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How to Reduce Lag in Online Gaming

Muhammad Hamza Shahid Muhammad Hamza Shahid is an online privacy/security advocate at BestVPN.co, who loves sharing his expert knowledge regarding the latest trends in user privacy, cyber laws, and digital affairs. Apart from writing blogs/articles relating to anonymity, he also writes detailed VPN reviews.

Gamers face a hard time playing their favorite MOBA games due to dreadful lag, high-ping and latency issues. With millions of active monthly players across the globe, whose skills are compromised due to lag during online game play.

Pro Tip: You can reduce lag also by using the best VPN for gaming, for which the top providers with high number of servers, connection speed and best encryption are mentioned below:

Lag exists for various reasons like a substandard graphics card, poor connection, improper optimization of visual settings or simply your ISP. For devoted gamers, high ping or lag in jeopardizes your skills and prestige, as every move you make or spell you cast is inevitably affected.

Hence, keeping your love for online games in mind, we’ll offer a guide that will help you cakewalk your way towards a lag free, low ping experience.

Reducing Lag Using KillPing

As gamers constantly complain over erratic lag spikes in Overwatch, there must be a one stop solution for them to kill the enemy every Overwatch gamer is facing. Hong Kong based KillPing is a leading edge ping reduction app readily available to gamers with multiple lag reduction features.

Overwatch players can subscribe to Kill Ping and reduce lag by up to 60% (according to some tests, YMMV!). KillPing offers remedial lag reduction features including:

Optimized Gaming Servers

Exclusive Support for DOTA 2, Overwatch, LoL and CS:GO

Support for 100+ MOBA & MMORPG games

Custom Game Configuration

Access to All Kill Ping Servers with One Subscription

Infinite Server Switches

Server Selection Recommendations

24/7 Live Tech Support& Assistance

Kill Ping employs its high speed & state of the art servers around the world to enable online gamers to connect to servers closer to the region they want to game in. For instance, if a Malaysian gamer wishes to play Overwatch in EU region they can choose from a vast list of European servers including London, Frankfurt, Milan, Paris and many more (check out the list of Kill Ping servers on their official website).

Gamers can also get real time server statistics on the KillPing webpage and check the status of all servers. In case subscribers face issues there are brilliant FAQ and tutorials sections while expert tech supports representatives are always available for help. Their 1 year package is currently on sale and can be had for cheap if you hurry:

It is suggested to use tunneling protocols with low strength encryption primarily OpenVPN (UDP & TCP), gamers can however also use iKEV2 protocol because of its high speeds.

4 Steps to Fix Lag Spikes & Packet Loss

Here are some steps you can follow to reduce high ping, packet loss, and lag while playing League of Legends online.

Step 1: Re-Tweak Your GPU Preferences

The first step of this procedure begins with the GPU your system is packing. After all, games these days are hefty on your GPU. So without further a due, let’s get some stress off of your GPU:

Reset your visual settings according to the game’s minimum requirements. This will give your graphics card and visual drivers a breather and will boost your games performance significantly.

Download updates for your graphics drivers regularly. Nvidia and AMD release updates of their drivers on a regular basis to fix bugs and frame rate stutters with consideration of the latest and the most played games in the market.

The price-tag on the new graphics cards today are relentless. However, you can lower your screen solution from 1080p to 720p or lower.

And most importantly, force your game to run on Direct X 10, 9 or 8 instead of Direct X 11. This will reduce excessive in-game particle generation and will give you game a major FPS boost.

Step 2: Use A Lag Reduction Client

Getting on step 2, a lag reduction client is a software that’s specially designed for reducing high ping in and other games. By using a lag reduction app, you can reduce high latency in from your ISP’s end.

We used Kill Ping, the most prominent lag reduction software currently available in the market. And to our amusement, in a 1v1 game, our latency and data packet loss were reduced to the minimum. You can also use different gaming VPN services to tunnel your data packets through uncongested pathways.

Instead of going through the hurdle of changing your ISP, you can simply use a lag reduction app to revive the experience you always wanted. Plus, it’s way more lenient on your wallet. By using a lag reduction software, you won’t see your Champion die immediately right after an “Attempting To Reconnect” notification.

