Ping (or latency) is one of the most crucial parts while online gaming, especially if you’re playing online shooter game where every delay counts. Gamers are mostly obsessed with it and it’s one of the best things to blame for your faults too. One thing many gamers wonders though is- they get great ping when do ping tests, especially in speed tests but they often face high ping in games.
So, why is that? There could be several reasons behind it. Let see what they are.
Why you get high ping in games but not on ping tests?
Server Location:
While you’re doing speed tests, the ping you see is for the server you’re testing on. And the server is usually closest to your Internet Gateway location. So, you will always get great ping on automatic speed tests.
Meanwhile, game servers are located at different corners of every region. Some region only has single server while some have multiple servers. Due to this, the server location might be far away from you. So, comparing the ping / latency you see in Speed Tests to game server isn’t really a good idea.
You can usually find the server location, if that’s PC or console game, by asking the community or the game support themselves. If the server is pretty close to you and you’re still get poor ping then read the next few points.
If you live far from the game server then you can’t expect to get great ping.
ISP Routing:
There are times when you’re getting great ping to servers from the location where the in-game server is located. And yet, when you are playing games, you get poor & high ping. It could be common problem for some people whose ISP don’t want to fix the problem. It could be due to poor routing from your ISP.
Routing decides the way your data will reach its destination.
For example, let say you live in point A and your destination server is in point B. There are multiple paths from which your data can travel. Point C will result in short path while point D will result in longer path. If your ISP isn’t careful with its routing, it might use point D which would result in higher latency / ping.
Besides this, there are times when specific servers are not properly routed by your ISP. So, you might be getting great ping to many servers from a specific location but some (including the game server) will have high ping.
The proper solution for this problem is to report your ISP with the IP address of your game server. You can use VPN for better routing as well, but they might be unstable. So, it is better to get it fixed from your ISP.
CDN:
Some time, you might see great ping / latency when you ping the game server. However, in-game, you might be getting poor ping. It is usually because the game server company could be using CDN. Usually, CDNs have multiple servers throughout every country. So, you will be having great experience regardless of your location.
So, when you ping a server which is powered by some CDN, it will have great ping. However, in-game, CDNs cannot work because gaming servers are UDP-based and they have to interact in real time with every player. So, CDN cannot work for gaming servers like they do for websites or apps.
You can ask the game support about the game server location to be sure. If the server is close to your location and you are still getting poor ping then it could be due to above issues. So, contacting your ISP can help here.
Conclusion:
So, these are one of the main reasons why you might be getting high / bad / poor ping while gaming while testing in Command Prompt or Speed Tests might be bringing great results. I hope this article was helpful to you in diagnosing the real reason behind your ping in games. At the end, mostly it is at the hands of your ISP. So, if they are not willing to improve anything for you then you might need to start looking for alternatives.
