Gaming Consoles – Page 3 – Never Press Pause

Some people make do with high ping. There are actually a few great players who have a high ping. I know of a few Rocket League Grand Champs who play with a ping of about 175 to 195. Sounds crazy, right? That said, there is nothing worse than losing a gunfight because you had a disadvantage, so how do you lower ping on a ps4? To lower the ping on your PS4, the 1st thing you want to do is make sure you are using a wired connection to your router. Make sure you aren’t doing any downloads. Reset your router to optimize it. Certain VPN services can also help by sending your data via the fastest route to and from the servers. One to find out exactly how to lower your ping on PS4 or any gaming machine for that matter? You have come to the right place. In this article, we will go through 6 easy steps that you can take to get lower ping and, ultimately, have a better online gaming experience. Wired Connection If you are playing on a wireless connection, which means that your PS4 is using Wi-Fi to connect to the router instead of a cable, this will cause you to have a higher latency than if you were using a cable. When you have a cable going from your PS4 to your router, the signal is straight forward, and it is much faster. Wireless signals take longer to travel to the router. There are also a fair few external factors that can make it even worse and increase your latency. I have written a few articles where I have mentioned the fact that wireless signals often have to contend with external interferences. Wireless signal has to travel through walls and doors, and then you have actual wireless interferences such as Bluetooth devices and headset wireless frequencies. All of these can interrupt the signal, causing the signal to take longer to get to the router. The difference in latency when using wired vs. wireless connections can actually be pretty significant. In my personal experience, I have seen differences of 20 to 30-millisecond pings. It does not only affect your latency; using a wireless connection can affect your stability as well. The biggest problem with wireless connections is a significant increase in packet loss. Another thing that you should consider is, connect your controller to your PS4 via the USB cable. The 2nd generation controller and up supports communication via cable. Also, you will need to have the PS4 slim or above for this to work. When a controller is connected to a console wirelessly, it has the same problems as connecting to the internet wirelessly. What is packet loss? I want you to think about a signal traveling from your PS4 through a wired or wireless connection to your router and then from the router to the server. Now I want you to think of the data being contained in little packets while traveling across the network. Packet loss is when some of those packets don't reach their destination. This could maybe come from your PS4 to the router or from the router to the server. What happens is the packets don't reach the server. On a wireless connection, you are more likely to encounter these errors as data traveling through the air is less stable than if it was traveling through a concealed wire. A lot of the time, you might encounter what is known as rubber-banding in a game. This is when your player goes through elastic movements. When you move forward, he gets pulled back. That is rubber banding, and it is most commonly caused by packet loss. Some game servers won’t let you join the game if your packet loss is too high. Have you ever had the “Can’t join lobby” error? It might have been packet loss. Types of ethernet cables If I have convinced you to go out and wire your PS4 to the router, finally, then you might be considering buying an ethernet cable. One thing you should know is which cable you are going to need to get. These are the main types of Ethernet cables that you get. CAT 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Don’t get any of these)CAT 5eCAT 6 You want to get either a cat5e or cat6 cable. You should not be looking at anything else. At the same time, Please note that cat6 allows for higher bandwidth of data transfer. That said, when it comes to hooking up your gaming machine to the router, you won't notice the difference between cat5e and cat6. You don't even have to consider getting any other type of ethernet cable. So, when you go to your local computer shop or if you are buying online, you know which ones to get or which ones to look for. Lastly, make sure that you know what length you need. I never recommend going above 30 or 40 meters as cables tend to lose capacity over long distances. Stop Downloads Remember the time when the reason we chose to game on consoles rather than PC was because of the convenience. You never had to deal with game updates and driver updates. There were so many of these little factors that made console gaming our choice of gaming machine. Well, times have changed, and it slowly crept up on us. It started off with consoles only updating their multiplayer games every now and then, but then game developers realized that they could sell DLC. Now every time they sell DLC, we get updates for games even if we don't buy the DLC. Then we reached the point where developers started making changes to the game and updating it after it was released. This is often to iron out bugs and make the game better for the community. All of this means that some of our games update weekly or at least every second or third week. Everyone knows the outrageously large Warzone updates by now. If you are playing a game and you are experiencing latency, check to make sure that no downloads are happening. You might not know that you are downloading something because most of us set our PS4s, consoles, and PCs to download games automatically. This is so that when we get home from work, our games are ready to play. Reset your PS4 Sometimes even though we are on a wired connection and we are not doing any downloads, our latency still seems pretty high. We might even be experiencing a little bit of packet loss. Often when we reset our consoles, it