The world is more than accustomed to the work-from-home (WFH) standard. While productive in it’s own right, it has a slew of downsides that accompany it. While there are many technical things that can ruin our experience, the worst is lag time. It has a myriad of names–latency, buffer, low ping–but nothing can ruin your day faster.
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For a stress-free modern day connection, a high speed internet plan is crucial. Multiple users streaming at home, taking online classes, online gaming, etc.–connectivity is truly the most crucial part of keeping us together. Whether we like it or not, slower speeds, iffy audio, and crappy quality affect our ultimate user experience, if not downright put us on tilt.
You could be the best player in the world, but a problematic ping will have lesser gamers out-manoeuvring and out-ranking you, unless you find a way to level up your internet connection.
What is a ping?It’s Mike Muuss’ invention. His way of measuring lag time in milliseconds (ms), inspired by submarines. Data packets, from your computer or console, are pinged to the gaming server and back to you. The quicker your ping, the smoother and more competitively you can play online games, and the bigger the advantage you’ll have – players with higher pings than you will struggle to keep tabs on you and you’ll seem to hop around their screen.
What is lag?It’s the time delay measured by the ping. The longer it takes to send and receive messages, the less they make sense. Lag can cause your character to jerk about while moving (fighting, driving, jumping) and your gameplay could freeze or rollback, if you haven’t already been disconnected from your online game because of lag. Perhaps you’ve heard gamers complain about latency? Well, this is what most people mean.
With practice and saint-like patience, you could get used to a lag. But it’s better to try to improve it so you can level up faster and have more fun. You’ll react quicker to what’s happening and land your skill shots on target when you’re seeing the most recent, live gameplay. You can also game on instinct, as you’ll see where you are on the map and what players are up to in real-time without having to imagine it all in advance.
For slower, turn-based games, lag isn’t the worst thing in the world because your moves can be less precise and perfect timing isn’t crucial. But high ping is a real killjoy for first person shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield) where a delay could stop you getting the headshots you need to win the game. It also sucks the fun out of questing on multiplayer online battle arenas (League of Legends), playing real-time strategy games (Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, Northgard) or massively multiplayer online games (World of Warcraft, RuneScape).