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Westbrook348
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High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Mon Jul 20, 2015 1:36 pm

Hoping some of the tech wizards here can help, as I've already contacted Riot and Comcast and neither one has been able to fix the problem. I've narrowed things down somewhat, so here goes:

In League of legends I'm used to 60-65 ms ping, which is playable for me. Occasional spikes up to 100-150 ms can happen, but lately what I've been getting are spikes to 300 ms, 500 ms, even the 700-900 ms range. Obviously this time of latency is unplayable, as the game is only updating once or twice a second on average (sometimes the engine will freeze for like 5 seconds straight). No one else in the same game as me is having the issue. It is not all the time, and some games I'll even be able to go 80% of the time with latency staying below ~120 ms. Other times it's mostly super high. It will typically "spike" to the 700-900 ms, then slowly come back down to 300 ms, then spike back up to 900 ms, and repeat this over and over again every 5-10 sec. The worst spikes are when a lot is going on in the game; when I sit in base latency seems somewhat better.

I was wondering if this was a router or ISP issue, so I was troubleshooting from that angle, but then I noticed my wife in the very same game as me was having very stable pings in the same 60-65 ms range. She was not getting any of the latency that I get, so I figure it must be a problem somewhere with my PC or its network setup, but even then my internet seems great except for in LoL. Both my wife and I are on wireless, I've measured my connection strength as excellent, and when I do other network things outside LoL I have good latency and 0% packet loss. I pay for 75 Mbps down and 12 Mbps up and with speedtest.net lately I have been averaging 50 Mbps down and 0.7 Mbps up, with 12-35 ms ping (the upload speeds are something Comcast says is temporary and they're working on). When I go to CMD and ping google.com it's typically 35 ms or less. But if I ping the LoL servers at 192.64.170.252 I get 100% packet loss. A tracert to the same IP shows good latency through comcast (30-50 ms), then a jump to 60-65 ms on Riot servers, and then "request timed out" at jump 13-14 after a few bounces around Riot's server IPs in southern CA.

I use a Dlink DIR-655 router and Motorola SurfBoard SB6121 cable modem (172 Mbps down, 131 Mbps up capable). My computer was built from scratch by me in May: i5-4690K, MSI Z97-G45, 16GB RAM, 980Ti, Adata SP610 512GB SSD. Wireless network card: StarTech.com PCI Express Wireless N Adapter - 300 Mbps PCIe 802.11 b/g/n Network Adapter Card – 2T2R 2.2 dBi. Drivers are all updated.

I've used ICSI Netalyzr to analyze my connection and it confirms latency 35 ms or less, 0% packet loss, but it does say I'm behind a proxy. I don't know much about proxies, but I don't think I've set anything up manually. Any ideas what this proxy might be and might it be causing all these problems? I have Windows Firewall enabled but LoL is listed as an exception; I also have avast virus protection on. I wondered if either of these programs could be a problem, so I disabled both and played a game of LoL and still had 900 ms ping. On CMD and typed: netsh winsock reset and netsh int ip reset. I have also ipconfig flushed/reset DNS.

Truly I'm stumped about what could be causing my computer to have super insanely high pings on LoL, when the rest of my internet seems to be working fine, and my wife who is playing in the same exact game as me using the same internet connection has normal ping.. No I'm not downloading pr0n or games through Steam running in the background.. I have Task Manager and Resource Monitor open and nothing else seems to be using the internet.. If anyone can help I would really appreciate it!
 
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Mon Jul 20, 2015 1:49 pm

My first instinct, considering your wife is getting on fine on the same connection and games as you, would be to try wiring directly to the router with some CAT5 to see if it's the Wireless NIC that's causing your problems, because it kinda sounds like that to me. Should only cost a handful of $ to test, and if it is indeed the problem, a replacement wifi card or a run of CAT5 is really cheap.