can not only make them run better and faster because it clears out the RAM and the cache memory, but it also reconnects the PS4 to the network. This can make it run a little bit better. If you are like me and you keep your PS4 in rest mode so that your games can update automatically. Also so that you can charge your controllers and wireless headsets while you are not using them. Well, then I recommend resetting your PS4 at least once every 2 or 3 days If you can, I do recommend switching it off for a least one hour to two hours every two or three days. This is much better than just resetting it. This is because, like almost everything in life, your PS4 or your Xbox or PC needs a little break. It will also prolong future maintenance. Reset your router Resetting a router is just as important as having a wired connection, in my opinion. You can think of a router as a very basic and minimal computer. It has memory and a processor. These two work together to make sure that your internet works and your network run efficiently. The processor converts signals and then compiles a list of commands that it needs to execute. It then stores this in the memory. When it needs to, it pulls it out of the memory to execute it. The memory also stores errors and tasks that get put on hold by the CPU. The memory also stores almost everything that your router does, and this can clog up the memory. To Refresh the memory, you need to reset your router. You get different types of routers, and some are more expensive than others. Obviously the more expensive your router is, the less you will have to reset it, but I recommend resetting the router at least once a week. How to reset your router The best way to reset your router is to simply unplug it and wait 10 to 30 seconds and then plug it back in. Wait for your router to reboot, restart your PS4, Xbox, or PC, and you should notice a difference instantly. This is the absolute best way to make sure that the router’s memory gets refreshed as it kills everything that the router was doing or had stored. Most routers also come with software that gets installed onto your PC or phone. You can reset the router by doing it through this software. This method is not the best, but it is the most convenient. The software on your router might have the ability to restart the router automatically every day, depending on your setting. Check to see if your model has this feature and then follow the software instructions to enable it. Lastly, all routers should have a button on them that you press to restart it or to switch it off. Press the button, switch it off and wait 10 to 30 seconds then switch it back on. Choose the right server region So the further away the server is to where you are, the longer a signal takes to travel to that server. This is why you should always choose the server closest to you. This can be frustrating for people in some countries as not all countries have servers. If you are one of these people, you will have to select the right server region. Always choose a server that is closest to you so was somebody in the Middle East they would choose European servers and if you are in Australia and there are no Oceana service you will have to choose Asia. Those were just some examples, but if you are unsure, you can just play around and find the server feels best for you. Unfortunately, games like Warzone does not have the ability to select servers, so you are at their mercy on this one. That being said, Call Of Duty games usually have servers for all their players. Recently they have made a few changes that got rid of the problem where certain regions would not find games due to a lack of players on those servers. Now, if matchmaking takes too long, it finds the nearest server to you and places you there. What to do if you don’t have servers in your region? This is something that people in regions with low player counts have to live with. Running a data center is costly, and companies cannot afford to lose that kind of money. There is nothing you can do except start or sign petitions for developers to build servers in your region. You could also reach out directly to community managers. A few companies are building huge data centers in less developed regions, so this might become a thing of the past. Use a monitor So, not many people actually know this, but most TVs actually have latency. The time that it takes for a message to be sent from your controller to your console and then to your TV, is considered latency. The latency for most TVs can be anywhere from 15 to 100ms. This obviously depends on the TV and the resolution. A monitor can range from anywhere between 1 milliseconds to 5. So you are actually giving yourself a small advantage by playing on a monitor instead of a TV. If you can't get a monitor, I recommend checking to see if your TV has a game mode because if it does, that means when you select the game mode, it will optimize the TV for the lowest possible latency. I have always been a console and PC gamer. I used to use my PS4 and Xbox on my TV. That is until I decided to try and use my console on one of my monitors, and the difference was incredible, especially for games like Call Of Duty. If you prefer playing on your TV, don't worry. As technology is advancing, we see more and more TVs come out with extremely low latency and great optimization for gamers. This is because gaming is becoming huge; it is skyrocketing, especially with the events of 2020, where most people were stuck at home. A lot of people resorted to gaming and are now hooked. TV manufacturers are sure to take this into consideration whenever they build their next TV. Conclusion This article was intended to help you solve a common issue with gaming, the latency. There is nothing worse than playing a shooter and thinking you have made it to cover just for you to be killed after making it to cover. This happens when our ping is too high, and our positions and movements don’t register with the server fast enough. I hope you found this article helpful. I wanted to go in-depth for every tip. Be sure to bookmark this page as a reference.