Fixing High Ping: Team Fortress 2 Lag Guide
Online first-person shooters are some of the most played video games in the world today. This isn’t entirely new – FPS games have been popular for decades, ever since they came into existence.
While the popularity of shooter games has steadily grown, so has their technical complexity.
Today, many shooter games are developed by triple AAA studios with incredibly realistic graphics, intricate maps, complex progression systems, and tons of cosmetic options often locked behind microtransactions.
With all of these new paint jobs, bells, and whistles, there are still some simpler games that have stood the test of time, thanks to the quality of their content and the “fun” factor. Team Fortress 2 is one of those games.
In fact, in many ways, TF2 has significantly influenced some of the best aspects we still see in games today in terms of storytelling and character development.
If you’re one of the many players who enjoy Team Fortress 2, you know that, like all online games, lag is a loss-causing buzzkill.
Today’s WTFast guide is all about how to reduce your lag in Team Fortress 2 by reducing high ping. So, let’s jump straight into it!
What Is Ping, and Does It Cause Lag?
Ping can mean a host of different things.
Maybe you’ve heard “ping” used in reference to social media and blogging, where it refers to interaction with content or a notification. That’s definitely not what we’re talking about today.
Ping in Gaming
In the context of online gaming, ping refers to the speed of your internet connection. More specifically, it’s the number of milliseconds it takes your data to travel from your local system (your PC or Playstation, for example) to the online network (in our case, the Team Fortress 2 server).
Ping can also refer to the actual data being sent and its journey.
In that sense, everything you do and see in an online game is based on data sent through pings. This data includes your input (pressing buttons to run, jump, shoot), graphics rendering (the environment and other characters), and even the audio tying it all together.
So, if ping is all about your game data and how long it takes to send back and forth, then what is lag?
The Meaning of Lag
Lag is an irregular delay. It isn’t exclusive to online activity, and it comes in a few different forms.
The most simple and common form of lag is stutter. Just like a stutter in speech, stutter lag is an individual or short series of irregular delays in any part of your game. Stutter can vary from subtle to game-breaking.
Stutter can translate into delayed input, choppy rendering, or late audio cues.
Microstutter is another form of lag that usually affects your frames per second (FPS), often less significantly than stutter. Microstutter can be obnoxious, but it typically won’t affect your performance.
Rubberbanding is an extreme form of lag that is visually hilarious but frustrating. You’re suffering this type of lag if you try to run your character to a certain point, but they keep bouncing back and forth as though they’re tied to a pole by a rubber band.
Rubberbanding typically makes it impossible to play your game well.
The last type of lag we should mention is called packet loss. If your ping is exceptionally high — whether consistently or in a brief spike — your data will take too long to arrive at the server, or it may never arrive at all.
Packet loss could look like loss of input (when nothing happens after you press a button) or perhaps some areas of the map that fail to render fully.
How Do High Ping and Lag Affect Your Gameplay?
Since ping determines how quickly information is sent, received, and made a reality in the game, it's most important for real-time gameplay actions – shooting, running, knifing, and so on. Time-sensitive gameplay is when high ping hurts the most.
That means your ability to put your skill into practice is hindered when your ping is too high. Having fast reactions or high-precision aim means nothing if your display takes too long to render. You’ll be acting on incorrect information about the map, where your enemies are, and other need-to-know facts.
When ping gets high and delays your inputs, its effects become even worse. If your character doesn’t act as soon as you press a button but rather half a second later, you’ll lose your competitive edge and suffer forced errors and losses.
You may not experience lag frequently. Still, with an unstable connection, lag spikes and major connection drops can interrupt your experience and cause the same issues as lag.
When your ping jumps up briefly and erratically from low values (around 30 milliseconds) to high values (100 or more ms), it becomes even more frustrating and detrimental to your ability to anticipate what you’ll need to do to compensate.
Ultimately, high ping and lag are going to hurt your loss aversion more than anything.
A fast and smooth connection isn’t going to magically make you the greatest Team Fortress 2 player in the world. It will let your skill reflect more accurately in your results.
Never losing again because of lag sounds great, right? Just be prepared to have no more excuses if a loss does come your way. Overall, your experience is going to improve dramatically – guaranteed.
Solutions: How To Fix High Ping
If you’re struggling with high or unstable ping, there are several solutions that can help you.
Identifying the Best Solution for You
Of course, you might be experiencing lag without knowing the cause! That’s okay – the solution has to start somewhere.
You can test your ping on a computer in several ways, and most consoles have a built-in ping test as well.
If your ping doesn’t seem to be the problem, it might be time to take a look at your hardware and make sure everything is up to spec.
You should be meeting the recommended system standards at a minimum, and you might need to close other programs running in the background to give your RAM (how much your system can process at once) more room to breathe.
Ethernet
If ping is the source of your lag on a wireless connection, switching to a wired connection should be your first course of action.
Wireless connections are super convenient for a lot of things – online gaming isn’t one of them. Not only is wireless internet much slower on average than ethernet, but it’s also much less stable.
With a wired connection, you’re less likely to experience lag spikes and disconnects, and your speed should greatly improve as well. That doesn’t mean all lag will be solved, though.
Cut Out Background Traffic
The next step is to double-check that you aren’t flooding your network with background traffic. Don’t play TF2 while downloading an update for another game unless you’re prepared to experience some lag.
Likewise, streaming or uploading a video to youtube while gaming will tax your bandwidth (how much data your network can send efficiently) and hinder smooth gaming.
Use a GPN
The ultimate solution is also one of the easiest to put into action. You don’t have to move your computer or constantly be alert to everything going through your network. Instead, just use our WTFast GPN, choose TF2 or another game of your liking, and play!
Our Gamers Private Network (GPN) connects to a game server with optimized speed and stability. It’s not completely dissimilar to a VPN in that it changes the way your data travels, but the purpose and details of a GPN are totally unique.
Most importantly, we created our WTFast GPN with real-time gameplay as the sole focus. Our GPN won’t affect how you log in or download updates – that all happens directly with the Team Fortress 2 server as normal.
When the GPN does become involved is as soon as you enter a match. All your time-sensitive actions and gameplay data are tunneled through the fastest and most stable route possible to ensure lag has no place in your gaming.
You might be wondering if a GPN can be used to encrypt your activity or bypass certain restrictions. It can’t, but this is an intentional design choice.
Some games automatically flag VPNs as potential fraudsters, hackers, or bots since VPNs can, unfortunately, be used to those ends.
We design our GPN technology to comply with security settings specific to each game, so you’ll never have to worry about this happening with Team Fortress 2 or any other game you play.
With a GPN, it’s all about your gaming. Once installed, it’s as simple as choosing your game and launching into a match.
If you’re the type who prefers manual control, we have those options too, and our AI can help you choose the best route available.
Conclusion
With our WTFast GPN technology, you’ll have a new secret weapon against lag, and we guarantee you’ve never seen such a one-sided matchup.
Whether you’re team RED, BLU, or playing another online game, our service is your best bet to cut lag from your gaming for good.
Sources:
How Team Fortress 2 changed FPSes forever | PC Gamer
Wired vs Wireless Networking | IT Best Practices | University of Nebraska-Lincoln
