I have seen many posts that people complain about disconnections and high latencies in games. I have experienced them myself.

I wanted to provide a quick diagnostics to determine if the problem is with the game (client, server, or the accessibility of the server over the network) or with your network connection.

The basic idea of this simple diagnostics is that if only the game produces the unwanted behaviour (high latency, lost connection) then the game has issues (which may be still on your side, e.g. router or firewall settings). If other of your network connections produce similar issues, it's not the game.

For this, we are going to start a simple network activity: a ping test. When it finishes, it provides some basic diagnostics we can use to see how our network behaved.

This test focuses on latencies. If your network bandwidth is too limited, you should run a SpeedTest[www.speedtest.net].

Let's open a Command Prompt (cmd.exe) first.

In there, let's start a ping test. You can ping any reliable server. In this example, I will use Google's server.


The /t flag means do the ping test until we terminate it (with <Ctrl>+<C>).

This will start producing output on the screen, like these:


When this has started, you can just forget about it and start playing your game. When you experience the network problems, you can come back to the Command Prompt, and see what the output is. Does it report any issues?

You can also terminate the test by pressing <Ctrl>+<C>. After this you will see a short summary, like this:

0% package loss means there were not general network issues when pinging the given server. If there is a package loss, its either because the target of the ping had issues or because your network connection has issues. We chose a reliable server for a reason, so chances are, your network has problems.

Similarly, if you had high maximum/average ping times to your chosen server while the game had similar issues, chances are, it's not the game, but your network connection that's giving you headaches.

With this simple diagnostics you can find out if you have generic network issues or the problem is with the game itself.

This will let you know what to focus on when you want to eliminate the problem. There is no use reporting problems to the game developers when it's the network that's unreliable. Similarly, do not call your network provider when only your game goes down, but no other services show similar symptoms. They cannot do much about it.

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