High Ping, yet no Ping

[Nofu 0]

So I just finished building my new desktop:

i7 3700k 3.5 GHZ

GTX 550ti

8 gb Ram

So I am not worried in any means of my computers ability to play this game. Here is all the information though:

So this past weekend I was at my house playing DayZ just fine. I played over multiple different servers with little to no problems. Then I get back to campus. Yes, I live in a dorm. No, my dorms are not jackwads; they do not restrict internet usage (some what). So I get on campus and start up DayZ. Holy poo, this is bad. My pind is hovering around 1300ms or 2300ms. Sometimes I am lucky and it drops down to 800ms.

So I call my housing dept. They say that they don't keep ping packets so the Ping I see is "artificially" high and I should be fine. Well the servers don't care and won't even let me in. Except one: Laughing Man's Server #3. This server I have a character on and I never have over 50ms. I could hop on it right now, just don't ask me to do that for any other server.

I disabled my Windows Firewall, but sadly, it was on when I was playing at home. The housing dept says it isn't the ports and I should just keep retrying to join, but after the tenth time I usually give up.

No I do not have direct access to a 'modem.'

Any suggestions as to why this single server works, and not others?

Thanks in advance.

[Tigerbeetweenie 51]

So I just finished building my new desktop:

i7 3700k 3.5 GHZ

GTX 550ti

8 gb Ram

So I am not worried in any means of my computers ability to play this game. Here is all the information though:

So this past weekend I was at my house playing DayZ just fine. I played over multiple different servers with little to no problems. Then I get back to campus. Yes, I live in a dorm. No, my dorms are not jackwads; they do not restrict internet usage (some what). So I get on campus and start up DayZ. Holy poo, this is bad. My pind is hovering around 1300ms or 2300ms. Sometimes I am lucky and it drops down to 800ms.

So I call my housing dept. They say that they don't keep ping packets so the Ping I see is "artificially" high and I should be fine. Well the servers don't care and won't even let me in. Except one: Laughing Man's Server #3. This server I have a character on and I never have over 50ms. I could hop on it right now, just don't ask me to do that for any other server.

I disabled my Windows Firewall, but sadly, it was on when I was playing at home. The housing dept says it isn't the ports and I should just keep retrying to join, but after the tenth time I usually give up.

No I do not have direct access to a 'modem.'

Any suggestions as to why this single server works, and not others?

Thanks in advance.

The answer to this problem is likely dependent to your specific situation. Obviously playing over a wireless connection is a big no-no for online gaming (if you aren't using fiber optics + a decent non-generic router) but I'd just like to throw this out there just in case.

You might just have shit luck in that your school's ISP is on a different WAN than the servers you normally play and thus you have to deal with ungodly amounts of latency.

It could also be that, even though the servers are on different WANs in both situations, that your school's network is routed in such a way that the number of hops (or time between them) has increased significantly between you and your standard collection of favorite servers.

Another possible problem is that your school has a high degree of bandwidth but also has high latency to compensate and thus makes the connection good for batch downloading for a lot of users but bad for gaming (shouldn't be the problem assuming you can play other games fine).

A final potential problem is that a 'hop' somewhere along your connection route is holding ping packets for long amounts of time and is thus artificially jacking up your ping (not impossible, but probably the most unlikely on this list. They could be doing it in order to obscure latency times from within their own network although it would be rather pointless).

You may just have to live with the fact that you can't play on your favorite DayZ servers from your school at the moment. The one you CAN actually play on is probably on a short routing path to your school and/or is close to you geographically so isn't likely affected to heavily by your peculiar problem.

Edited March 26, 2013 by Tigerbeetweenie

[Nofu 0]

The answer to this problem is likely dependent to your specific situation. Obviously playing over a wireless connection is a big no-no for online gaming (if you aren't using fiber optics + a decent non-generic router) but I'd just like to throw this out there just in case.

You might just have shit luck in that your school's ISP is on a different WAN than the servers you normally play and thus you have to deal with ungodly amounts of latency.

It could also be that, even though the servers are on different WANs in both situations, that your school's network is routed in such a way that the number of hops (or time between them) has increased significantly between you and your standard collection of favorite servers.

Another possible problem is that your school has a high degree of bandwidth but also has high latency to compensate and thus makes the connection good for batch downloading for a lot of users but bad for gaming (shouldn't be the problem assuming you can play other games fine).

A final potential problem is that a 'hop' somewhere along your connection route is holding ping packets for long amounts of time and is thus artificially jacking up your ping (not impossible, but probably the most unlikely on this list. They could be doing it in order to obscure latency times from within their own network although it would be rather pointless).

You may just have to live with the fact that you can't play on your favorite DayZ servers from your school at the moment. The one you CAN actually play on is probably on a short routing path to your school and/or is close to you geographically so isn't likely affected to heavily by your peculiar problem.

1) I guess I forgot to mention, but it is wired. I will never game wirelessly unless I have to.

2) They fixed SW:ToR.... Can't they fix this :(

[Tigerbeetweenie 51]

1) I guess I forgot to mention, but it is wired. I will never game wirelessly unless I have to.

2) They fixed SW:ToR.... Can't they fix this :(

It's not as simple as "fixing" the problem. You have to understand what the network guys actually care about versus what you want them to care about. Their job is to provide internet to the entire campus. What constitutes "the internet" to most people is the ability to do basic surfing, streaming video, checking email, and maybe streaming a jam or two along the way. In order to do this, they need massive amounts of bandwidth. Bandwidth, however, is expensive and so to mitigate costs they probably have a trade off of a high degree of latency coupled with a high degree of throughput (i.e. an individual download might take longer but you can download a lot of things at the same time without a drop in speed). Imagine a few really big pipes versus a lot of really small pipes. The small pipes will drain a lot slower, but you can drain a lot more at the same time (i.e. servicing the thousands of people at your school) versus a few big pipes which can drain REALLY fast but you can only drain a very few at a given time (i.e. your mom's and pop's network at home which only has a few connections going though it). For things like streaming compressed video/audio and downloading web pages, you don't *need* the "big pipes" but for time critical applications like video games, you do (unfortunately). Again, this is just speculation, but it's the best I can do with the information I have.

I could be wrong when pinpointing your specific problem because I don't *know* your schools network but I'm pretty sure it's just a case of high latency and you should stick to geographically close servers when playing online from your school. I don't know exactly what you mean by saying "They fixed SW:ToR" but it likely means that this is something that only they can definitively answer. Unfortunately, asking about this on the DayZ forums will (and can) only land you approximate identifications of the problem at hand. You need to go to the source (i.e. your housing department or whatever).

Sorry for my crappy pipe allegory. I hope it at least helped somewhat.

Edited March 26, 2013 by Tigerbeetweenie