, tips or a step-by-step instructions on how to help improve/reduce gaming latency, I would happily sacrifice a goat/lamb under the pale moonlight, dancing naked around a bond fire if that helps too.

Thank you all in advance for your time and patience. I look forward to the communities vast knowledge and any solution available. Thank you

 

[viewtyjoe]

Honestly, if you're stuck with ADSL, your best bet may be a tunneling service. I'm not too familiar with any, being US myself, but EU/AUS friends playing on US servers have had pretty solid success with some of the better regarded services at getting better ping times. I would check within your community online to see if anyone does use a tunneling service and their experiences, though.

 

[gommerspider]

Ping has to do with the distance of the servers you play or the even better the route that the ping follows to get to the wow server and the traffic workload of the servers in bettween.
For me you have to do 3 steps
a) Download the Leatrix Latency fix tool.
b) choose the nearest possible server to play with.
c) Check with your isp if the adsl is on an interleaved or a fastpath. You may want to ask to change to a fastpath connection which will surely reduce ping but may turn your connection unstable. Try it and if u have disconnections you may change back to interleaved.

 

[bill001g]

First step is to run traceroute to some address. 8.8.8.8 tends to always work it a google dns.

All you really care about are the first couple of hops. The first one is to your router in your house you should see close to zero. The next is your connection to the ISP. If this one is high then you may be able to get your ISP to fix this. It should not be more than maybe 10-15ms. Things like mobile broadband you can see well over 100ms which is why its bad for games.

After this point you dive into the huge mess of how the internet is really built. What you do is run traceroute to the server you are interested in. The DNS resolution for these routers in the path generally give you a good clue as to where the traffic is going. You can generally tell which ISP and what city some of the device are in. On your ISP this is mostly just interesting data because you can't change it.

What you would be looking for is say your ISP is xxx and the game machine isp is yyy but these 2 isp do not directly interconnect. But lets say xxx connects to zzz and yyy connect to zzz but they connect in a poor location for you....lets say india which is really bad if you are going to the USA. There is nothing you can do about this since your ISP controls the pathing and it is based on their interconnect agreements.

So how do these magic vpn services improve the latency. Lets say there is a vpn company in a city near you that has a connection to your isp xxx and a direct connection to the game company ISP yyy. What you do is send your traffic over a vpn tunnel to that city that then allows you to directly connect. The reason this works is to the game company you appear to be coming from a different ISP and so it routes it differently.

Of course this is overly simplifying things since there are many isp in the path and traffic does not flow in and out over the same path...you need to run traceroute from both ends to be sure.

It is a matter of finding one of these vpn services that has good connectivity to you and to the location you want.

Of course if you could get a different ISP...especially if you could get one of the ones the game company uses...you could get better pathing.

Things like RIPE and ARIN will help a lot to determine which ISP owns which addresses. You can then use tools from some of these ISP called looking glass to examine their connectivity to other ISP and run trace and ping.

Still this tends to be a rather tedious thing to do any many times you can't fix it when your ISP is too cheap to buy good connectivity to the rest of the world.

 

[C_hiesler_2000_2000]

Do you know what a DMZ zone is in your router/modem? Do you know how to get the mac address of your gaming machine?

 

[g-unit1111]

Do you know what a DMZ zone is in your router/modem? Do you know how to get the mac address of your gaming machine?

Please keep in mind that any posting of private addresses in a public forum will result in the posts edited out immediately and the thread may be locked and bans may be issued as a result. Tom's Hardware, nor its' parent company Purch Media do not want to be held liable in the event of a data breach, identity theft, or your network being hacked and your private data stolen.

 

[LShun]

Hello, firstly you could change your modem for better ones, it may or may not decrease your bandwidth but if you are using wireless connection, the range is normally larger and thus lower the latency for larger distance between the modem and the computer. The second is to use a DNS, for example 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 from Google.

Third is to change to another ISP. If you are only into gaming I guess a fairly average quota with low latency network will be better than a unlimited network with high latency. Using Optical fibers will also help. The worst is to use a satellite-based network. Good luck and have fun!