How to Lower Your Ping in Video Games

A Field Guide by a Gentlemen Who Has Seen 100 Years of Lag (1925–2025)

Good evening, young ones. Pull up a chair. Mind the hip.

I was born in 1925. I have watched humanity go from sending letters by train to sending bullets at strangers across the ocean in something called "Fortnite," all while complaining that the experience is "laggy." You want to know how to lower your ping? Fine. Sit still, stop fidgeting, and listen to a man who once waited six weeks for a reply from his aunt in Ohio and considered that acceptable.

First: What in the Sam Hill Is "Ping"?

Ping is the time it takes for a little message to travel from your machine to the game's computer (the "server") and back. It is measured in milliseconds. When I was a boy, we measured communication in weeks, and we said "thank you." You people get 40 milliseconds and write angry paragraphs on the internet.

The lower the ping, the faster the game reacts to your button-mashing. The higher the ping, the more you die in a doorway and blame "the connection," when we both know it was your reflexes, sonny.

Now then. Here is what I have learned in one full century of life.

1. Plug the Blasted Thing Into the Wall

Young people, I see you playing your war games on a machine connected to the air — "Wi-Fi," you call it. Invisible internet! In my day, invisible things were called ghosts, and we did not trust them with our mail.

Wi-Fi is fine for reading the news. It is not fine for competitive shenanigans. The signal wobbles through walls like my Uncle Bertie through a buffet. Take the cable they call "Ethernet," plug one end into your machine and the other into the router, and enjoy ping smoother than my barber used to give me in 1947.

One cable. Two ends. Plug both in. You can do it. I believe in you.

2. Move Closer to the Server, You Ninny

If the game lets you choose a server region, choose the one near where you live. I do not care that the server in Singapore has a cooler name. Your little message cannot take a noon nap on the way across the Pacific.

I once chose a server "for the vibes." I was eighty-seven. I know better now. Play where the map says your own country is.

3. Tell the Household to Hold Their Horses

Every device in your home is eating your internet like grandchildren at a birthday cake. Your sister is streaming a show in "4K." Your father is downloading a tractor manual. The refrigerator — yes, the refrigerator, apparently refrigerators have the internet now, civilization has fully collapsed — is updating its firmware.

When it is time to play, pause the downloads. Ask the household, firmly but politely, for fifteen minutes of peace. I asked my wife for fifteen minutes of peace in 1958. She said no. You may have better luck.

4. Restart the Router, as I Restart Myself Each Morning

The little blinking box has been running since the last eclipse. Unplug it. Count to thirty — slowly, I have earned the right to slow counting — and plug it back in. You would be astonished how many of life's problems, in machines and in men, are solved by a brief rest.

5. Close the Nineteen Programs You Have Open

Your machine is juggling your game, a music service, four hundred browser tabs about cats, and something called "Discord" that I am told is not a disease. Close what you are not using. A computer, like an old man, cannot perform miracles while carrying forty passengers.

6. Beware the "Ping Fixer" Salesmen

The internet is full of young men selling software that "guarantees zero ping." In my hundred years I have learned one unbreakable law: anyone guaranteeing you anything on the internet is selling you something. These programs are snake oil. The only snake oil we respected in 1931 came from an actual wagon.

7. If All Else Fails, Lower Your Standards (A Life Lesson)

I play at 60 ping. Sometimes 80. I still top the scoreboard occasionally, because my opponents are seventeen years old and panic under pressure, and I have survived a Depression, two wars, and the invention of the pop-up advertisement. Calmness, children, is the ultimate low-ping technology.

The Whole Thing on One Little Card, for the Impatient

Use a cable, not the invisible ghost internet.
Pick a server near your home. Geography is real.
Pause the household downloads. Negotiate firmly.
Restart the router. Rest heals all things.
Close your extra programs. Travel light.
Ignore miracle cures. Snake oil is snake oil.
Breathe. You are playing a game. I have watched a hundred years go by. Nothing on that screen is worth an ulcer.

Now if you'll excuse me, my grandson is teaching me "Elden Ring," my tea is getting cold, and my ping, for once in this century, is excellent.

Respectfully,

A Very Tired Centenarian with Very Good Reflexes for His Age

P.S. — Get off my lawn