Left 4 Dead: is my connection no good for online games?

slipd

slipd

slipd

Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2004
Posts
4,805
Location
Hampshire, England.
Hey guys,

I got l4d (pc) at Christmas but have only just got round to playing it on my own at home. Until now I’ve been playing it on the 360 round mates' ;)

Anyway, I'm pretty certain my 2mb enta connection is causing me problems during games… I started by playing through steam/l4d and I was getting put automatically into games with a ping of (usually) between 250-400 and the gameplay was awful – constant screen freezing, lag and general erraticness whilst playing?!

I've tried using xfire to find English games with low ping and although my ping is generally much lower (between 30-50) my problems remain. I've tried lowering my res settings as everything was on high but that hasn't done anything either.

Every speedtest I run tells me my connection is fine and I don't have any problems downloading etc. Since I rarely ever game online at home I've got nothing else to compare it too? The last proper online game I played at home was cod2 on an old fixed 1mb connection and that was fine :(

Have online games got more sophisticated since then or do I need to tweak a router setting or something – I've never had to in the past?

Any ideas?

Cheers,

SW.
 
have you tried playing on the OcUK L4D servers? They're tried and tested to be lag free :)
 
Maybe something is downloading in the background? Steam/Xfire/windows loves doing stuff like that.

Steam is the worst though, sometimes im like NAH dont download, yet it still goes onto download while im playing. Really annoying.
 
Steam and xfire should both stop downloading anything when playing a game.


Do you have any other users in your household? someone who could be downloading and uploading a lot ? A lot of the L4D servers are pap, quite often I get into servers with a 200+ ms ping, luckily still the majority of the servers, the European ones give me pings from 20-90ms.


Also as above, how is sp? If your ping is fine then you shouldn't get any lag. You using wireless perhaps ?
 
I'm on a 512kb connection and have just as good a ping as anyone else, so you should be fine.

One thing I do notice is that a lot of people play on a wirless connection, which can be utterly terrible depending on your router. If you're having problems and using wireless, the first thing to do is try hooking up a cat5 cable. I'm certain that will sort out lag/ connection issues for some.
 
at my mum's, currently connected at 350kb/s ish, L4D and TF2 both play fine on it, not wireless though
 
Thanks for the response guys! I've only just got round to checking my email...

I played a single player game earlier (all of it) and there was no lag whatsoever - it played absolutely fine. I get a driver prompt when I load l4d, but I think that's an issue with the latest cats, the 9.4's.

I play on a wired connection, straight off the router (a netgear dg834g with minimal configuration). There are definitely no other users downloading when I play - I've checked :)

How do I go about trying out an ocuk server? That seems like a logical step ;)

When I next play on a public server I'll try out the net_graph 5 thing and post you a screenie.

Cheers,

SW.
 
Update: I couldn't find any games on the oc servers so I went on another public one. It lagged :(

I've noticed that when back in windows my xfire/msn appear to disconnect/reconnect periodically - maybe that's this problem? My internet seems to be ok whilst this is going on and I can reconnect my apps instantly if I do it manually?

I'm still going to try out an oc server, see if that makes any difference...

Cheers.
 
in cmd..

ping jolt.co.uk -t

screenshot of that mate..

let it do about 30 lines and screenshot it


you'd expect about 35-50 ish ms..


are you 100% sure that nothing is downloading in steam when you're playing? -alt/tab out of the game to check
 
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Thanks mate - I'm not sure what happened just under half of the way down; it seems to have shot up a bit there? I ended up letting it run for about 4 minutes and the highest it got to was 40. It mostly stayed around the 34-36 mark :)

I'm starting to think I'm just unlucky with the servers I'm player on? I always tend to find english servers on xfire with the lowest ping available before playing. I regularly check my ping in-game too, and it seems fine.

The periodic lag remains though and it's getting really annoying, not just for me but for the people I'm playing with. I often just freeze (with the game carrying on around me) and when I regain control my character is usually in a worse shape than it was previously :rolleyes:

I also get set back quite a lot... I can be walking along and the next second I'm back where I was 5 seconds ago (hope that makes sense!). I rarely get the 'server issues' message which momentarily takes you out of the game, but I got it last night on a uk server and my ping was never higher than 40 all game!

Perhaps I should start looking at changing isp's, or is that being a bit drastic?

I'll alt-tab out of a game later and report back but I'm almost 100% sure no one else is using my connection at the same time - there is only one other client on my network regularly and that's wireless and only ever on for a few hours a day in the a.m. All other laptops/mobile devices are mine, and definitely not on at the same time I'm experiencing my problems.

Cheers guys!
 
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I have similar issues. Since moving to Sky i never get good pings. I used to regularly get 20-30 on UK servers in TF2, now i'm lucky if i get 50. No way of changing ISP's though. My dad won't go through all that effort just for me to get smooth games :D

It doesn't help that there are normally 3 other people in the house using the internet when i am and that's not something i can fix. However, while i get reasonable pings in TF2, i never get a good ping in L4D. I'm probably in the same boat as you sam.wheale where i'm just unlucky with the servers i'm allocated.

I was thinking about trying Xfire to find servers the other day. How is it's Vista support now? I remember it's lack of Vista support is what made me stop using it.
 
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