How Gaming Companies Can Beat High Ping and Keep Players Engaged

Few things disrupt a gaming session like high ping or latency. High ping reduces user movement and leads to glitches that make games unplayable.

As a result, gaming companies must look for ways to reduce ping at every turn. Read on to learn why high ping is a problem for gaming companies, and some ways to solve this issue and improve user experience.

Why is ping a problem in gaming?

When a game gets disconnected due to severe latency issues, it can lead to significant consequences.

· For competitive players, a dropped game can result in losing the match and negatively impact their hard-earned rankings on leaderboards.

Some games also institute policies that automatically ban players for infractions that include “rage quitting” or automatic cooldowns during matches after a certain number of occurrences — even though it’s nearly impossible for game servers to distinguish between players dropping out due to frustrations or being kicked off from extremely high ping and subsequent unsuccessful attempts to reconnect.

· For less competitive players, poor connectivity can ruin the fun of a game and cause them to lose faith in a product. As a result, they may abandon a title entirely. And once a player abandons a game, they may not come back. And they may share their poor experience with others, causing reputational harm for the gaming company.

Unfortunately, performance is a major issue for gamers today. According to a recent study, nearly all gamers experienced have experienced latency issues at some point. One third will also quit their game or session entirely after experiencing latency. And over half blame latency on developers, publishers, or the company managing the game servers when it happens.

How to reduce ping and improve user experience

It’s impossible to completely avoid latency. After all, some issues stem from user errors, unoptimized local networks and outdated player gear.

This just makes it more important to optimize factors within your control. And as it turns out there are several steps you can take to reduce ping and make games more enjoyable for players.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

One way to reduce ping is to use a CDN — or a group of distributed servers — to cache content closer to users.

With the help of a CDN, you can deliver content to players more efficiently by routing their requests to be fulfilled by whichever server is closest to where they are playing your game. This results in lower ping for players and snappier, more responsive gaming experiences.

Optimize your gaming network

By reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted between a player’s device and your servers, players will experience substantially lower ping.

To accomplish this, you can try compressing data to reduce file size or group requests to minimize the overall data load. It may also help to use client-side prediction to immediately process the outcome of player actions before they’re confirmed by the server, which can help lower input lag and improve gaming interactions.

Be transparent with your players

A little communication can go a long way with gamers. Consider being more transparent about the state of your game by displaying ping time and providing information about the number of players on your servers. This may help players determine the best time to play and avoid frustration.

As a bonus, when players are informed about the current load on the game servers, less players will be joining games during peak hours or hop into already taxed servers. This results in more even distribution of players throughout the day and across servers to help lower latency for all players in the game.

Enhance your game servers

It’s possible that your game servers could be contributing to high ping. Outdated GPUs, processors and routers can create data bottlenecks and contribute to lags, glitches, and other undesirable effects.

To improve this, consider upgrading your servers to the latest hardware. It’s also necessary to ensure your servers have adequate bandwidth and can handle the maximum number of concurrent players.

Compute at the edge of the network

If you have a global player base, then it’s a good idea to work with a trusted cloud services provider offering compute at the edge of the network. Virtual machines and bare metal servers can store and process game data close to players for lower ping and more fluid gaming experiences. This is particularly helpful for MOBAs that rely on team coordination or turn-based multiplayer games.

Edge compute servers are very easy to scale and deploy within minutes. They also support load balancing, which will enable you to distribute traffic between multiple servers.

Keep your players happy with Zenlayer

Zenlayer is a global gaming enabler with a vast network of 5,400+ global peers and 290+ edge nodes. By working with Zenlayer, your company can maximize performance and extend the reach of your games to more players — no matter where they are in the world.

If you’re looking for a partner with industry experience, technical expertise, and a suite of advanced edge compute solutions to help your company lower ping for players and grow your player base, then contact Zenlayer today.

For further reading, have a look at our eBook on gaming infrastructure.