You could also try physically moving your machine to see if something is causing interference with your wifi signal, or switch your wireless router to a different wifi channel.
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Duct Tape Dude
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Mon Jul 20, 2015 1:52 pm

I've noticed on my laptop's wifi adapter my ping will spike every so often in League. Using wired adapter works great.

Basically, drivers or firmware in my wifi chip are dumb. I have an Intel 6235N card with the latest drivers on Windows 8.1, and it still does this. On my desktop I actually bought a powerline ethernet adapter just to get more reliable internet, and the ping is 5ms higher but stable now.

You might try a different wireless NIC (maybe a USB one, or whatever your wife has?), different (perhaps older) drivers, or switching to a wired connection. As much as I'd like to blame Comcast, I'd wager it's your NIC, drivers, computer, or router before your ISP.
 
Deanjo
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Mon Jul 20, 2015 1:56 pm

Wireless is prone to outside interference. You could troubleshoot all day and not find a specific cause. Plug an ethernet cable in and test, if the issue disappears you know at least what is happening.
 
Westbrook348
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Mon Jul 20, 2015 2:23 pm

Thanks for the ideas guys. I figured my wireless with its excellent strength connection should do about as well as my wife's, since she's also on wireless and having no problems, so I've been lazy about looking for my long 50 ft CAT5 cable that I need to get wired up to my office. I know wireless increases latency slightly, but I've never had this kind of lag before. It makes me think it's not the wireless per se, but maybe something with the card or its drivers. I'll run a long cable downstairs downstairs tonight for troubleshooting purposes; unfortunately a wired connection isn't practical long term without going through the walls somehow.

One wrinkle I forgot to mention might be that I'm using the Logitech G930 wireless headset, which might be causing some interference? I've tried different 2.4Ghz channels on my router, though, and I get high latency no matter which one I've tried. I also used the headest with my older PC and no latency problems there. Still, I think I'll try unplugging the USB base that provides the signal to the headset, see if that fixes things.

Any ideas about what mysterious proxy I'm apparently using, according to Netalyzr? I made sure the "use proxy" box is unchecked under TCP/IP properties. I'm not using any proxy advanced options on my router. Any way to find out what it's talking about? Here's the Netalyzr summary, if it helps: http://n1.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/su ... -49c4-94e5
 
notfred
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Mon Jul 20, 2015 2:38 pm

I wouldn't worry about the proxy, clicking on it in the Netalyzr report shows it is for the email ports so I suspect Comcast redirects those ports to its own servers to catch spam spewing zombies.

EDIT:
Forgot to say definitely try wired. There are various WiFi protocols that will try and sleep the connection to save power and only put your data through at the right time. If one of those goes off the rails it may be misclassifying your traffic as something not important and sleeping for longer than it should. It could also be interference clobbering some of your packets and them only getting through on a retransmit. Short of sniffing the WiFi link in monitor mode to see what is happening you aren't really going to be able to tell.
 
Westbrook348
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 7:19 am

I went home last night all ready to plug in a CAT5 cable to see if my wireless card/drivers were the culprit for my high LoL ping, but after weeks of getting this problem on a daily basis, yesterday I played 3 games with pretty much 0 lag. It was a smooth 65-66 ms pretty much the entire time. I couldn't believe it. I even had youtube streaming in the background. So I dunno what changed. Totally stumped.
 
notfred
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 7:40 am

Neighbour not running their microwave yesterday? :) Who knows, WiFi troubleshooting is bizarre.
 
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 7:55 am

Never, ever game seriously on wi-fi.
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Westbrook348
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 8:02 am

Except last night shows that gaming on wifi can be totally fine. Not everyone's a pro playing in a tournament. Wireless is capable for every day use. That's always been my experience. 900 ms ping is abnormal even for a wireless connection.
 
notfred
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 8:41 am

It can be fine or it can be abysmal, that's the problem with wireless. It's just too random and it can be completely out of your control to fix.
 
