How To Fix Heroes of the Storm Lag
Crossover games have experienced huge success in the past, including gems like Super Smash Bros. and Soulcalibur.
While fighting games are the most common platform for crossovers, Heroes of the Storm flipped the script and put some of the best content from massive Blizzard titles into a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).
This move capitalized on the massive continuing popularity of MOBAs and the existing fan base of Blizzard’s games, including Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.
While there have been some bumps in the road for Heroes of the Storm, it still has a lot of merits and brings value to the MOBA game lineup. The familiar characters bring nostalgia and unique opportunities for lore development to the table.
However, like all online games with real-time gameplay, Heroes of the Storm has its fair share of lag problems.
Today, our WTFast gaming guide is all about identifying why Heroes of the Storm is lagging and ways you can fix it. Let’s jump right in!
What Is Lag?
You probably want to jump straight to an easy fix, but understanding where your lag comes from is the first step towards finding your solution.
Lag itself is an irregular delay in your game. If you notice a hero glitching around the screen, a tree taking too long to render, or your character actions delaying after your button inputs – that’s lag.
It can also take more extreme forms, such as rubber banding, failed rendering, or lost inputs. We’ll discuss these in more detail below.
Whatever type of lag you experience, it’s no secret that it’s incredibly frustrating. Lag is the arch-nemesis of all gamers (except those who use WTFast’s GPN), and Heroes of the Storm is no different.
Particularly due to the game's fast-paced nature and its reliance on competent performance by the entire team, your entire team is affected if your lag leads to an avoidable mistake.
Your skill can only be rewarded when you aren’t suffering avoidable losses, so defeating ping is the real final boss.
What Are Types of Lag and Their Causes?
Lag may seem like a mysterious and frustrating enemy at first, but it becomes less intimidating once we break it down.
Lag is a pretty broad term, and it has a broad array of causes as well. Generally, we can categorize lag as being either hardware-based or network-based.
Hardware-based lag is caused by issues with your computer or gaming device. Perhaps the device isn’t up to spec or it’s overworked. You should always troubleshoot for this kind of lag before looking into network issues.
Network lag is due to a slow or unstable internet connection. This is typically where the more extreme forms of lag come into play.
Certain types of lag are more commonly based on hardware or network issues, and some are exclusive to one or the other. The types of lag most likely to affect Heroes of the Storm are as follows:
Stutter
Microstutter
Rubberbanding
Packet Loss
Let’s look at each in detail.
Stutter
Stutter is characterized by short, choppy delays alone or in a short series. Stutter is the most irregular form of lag, and it’s impossible to predict.
Smooth gameplay amidst stutter can feel impossible. It’s one of the most frustrating and debilitating forms of lag, whether it’s consistently a problem or it appears in spikes.
The shortest forms of stutter are most likely due to your network. Meanwhile, longer forms of stutter referred to as freezing might instead be due to your hardware.
Microstutter
While stutter causes a significant impact on your gameplay, microstutter does the opposite. It’s much more subtle, rarely more than a minor annoyance.
In terms of how it comes into effect, microstutter simply causes irregular drops in your FPS. Gaming on high graphic settings suffers the most. Microstutter is equally likely to be hardware or network related in most cases.
Rubberbanding
You’re most likely familiar with rubberbanding, thanks to the evocative name and popular blooper clips that show the funniest iterations of this type of lag.
In practice, the rubberbanding proves to be quite accurate, as it causes your character to bounce back and forth as though they were tied to a pole by a rubber band.
While it may be funny in bloopers, it’s one of the most frustrating forms of lag in-game, and it’s the most significant in terms of causing problems for your gameplay.
Rubberbanding is an exclusively network-related form of lag.
Packet Loss
Like rubberbanding, packet loss only comes into play when gaming online. When you play an online game like Heroes of the Storm, your local system constantly sends “pings” of data to the online game server, which then “ping” back to your system. This is how the game knows what’s going on, shows it to you, and lets you interact with it.
When your ping is extreme or the data doesn’t arrive at all, that is packet loss. This might look like an enemy that doesn’t render, a button press that never results in action, or a sound cue that never plays.
Solutions for Lag
Now that we’ve built our foundation, we can start to fix the problem. Thankfully, there are tangible, relatively simple ways to combat lag starting today.
The first place to look should always be your hardware, as network fixes won’t mean anything if your device isn’t holding up.
Hardware Solutions
Hardware issues are a common cause of lag, especially with PC games that have more factors at play.
Start by making sure your device is up to specs with the recommended system capabilities laid out by Blizzard for Heroes of the Storm.
You can also adjust your graphics settings to ensure your computer isn’t being overworked. Vertical Sync, Antialias settings, and a number of other factors will make the gun easier to run without causing significantly noticeable differences in the graphics quality of the game.
Speaking of graphics, you should always double-check that your graphics drivers are up to date. Running on an old driver is one of the quickest ways to get super laggy gameplay.
It’s also important to close background programs that might use valuable RAM (how much your system can process at once). Close all those Chrome browsers, shut down Photoshop and Spotify, and give Discord a break if you really need to open some room in your RAM.
Network Solutions
If hardware fixes aren’t relevant or don’t do the trick, it’s time for network fixes.
Are you running Heroes of the Storm on a wireless connection? Switching to a wired ethernet connection is the first change you should make.
Wireless internet is convenient for communication and on-the-go living, but it isn’t up to spec for real-time online gaming. Ethernet is much faster and more stable in almost every case.
Just like with hardware, your network can only do so much at once. This is measured by bandwidth, and other traffic on your server can take up this valuable metric, leaving Heroes of the Storm less connection power.
Pause your streams and downloads while gaming to ensure you aren’t taxing your network unnecessarily.
A GPN
Even with all these basic solutions, lag may still be a big problem. Whether it’s consistent lag or random lag spikes, the best way to cut network lag from your gaming is with a Gamers Private Network (GPN).
Our GPN is a new way to connect for online gaming that focuses completely on optimizing your speed and stability.
A GPN may sound like a VPN at first, but its purpose and methods are completely different.
In fact, the main draw of a VPN is masking your connection and bypassing restrictions. This isn’t part of our GPN technology due to a conscious decision to work with video game security measures. Instead, we put all our effort into getting you the best connection possible.
Why? A VPN connection might get you flagged as a hacker or bot, but our GPN is always compatible with whatever game you choose.
So how does it work? We use advanced technology and AI to find the fastest route for your data, and we tunnel only the most important, real-time gameplay data through our GPN.
This means any background downloads, streams, or other internet activity won’t interfere with your gameplay, and your speed and stability will be unmatched.
The best part about our service is that it’s plug-and-play. This is the simplest solution of all – just install our GPN, choose Heroes of the Storm or another game, and start playing!
Manual control and deeper information are available for those who want it, but our AI is expertly engineered to find the best way to connect you for your game while you play.
Conclusion
Tired of being held back by lag? Ready to cut avoidable losses from your Heroes of the Storm gameplay once and for all? Let WTFast equip you with our secret weapon in the war on lag with our GPN. Your gaming experience will be better than ever.
For all the latest gaming technology and guides, WTFast is the place to be.
Sources:
Wired vs Wireless Networking | IT Best Practices | University of Nebraska-Lincoln
