Tips To Check Your League of Legends Ping Before You Play

Do you enjoy playing League of Legends? Do you understand the importance of ping in this game? Has it ever happened to you that you joined a game, and the ping was more than 800? Such a high ping makes it simply unplayable. It not only kills your mood, but you also have to take a lot of abuse from your team. A high ping can happen to anyone, but it’s better to check the ping before joining the game.

It is recommended that before joining a game you should always use LOL ping test which enables you to check the ping before joining a game. It will take just a few seconds to figure out the speed of your Internet and whether you should join a game now or wait for a few hours. Before we start getting into the nitty-gritty of testing your LOL ping, here is what exactly ping is and how it affects your game.

Definition of Ping

People who are not technically proficient might find it a complicated term, but it’s really simple. In simple terms, it is a software utility used for testing the time it takes for to and fro communication between a server and a computer on a network. The results are shown in milliseconds.

Many of you might already be aware of this definition, but for people who are not aware of this, here is some more information on this technical stuff. Whenever you want to play League of Legends, your computer needs to connect to the Riots servers. Every player needs to connect to the Riots servers. For this connection, your computer sends down a connection request through your Internet Service Provider. The Riots servers respond to your request with a message in the same manner.

This whole process is completed in milliseconds, and the time taken for this communication gives you an idea of the lag. Simply put, a LOL ping above 100 is a problem.

It’s easy to ping a server and figure out the speed of your Internet without even entering the rift. When you get this number, you’ll be able to figure out how laggy you are and whether you should join a game.

For instance, if the ping is over 100, it means that the communication between your computer and the server is taking 0.1 seconds. It might seem a small number when it comes to the gaming world; it’s almost an eternity. Most players enjoy playing with 40 ms ping, and some players have a ping of less than 20 ms.

In simple terms, your gaming experience depends on the ping, and the lower it is, the better your overall gaming experience is going to be. However, you must be wondering about the reasons for the lag.

Reasons for the Lag

It could be due to a variety of factors, but higher lag means higher ping. When you have a high ping, the communication between your computer and server takes a long time, and you will have a poor experience. Things become unresponsive, and you keep dying, and overall, you have a poor experience.

There can be many factors responsible for internet lag, but one of the most common factors is simultaneous downloading. If you have joined the game and are also downloading something simultaneously, your ping will instantly go up. This is due to the reason that your Internet bandwidth is chocked as a lot of information is being exchanged between your computer and servers. If the Internet bandwidth is full, it will slow down the communication between your computer and servers. This is why many people players experience a high lag in-game as they also have a download going on in the background, such as a torrent or an update.

Sometimes, the issue is not with your computer. If others on your Internet network such as your family members or your neighbor is using the Internet simultaneously, they can choke the bandwidth. It could be due to someone in the family having a Skype chat or watching videos in full HD on the same network.

Here is how you can check whether you are laggy or not before joining the rift.

General Test

It would help if you began by checking your ping to a generic server. Use a free tool such as SpeedTest by Ookla. They have many servers, and once you use it, it will connect your computer to one of the servers. The result returned by Speed Test should provide a general idea of the stability of your connection. For playing League of Legends without any lag, this number should be below 50.

If the ping is high, it means there are problems with your Internet. However, there are times when the ping score is low, but you are still experiencing lag in the game. In some cases, it is due to problems with a specific server and not your Internet connection. Here is what you need to do to test the connection to individual servers at Riots.

Specific Test

Another way for you to check the ping is to find out the time it takes to communicate between your PC and individual Riots servers. This test will take only a few minutes. The advantage of this method is that it tells you exactly the ping you are going to get in the game. If this ping test result is over 100, it simply means that you should wait for some time to play Leagues of Legends.

There are many servers that can be used to test the ping score. You can easily find this information online. After you have chosen a server, you need to ping that server. On Windows, you will need to search ‘cmd,’ and it will open the command prompt. When you get the command prompt, you will need to type ping followed by the IP address. The IP address is the address of the server you want to test. That’s all you need to do.

Once you do that, the results will be displayed in milliseconds. If the returned result is a score of over 100, it is not the right time for you to play. If the number is low, it means that you shouldn’t have any problems while playing.

Overall, this is everything you need to know about testing your ping before entering the rift.