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 8:47 am

Westbrook348 wrote:
Except last night shows that gaming on wifi can be totally fine. Not everyone's a pro playing in a tournament. Wireless is capable for every day use. That's always been my experience. 900 ms ping is abnormal even for a wireless connection.

Sure, it *can* be fine. But you need to be prepared to put up with random brokenness. It's like saying "My car can be totally fine even though the battery is 10 years old and I've needed to jump start it 6 times in the past month. It started right up this morning!"
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The Egg
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 10:02 am

If you're using 2.4ghz, you'll want to test all the different wireless channels to see which work best. About half the channels in my place are completely crippled. If you own your house, I would find a way to make a wired connection work.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 11:37 am

Two things-

I've seen this behavior with LoL on multiple 2.4GHz networks- both in residential houses. I'm thinking that their netcode is a bit goofy, as it doesn't happen on the same networks when wired.

Also, I've had success in the past with WiFi issues by moving to a 5GHz network. Something I've been meaning to replicate at my new place...
 
Westbrook348
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:28 pm

I've tried various 2.4Ghz channels and one seems to be the best. No interference from neighbors (only 1 other major network nearby, on the opposite end of the spectrum) and from my G930 headset. "Wifi Analyzer" in the Android store is a pretty neat little app.

It just doesn't seem to be as much a wi-fi vs wired issue. My internet was working fine other than LoL; speedtest.net showed low ping at the exact same time LoL was showing high ping. My wife in the same game on the same internet also using wifi at the same time had no problems. That's why it seems to mostly be something to do with my network drivers, settings, or interfering programs - assuming of course that this isn't all just Riot's fault..

At any rate, it didn't happen last night at all. Hopefully the problem is solved, whatever it was. If the latency returns I'll try running the cable through my mobo instead of my PCIe WIC. I looked into more permanent alternatives for wired connection on different floors of the house; what do people think of Powerline adapters?
 
Glorious
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:54 pm

Westbrook348 wrote:
what do people think of Powerline adapters?


Like so many other things, it depends. :wink:

The setup and quality of the wiring in your home, whether or not you have cheap/noisy switch-mode wall-warts plugged in, etc...

On the software side, they also tend to suffer from bufferbloat pretty badly too, which can be problematic depending on how you intend on using them.
 
LostCat
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:59 pm

Assuming you've got the latest firmware on the router and Riot isn't having issues on their end (you've got an amazing system and cable modem for such a crappy router and wireless card huh) powerline on the one machine having the problem should fix it.

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en ... -to-fix-it
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Westbrook348
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 1:52 pm

According to CNET, the DIR-655 is "arguably one of the best among single-band Wireless-N routers on the market." Of course, that was 2010 but still.. I would happily upgrade it to a dual band gaming router, if it was really the source of the problem. But I don't think it's my router, since my wife is getting consistently low latency. I don't want to replace hardware that's doing its job..

The WIC, on the other hand, was deifnitely cheap. I wasn't looking for a ton of features just something functional. Try to save money in some areas so you can splurge elsewhere, right? Should've gotten a better brand maybe. But last night everything worked fine. If I have problems again I'll probably just take the card out and run some cable to my mobo ethernet.
 
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:08 pm

Westbrook348 wrote:
According to CNET, the DIR-655 is "arguably one of the best among single-band Wireless-N routers on the market." Of course, that was 2010 but still.. I would happily upgrade it to a dual band gaming router, if it was really the source of the problem. But I don't think it's my router, since my wife is getting consistently low latency. I don't want to replace hardware that's doing its job...

Dual band alone would keep the 930 from interfering if you use the 5ghz band and the clients from interfering with eachother. It might be keeping you from getting your ISPs full speed and QoS engines are entirely hit and miss (I prefer Streamboost myself - http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/l ... eally-work , but the Streamboost routers out there aren't great.)

