online games

carbunkle

I am getting a really weird problem when I play online. Espically in FPS games randomly everyone freezes. I can look around but not move or shoot then everything goes really fast and people are in diffrent areas and everything is back to normal. Usually I get killed when everything is frozen. Its really weird because it happens to every kind of connection I have.
ps2 is hard wired, my xbox and one computer is set up wireless, and the other computer is hard wired and they all do the same thing regardless of the game.
I have mediacom for my broadband, I am using a netgear home router, I usually get pings of 30-50 in games, and usually only one device is online at a time.
Is there anything I can even do at my end? Could my netgear router be going bad or do I need to call up mediacom and complain?

I am just really stumped here

Webmaster

Could my netgear router be going bad or do I need to call up mediacom and complain?

It sounds very likely that your router or the internet provider is causing the lag because you experience the same thing on all those devices. What you could do is start a ping www.google.com -t and leave it running, don't start a game, just sit back and watch. When the problem occurs again you'll probably get extreme high reply times, or request times out messages. You can make a snapshot, or log, from the results. If it happens quite often, write down the times, and how long it lasts. You can use that to contact your ISP and demand a solution.

There can be a lot of different reasons why such a problem would occur, but a very possible one is that one of their routers (router interface) or a connection is flapping causing the routers to exchange routing information to update the their routing tables, which in some cases may take a couple of seconds. You may get Destination Host Unreachable message when you ping an internet host.

Similar problems can also occur because duplex setting mismatch.

I'm not sure if you have access to the netgear router, but if you do you may want to check on dropped packets, and if it uses DHCP check the lease time right after the problem occured.

longshot

DOnt forget that the game server could be lagging to. I run great on Counter Strike but when I get on Halo...some servers are laggy. All I do is change to another game server.

carbunkle

yeah I did that ping www.google.com -t and you were right. About every 60th time it is a really high ping rate. Usually it is 40ms and on the 60th time it would be like 3000ms. I'll see if I can get my hands on another router to see if it is on my end if not then I will take some screen shots and give mediacom a call.

That was really smart idea I wonder why I didnt think of it

matts5074

carbunkle wrote:

yeah I did that ping www.google.com -t and you were right. About every 60th time it is a really high ping rate. Usually it is 40ms and on the 60th time it would be like 3000ms. I'll see if I can get my hands on another router to see if it is on my end if not then I will take some screen shots and give mediacom a call.

That was really smart idea I wonder why I didnt think of it

Good luck on getting them to fix it. My DSL pings horribly (200 to 2000) and my ISP will do nothing about it. That's when I'm not getting "This page cannot be displayed" errors.

fredd13

longshot wrote:

DOnt forget that the game server could be lagging to. I run great on Counter Strike but when I get on Halo...some servers are laggy. All I do is change to another game server.

I find that playing Diablo 2 LOD is ok...
But playing Dungeon Siege it lags lots...

I believe that the problem there lies in the M$ part of this equation...

Freddie