Step 3: Reconfigure Your Network Connection Settings

Having a poor set-up of your internet connection can significantly increase ping and packet loss in. So it would be favorable for you to revise your internet connection settings and see if there’s something that can help in lag fix. On the other hand, here are some steps that you can follow to reduce lag:

If you’re connected to the internet through a Wi-Fi device, then we advise you to immediately switch to a wired connection. The procedure will eliminate connection latency, thus allow you to enjoy games in high ping.

Close any type of firewall that’s securing your internet connection. Firewalls usually consume bandwidth immensely and cause bandwidth latency.

Ensure whether your router or Ethernet cable is damaged or not. A damaged Ethernet cable or router can cause bandwidth leakage, making your game lag frequently.

If have devices in your household that operate on a shared internet connection, then this could be another vital reason you’re facing ping spikes. Before playing, ensure that you’re not connected to a shared connection.

Also, make sure that all unnecessary P2P file sharing clients and instant messaging apps, like Skype, are closed. This will help you reduce ping and packet loss by a significant margin.

Step 4: Refresh Or Upgrade Your RAM And CPU

Talking about step 4, this step is very crucial for lag reduction. Due to unnecessary background processes, your RAM and CPU fails miserably in offering their maximum power to gameplay to boost its performance. However, by following these steps, you can optimize your CPU and RAM for the best gameplay experience possible:

Perform disk defragmentation once a while. This way, your system can access the essential files of game way quicker.

Before launching the game, ensure all unnecessary background applications, downloads, updates and instant messaging clients are closed. This way, your system will allocate its power and network bandwidth to reduce high ping.

Re-allocate the usage of your CPU and RAM wisely. This will allow your system to boost up long load times and in-game activities.

In-Game Settings For League Of Legends Lag Fix

The best thing to do in order to reduce lagging in League Of Legends is to face off the in-game settings itself. Here, you can find all the settings related to the graphical and the network performance of the game.

Firstly, turn of anti-aliasing. This will take off all the stress of your GPU and allow LoL lag to reduce significantly.

Secondly, to have the best gaming experience, your game session should be somewhere around 40 FPS at least. You can lower your resolution and turn all the texture details to medium or low so that you achieve 40-50 FPS during your League Of Legends gameplay.

And finally, turn off the intro music and animation of the League Of Legends launch client. This will reduce stress off your GPU and CPU collectively, allowing you to reduce LoL lag.

CS: GO In-Game Settings

After following all of the procedures above, it’s time for you to head towards the in-game configuration of CS: GO. CS: GO offers you a variety of options to tweak and configure to meet your optimum GPU, sound and internet connection requirements.

It’s time that you realize that running CS:GO on Ultra-Settings is not the best option, unless you have a high-end GPU. When it comes to CS:GO lag, you’re main focus should be smoother performance rather than visual delight. Here are some steps that you can follow to optimize in-game settings for a CS:GO lag free experience:

1. Steam Launch Options Command

When you log into steam for CS:GO, there are multiples options for you to choose from besides starting the game. One of these options is “Launch Options Command”. Here, you can input certain commands that will optimize CPU, GPU and RAM allocation for a CS:GO lag free experience. Here is the list of these commands:

-novid

-tickrate 128

+cl_forcepreload

-nod3d9ex1

-heapsize 524882

-threads 4

-processheap

-lv -high

2. Visual Preferences

CS:GO allows you to manipulate its visual textures, particles, resolution and frame rates with its easy-to-follow settings menu. Here, you can find all the essential options needed to determine the overall visual performance of CS:GO.

Firstly, we recommend changing your resolution to “1366 x 768” as this will reduce pixel density and reduce CS:GO lag. Second, put every detail options in Advance menu to low, which will reduce stress on your GPU and CPU combined. And last but not least, disable motion blur in the settings menu, as the screen transitions in motion blur takes most of the GPU juice.

