What Is Rubberbanding in Games & How to Stop It?
If you’ve never dealt with the issue of rubberbanding in your online gaming, count yourself lucky. Rubberbanding—sometimes spelled rubber banding—is a minor nuisance at best and a game-ending catastrophe at worst. Along with lag, it can spell the downfall of many online experiences.
Thankfully, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this issue, there are a few simple solutions. WTFast is here to highlight everything there is to know about rubberbanding in games and how to stop it from happening.
What Does Rubberbanding Look Like
Your character is running through a field, ducking for cover, or riding a transport vehicle through a warzone. You are playing any number of server-based games where you are at the behest of ping and latency.
As you are traveling, your character suddenly jumps back to where they were a few seconds ago. When your character moves without your control like this, it may elicit shock—or send you somewhere you’d rather not be.
Rubberbanding may seem like a glitch to both player and observer, but it does have a practical purpose. In server-based games, stopgaps are in place to prevent a player from drifting too far from the position recorded on the server. It would be unfair and difficult to give a player an advantage due to poor internet service. Due to various reasons, there may be subtle discrepancies in position player-side and server-side.
When someone drifts too far, the server resets the position of the player. The resulting position may be a total reset to the server position or a composite of the two perceived positions.
For players, this can create an unfavorable gaming experience. There are few things more frustrating than playing a game when suddenly you get teleported right back into an enemy.
It might be something to laugh about when it happens in a relaxed situation, but it can potentially be disastrous. It is frustrating to see this happen in games. Beyond this, the existential dread your avatar must feel at having to repeat a task they just completed is truly horrifying. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, but the same cannot be said of the player.
Other Types of Rubberbanding in Games
Though rubberbanding in online games is considered position-based, it has historic roots in other types of gaming.
Rubberbanding A.I. is a notorious feature of many racing games, viewed as a way to add artificial difficulty. Each player has their own special position on the track in a racing game. In theory, a top racer should be able to leave the competition trailing far behind them. In practice, sometimes no amount of skill is enough to put distance between you and other racers.
Rubberbanding A.I. prevents in-game opponents from drifting too far behind the player. No matter how fast the player goes or how skillfully they maneuver, second place is always right behind them. Though it adds tension, some may feel it punishes players for pushing ahead early in races.
Rubberbanding also exists as a form of difficulty balancing in other types of single-player games. In some RPGs, enemies scale as players level up in order to ensure a consistent level of challenge. The principle remains the same as in rubberbanding AI: to keep players on their toes, never totally outshining the in-game challengers.
The principle of rubberbanding AI is in some ways similar to the rubberbanding at hand here. This holds true insofar that both put a strong emphasis on player position to improve the gaming experience. While the former is to create challenges for a human player, the latter exists to balance accuracy across a server.
Unfortunately, rubber banding will likely never go away as long as servers, which are necessary, exist. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to prevent it from happening. The first step in prevention is understanding the cause.
What Causes Rubberbanding
We stated previously that rubberbanding happens due to a disparity in positions on the player and server sides of your game. However, this is just a symptom of underlying issues. Rubberbanding itself comes down to a few core issues. These include:
Dropped Packets
Your controller inputs are relayed to a server through data packets. Sometimes, it may feel like the game is not responding or “eating” your inputs due to a delay. This is more often an issue in fighting games where the density of inputs is extremely high.
Dropped or delayed inputs are usually a result of overall speed or the route your data takes to the server.
High or Intermittent Ping
When we list high ping as an issue, we are referring to exceptionally high ping. The ping needed to make rubber banding happen is high enough that you would immediately notice it.
More often, rubberbanding is caused by periodic spikes in ping that result in connection delays to a server. As with dropped inputs, this can be the result of your connection to your internet provider or the server.
Outdated Files
Games send out intermittent patches that are not always automatically updated. Playing with an outdated version of the game can lead to widespread difficulties when connecting to servers.
Corrupted Files
The other thing that can happen to game files over time is corruption. This is more likely to occur when errors happen in the download process but may appear over time. When a file is corrupted, uninstalling and reinstalling it is a simple enough fix.
Numerous issues can be plaguing your online experience, leading to rubberbanding. These numerous issues also have several fixes, as well. Many of the solutions for this digital problem tackle multiple underlying issues at the same time.
What Stops Rubberbanding?
The methods to stop rubberbanding tackle PC performance and overall connection. You can improve your online experience in many ways, such as:
Wired Connection
The best way to improve your connection speed is switching from a wireless to a wired connection. Not only will this save your general ping, but it can also make your overall connection more consistent.
Restart or Uninstall
Try turning your game off and on again. Sometimes, you may need to restart a game or redownload a corrupted game.
If the issues are underlying in your connection, this will not solve the problem. Game-specific issues can be solved this way, however.
Update Everything
Letting software go out of date can harm your gaming experience and potentially your computer as well. This includes games, your digital gaming service of choice, and the drivers on your PC or phone. Periodically checking up to make sure everything is up-to-date ensures you have optimized the software portion of your playing.
Choose the Closest Server
Many games run on multiple servers and let you choose a specific one to play on. If you attempt to connect to a server halfway around the world, you will have a far worse connection. Checking the geographic location of servers relative to your location can help you find the best one for gaming.
Reduce Devices on Your Connection
Reducing the number of devices actively connected to your router while you game can solve network congestion issues. This is a major cause of packet loss and ping spikes. Bandwidth isn’t nearly at the premium it was in the days of 56k modems, but high-intensity activities are still internet-intensive.
Get a Network Speed Booster
Certain online services can help reduce your ping. Without an online latency reducer or network speed booster, some solutions for ping would be out of reach for the average user. Thanks to these internet acceleration services, users are able to harness a variety of new methods for data transmission that can help improve their gaming experience by reducing ping.
Take Things to the Next Level
Rubberbanding only occurs in the worst of instances. Because of these, all the improvement methods listed above may leave something to be desired in overall performance. WTFast exists so that players can improve their gaming in ways that would otherwise be inaccessible.
The WTFast client actively controls the route your data packets take from point-of-input to the server of your game. This reduces packet loss and allows us to optimize the path your inputs take. Stability and consistency in connection help make rubberbanding a thing of the past.
The client also allows ping to be actively tracked over time, so a player can see the moment-to-moment connection. Transparency and exactness matter when a single ping spike can change a win to a loss.
Countless FPS, MOBA, and MMOs are supported, with new ones regularly added to provide improvements regardless of your favorite genre. Some mobile games are supported as well, with a mobile client presently in beta. The world of gaming is constantly evolving, and the way you interact with it should too.
WTFast continues to provide information for those looking to perform DIY maintenance and explore gaming better. For those seeking a hands-on approach to the future of gaming, we offer our services.
Sources:
The Myth of Sisyphus | Britannica