It might not be the immediate problem, but it might not be helping either.
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Bauxite
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run a cable

Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:31 pm

on wireless


WiFi: half-duplex shared bandwidth on the most popular and often heavy noise polluted ISM band, running a latency sensitive and frequently transmitting program. No 'magic' router or card can make that go away, and regular casual surfing and low-end streaming actually works pretty well on **** networks.
Run a cable and try again, if you still have a problem then maybe its something interesting.
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LostCat
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Re: run a cable

Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:38 pm

Bauxite wrote:
No 'magic' router or card can make that go away.

I don't believe anyone was talking about magic. More interference, congestion, poor hardware or software, and mitigation.
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:48 pm

Disabling features like packet coalescing has helped me immensely in the past for gaming. It sucks in general use on Wifi comparatively though...but latency tends to be much better. Wifi drivers are teh dumbs.
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Westbrook348
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:38 am

Update: lagged to 400 ms in two games tonight with my wife who had no lag at all. Plugged in my 50 ft CAT5 and got a steady 65ms.
 
LaChupacabra
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:05 am

I had an issue similar to this. The fix for me ended up being putting the wireless adapter into a USB 3 slot instead of a USB 2. Even though the adapter itself was not USB 3 I believe wireless networking can push the limits of the USB 2 interface in ways that are alleviated on USB 3.
 
Duct Tape Dude
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:12 am

Westbrook348 wrote:
Update: lagged to 400 ms in two games tonight with my wife who had no lag at all. Plugged in my 50 ft CAT5 and got a steady 65ms.

Glad you found a workaround. I'm very jealous of your 65ms though!

LaChupacabra wrote:
I had an issue similar to this. The fix for me ended up being putting the wireless adapter into a USB 3 slot instead of a USB 2. Even though the adapter itself was not USB 3 I believe wireless networking can push the limits of the USB 2 interface in ways that are alleviated on USB 3.

You can actually have more issues if you have a USB 3.0 device on the same hub as your USB 2.0 WiFi adapter if you use a 2.4GHz band, because the additional signaling of USB 3.0 is also 2.4GHz. I've had a USB WiFi adapter simply give up and drop the connection whenever I had a USB 3.0 device also plugged in.
 
Kougar
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Wed Jul 22, 2015 4:42 pm

Westbrook348 wrote:
Update: lagged to 400 ms in two games tonight with my wife who had no lag at all. Plugged in my 50 ft CAT5 and got a steady 65ms.


Okay, from reading this thread it appears you did not have any problem when your wife was not playing, but you did every time you both were playing together? That going cat5 resolves it as well would imply a wifi congestion problem. Too many things can congest wifi. Even if something causes only very minor interference, heavy traffic plus another user with heavy traffic, plus random small interference and neighbor's wifi and whatever else all adds up. There's only so much home-based wifi can do before it hits saturation and latency goes through the roof due to packet retransmission.

I am using a DIR-655 as well but I've always gone hardline with it for my desktop, so I can't speak about the wifi as that's just for visitors and laptops. I will string 50-100 foot cat5 cord through a new house if I have to to stay on a hardline. :P
 
crazybus
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Wed Jul 22, 2015 5:14 pm

I had a very similar experience last week playing LoL. I was getting ping spikes in game and realized I had forgot to plug in the network cable and it was running off wifi. Switched to Ethernet and everything immediately got better. The other computer in the room was on wifi and didn't experience any issues. Moral of the story is always use a wired connection if at all possible.
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kokomomo
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Re: High Ping with LoL - At a loss

Wed Mar 09, 2016 3:01 am

Wow... it is so amazing that your experience is exactly mine.
I did trace lol and found out that thers are many comcast servers that my computer goes through to lol.
I see many lags in comcast servers in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, CA.
I called comcast, but they don't do anything. They just ask me to reboot and replace my modem and router.
And now they are trying to sell me 150 mps service.
I won't buy that because there is no guarantee that they won't lag.

I have no clue now. I am stuck with 500-4000 ms latency in lol.
I am thinking about quitting the game for a few months to see if it gets better later.
But anyways, I am loosing interest in lol because I can't time with this lag and I always end up feeding or hugging turret.

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