How to Fix and Reduce Lag in Overwatch

The official Blizzard Support page identifies several factors that may occur lag during Overwatch gameplay. The list identified by Blizzard requires uninstalling the following apps or drivers from Windows PCs:

Gigabyte, RealTek, etc. LAN Optimizer

KillerNIC (killerservice.exe)

Asus GameFirst III or IV

Hamachi VPN

Specific Router Quality of Service (QoS) options

For gamers who use routers with QoS packet shaping, Blizzard recommends contacting the manufacturer to disable QoS services or alternatively configuring the router to use with Overwatch.

Improve FPS by larger amounts with moderate impact to visuals

Set Dynamic Reflections to Off

Set Shadow Detail to Medium or Low

Set Lighting Quality to Medium or Low

Gamers who wish to turn off the QoS packet scheduling on their routers can do this by going to their browser and typing in “192.168.1.1”, which is the default IP address for most router configurations. In cases you cannot access the router configuration with the above address, it has been changed by the manufacturer or administrator. Contact your IT administrator or manufacturer for the correct address. Alternatively, you can hunt through Portforward.com to see if your router’s setup guide is listed there.

Dota 2 Lag In-Game Optimization

You can improve your Dota 2 experience right from the beginning by choosing different launch options and entering different console commands. If you have been playing Dota 2 for some time then you might already be using some of these commands. But if you are new to Dota 2 then might want to consider the following console commands:

-console

-high

-novid

-useforcedmparms

-noforcemspd

-noforcemaccel

-dx 11

-map dota

How to Access Region Locked Games Using a VPN

Now that you have selected the Fastest VPN service, just follow these steps to access Google Play Store of your choice and play Japanese games, Korean games or Chinese games.

We recommend that you use any web browser other than Chrome to carry out these steps. This is because the process for getting it to work on Chrome requires the deletion of various files, cache, cookies, and clearing previous history.

Open your VPN service & connect to a server from where you want to access Google Play Store. For example, if you want to access Play Store of Japan, then you need to connect to the Japanese server available on your VPN. Now open the web browser on your Android device and go to the Google of that particular region, like Google Japan (google.co.jp) or Google Korea (google.co.kr) and make a new account. When you are making a new account, make sure you set the location to the region from where you want to access Google Play Store (example: Japan or Korea). You don’t need to provide a phone number. If you are promoted to provide the main email address, just enter your Non-Japanese email address. Add this new account to your Android device once it is ready. You do not need to log out or delete your main account. Next, open Google Play Store of your choice but make sure you are connected to that region through your VPN. For instance, if you are accessing Japanese Play Store, make sure you are connected to Japanese server. Now switch to your newly created account from the menu given on the side and you will see the play store of a different region. If you are not in the Play Store of your choice, close the app and open it again. Accept the terms and conditions again (if promoted) and now you are ready to use apps from another region.

How to Avoid Swatting on Twitch and Youtube

In layman terms, “Swatting” or “Getting Swatted” is when an online gamer is broadcasting their online game play and a prankster calls the police reporting a serious crime in progress or life threatening emergency unfolding. In historical cases perpetrators have falsely reported bomb threats, murders, shootouts, hosting situations and alleged murder.

Here is a checklist you can follow and learn how to avoid swatting on Twitch and YouTube:

Register Yourself With The Local Police Remove Personal & Location Information From Online All Profiles Secure Your IP Address & Home Network With A VPN Use 2 Factor Authentication For All Social And Broadcasting Accounts Be Careful What You Talk About On The Live Broadcast

What to Do If You Get Swatted?

In case you have been swatted and the police are storming your apartment simply follow protocol and do not resist. Remember the SWAT team is there to neutralize a criminal threat and will use extreme force. Simply follow the arrest routine, since you have nothing related to the false report they will eventually ask you.

Wrapping Things Up

In conclusion, it is pretty clear that high ping, latency, lags, delays, and packet loss are the ultimate destroyers of online gaming, and the last thing you want when playing. In order to hit those combos with your teammates and cast your spells are the right time, you need uninterrupted and lag-free gameplay.

We hope our tips help you make the necessary changes to your system like upgrading certain components, configuring different video/network settings to fix packet loss and lag in no time. Nevertheless, if you encounter any issues, feel free to drop a comment below. Also, do not forget to share the guide with other gaming fanatics!

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