Why Roblox Is So Laggy & How to Speed Up Gameplay
Roblox is one of the most addictingly fun games available today, drawing in massive numbers of gamers. When we say massive, we mean really staggering. Almost 200 million people play Roblox every month—for context, the population of the US is just over 320 million.
There’s a reason so many people love Roblox. It’s incredibly fun and offers a ton of gameplay options. Don’t let lag ruin the fun.
Most gamers know about lag, and every gamer despises it. Delays and visual glitches are just the start, and they can turn the most enjoyable gaming session into an annoyance.
We can teach you everything you need to know about how to stop lag in Roblox, so you can keep having fun.
Let’s jump right in!
What Is Lag?
If you’ve ever played a game, you’ve probably heard of lag and you’ve definitely seen it in action. Lag is a delay in your game that causes visual or gameplay irregularities. It can be as minor as a small drop in framerate or as significant as game-breaking stuttering and infinite rubberbanding.
Even if you’re well-versed in the annoyances of lag, you might be less familiar with specific types of lag and the factors that can cause them. Knowing your enemy is the first step to defeating them, so let’s do a little get-to-know-you exercise with lag by diving into some of their differences.
Types of Lag
The most common type of lag is stuttering. Stuttering is a simple, irregular delay in what you see on your screen.
This can be a stutter of your character’s animation, a stutter in an environmental animation, or a one to two second delay between when you press a button and when your character acts.
Microstutter, on the other hand, is much less significant and harder to notice. Microstutter is an even more irregular drop in frame rate, basically a very small change in how smoothly the visuals run.
The next type of lag is packet loss. Packet loss occurs when the data from your local system fails to arrive at the online server. This transfer is crucial for keeping your visuals up-to-date with what’s happening in the game. When a packet is lost, you miss out on visuals or they get delayed.
Finally, rubberbanding is one of the significant types of lag, and it’s impossible to miss when it happens. Have you ever tried to make your character run somewhere, only to seemingly bounce back where you came from like you’re tied to a post by a rubber band? That’s rubberbanding.
It can happen once, or you can bounce back and forth repeatedly. The latter case is called infinite rubberbanding, which occurs when your character continuously bounces back for extended periods. This can last the entire time you’re playing with no end in sight.
Sometimes infinite rubberbanding is triggered by an action, like rubberbanding every time your character jumps during your game. Other times, it’s just a constant game of one step forward, 20 steps back.
In either case, rubberbanding is going to cause real gameplay issues.
How Lag Affects Roblox
Lag is always a problem, but how much of an impact it makes in Roblox depends on the Place where you are playing.
Competitive
Some Places offer games that are intense and action-based, requiring skill, focus, and timing. These are the kinds of games where lag hurts the most. You want to win, show your friends your skill, and earn as much currency as you can.
Unfortunately, lag can quickly ruin your odds. With a delay like stutter or packet loss, you won’t be able to react properly because you’ll be seeing an inconsistent display, and the buttons you press won’t always work exactly when you press them.
With other types of lag, such as infinite rubberbanding, you won’t be able to control where your character goes, and they might just snap back into enemy territory.
Casual
One of the coolest things about Roblox is that you don’t have to complete. There are thousands upon thousands of casual, creative, and relaxed Places out there to explore.
You might not think lag matters much here, but it definitely does. Most importantly, lag is frustrating and unfun. Many Places exist for the purpose of destressing and feeling peace. Constant lag will snuff that zen right out.
You deserve to have fun with your friends without constantly dealing with delays and seeing broken visuals on your screen.
Causes of Lag
Before we talk about fixing your lag, we need to be able to identify the cause.
Of course, lag is more common in online games, but it can also affect offline games. Whether you are playing online or offline, there are two main factors that could cause lag: your hardware and your network.
Hardware Factors
Checking that your hardware is optimized against lag should always be your first troubleshooting step.
Make sure your system meets—and ideally exceeds— the requirements for whatever game you run. Thankfully, Roblox is relatively low-demand for most computers, but that’s not to say every device is ready to run it lag-free. Even though the minimum requirements can run the game, we advise meeting the recommended requirements to help reduce lag.
You can also adjust the graphics settings in game to help keep things smooth.
Ensuring that your computer isn’t running other programs in the background is another essential step. Say you’re also playing music, downloading a new game, and leaving some apps open from doing homework or a project for work. That’s all going to slow your computer down—way, way down.
Even seemingly innocent programs like a notes app or web browser will take up valuable space on the technological highway your games need to drive down. Don’t make unnecessary traffic. Clear the road first.
Network Factors
That traffic analogy applies to network factors, too. Your internet connection can only handle so much traffic. This capacity is called bandwidth. If there are multiple functions competing for your network’s bandwidth, your capacity will be reduced.
A congested network can still function optimally. The first step to reducing lag is pausing any background downloads, streams, or other online activity you may be running.
If you’re using a shared network, such as your home WiFi, other people will be using the same bandwidth as you. However, asking them to stop using the internet isn’t a fair or practical way to reduce your lag.
Switching to a wired connection is a great first step to ensuring your connection is as smooth, stable, and speedy as possible without interrupting your housemates.
If you’re looking to optimize your network capabilities, start using a GPN. WTFast’s patented GPN system can cut out all the unnecessary gunk that might be slowing down your game connection and causing lag.
Since network clog is the biggest cause of lag (assuming your computer meets the gaming requirements), a GPN is the perfect solution.
How a GPN Can Help
A GPN or Gamers Private Network is a different kind of private internet network, almost like a VPN. However, the purposes of a GPN are quite different from a VPN.
VPNs are super popular thanks to their privacy functions – you can bypass restrictions and keep your activity private from different kinds of detection. As such, many online games actually restrict VPN access to their servers to prevent hacking and bots. This makes VPNs suboptimal for gaming.
Our WTFast GPN doesn’t hide your activity or change your IP. It’s a clean and honest connection, just like you would have with your normal network.
Its huge advantage comes in when we talk about speed and smoothness. A VPN isn’t optimized for either of these factors. There’s typically tons of other traffic going through the same network, and this traffic tends to be dense like streams and downloads.
The best part about a GPN is that you don’t deal with any of that clog. Get off that crowded freeway and let your data ride the autobahn of the internet. GPNs use specialized technology and algorithms to find the absolute fastest and clearest route for your data to travel obstacle-free.
In simple terms: your games will run fast, smooth, and with no lag in sight.
GPNs only direct the most essential gameplay data. That means background downloads and other fluff won’t impede your route.
Conclusion
Roblox can be one of the most fun gaming experiences for people of all ages, but a lag-filled session will be quite the opposite – a frustrating and unfun time for anyone, even the most patient of gamers.
With our cutting-edge WTFast GPN technology, you can minimize lag from all your favorite online games, Roblox included. Try WTFast today to see just how awesome this secret weapon can be.
Sources:
Rubberbanding Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Wired vs Wireless Networking | IT Best Practices | University of Nebraska-Lincoln
How Many People Play Roblox? Player Count Tracker (2021) | Dexerto
