PSA about ping (from someone with a master's in computer science), mostly about HD

Disclaimer: I'm reasonably knowledgeable (not just "i read on the internet") but this knowledge is a bit rusty too so take it for what its worth.

I want to help clear some misconceptions about what ping is and what it's not and then ultimately give some suggestions on how to fix it. I want to repeat the disclaimer that part of my knowledge might be rusty.

Ping is simply put, the time it takes for your computer to connect to the other computer. This depends on various things, one of the most important factors is the "connection distance" between your computer and the others. From, say, Beijing to chile, this number should be largest.

As someone who often plays across worldwide players, (upto 10000 miles, north pole to south pole is 12K I think, undersea cables don't follow aerial distnace logic though) my experience is that under "normal" situations, this number never exceeds 300 and also from my experience, anything less than 400 is just fine for the game.

To summarize, just the distance won't cause your game experience to be bad. Although the lower the ping, better things go.

However, there are other factors too which are arguably more important. One of those is the routers, which generally means your ISP and your ISP's ISP and so on. Routers are amazingly complex and typically the guarantees they make about packets are based on service tier and consumers have no guarantee delivery. You could get 100GBps internet or you could be on 1MBps internet, generally speaking either doesn't matter because the router will only give you aggregate speed, again no guarantee about individual packets. Routers try to be fair though and work in a way that 20 different people will have number of packets transferred proportionate to their service tier.

I'll come straight to tips on how to "fix" pings:

1) You cannot "fix" it most of the times.

2) Reduce personal usage.

2a) Turn off phone wifi: Phones have multiple connections open. Typically this means nothing because packets aren't being exchanged but at some point your phone might talk to the service it wants to talk to and your router might decide to only let so many from your network.

2b) Turn off browsers: Most allow background services these days and this point applies similar to your wifi.

2c) Just turn off everything using network, focus on the game.

3) Nothing you can do about it-- but estimate what time do people watch netflix and other video stuff in your timezone. Avoid those times. Good for your and other players.

4) Stop blaming the other guy. Ping is mutual and just because you have good ping with 7 other players doesn't mean its not your fault that its not good with the 8th.

5) Get a "better" internet connection. You could buy commercial tier, or play from your office. Consumer tier connections typically have no way to know who's got the best routers and they are usually all lying to you.

These points actually don't apply to DE (almost at all) because DE isn't P2P.