Background: I live in Australia and play UrT v4.3.2. So a while ago while talking to a friend in NZ, I discovered that he had a much better ping to the US West coast than I did. His was 190ms, mine 250ms. I stated digging. Turns out his traffic went North via the Southern Cross cable to Hawaii, and on to California where the server is. Mine was going North-West to Guam, then West to Hong Kong then east across to California. I decided to go to the extreme and swap ISP to one that uses Southern Cross Cable. Also I have been told that cable is faster/less latent than DSL.
My ping to the server (from the command line) has dropped from 250ms to 175ms, Wahoo !!!! traceroute shows that I am no longer going via Asia, but going via Southern Cross Cable as planned.
Problem: When I hit <tab> in game, it still says my ping is 250ms, and the game still plays like it is.
Related info:
- My cable is 130Mbps down 2Mbs up
- My laptop is a Skylake core i7 with 32Mb RAM and Nvidia GTX970M graphics running Linux Mint 17.3
- I am running at 3440x1440 resolution which is native for my 34" ultrawide monitor.
- No-one else is using the cable (my laptop is the only thing plugged in to it at the moment)
- I can literally have my laptop pinging 177 and a computer on the old DSL pinging 250 at the same time.
There is no local slowness, it seems like just plain old lag. Now I can accept a bit of lag, but I would expect some improvement after reducing my ping by almost 30%. With UrT telling me my ping is still 250, makes me think I am missing something.
Questions
- Why does the in-game ping say 250 when my real ping is 175 ? (My friends in game ping roughly matches his real ping)
- Why seeming no improvement in lag after a 30% decrease in ping ?
Any thoughts/suggestions ? (other than playing on a closer server)
thanks
--ge0rdie