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What is lag?
Lag
is another word
for Latency. Latency is a measure of the quality of your internet
connection. Many factors contribute to your latency (including
but not exclusive to the performance of your system and the
speed of your internet service provider). You could have a
Pentium3 500 Megahertz computer with 1 Gigabyte of RAM with
a T1 connection and still have lag in a game if the other
computer can't keep up with you. It is really annoying in
a game if it goes realy slow or keeps stoping, but if it didn't
do that, then you could attack the enemy and he wouldn't know
until a couple minutes later. Your latency has a large impact
on the speed of games you play over the internet, so we have
developed a system for users to easily gauge their latency,
and the latency of others.
Latency is
represented on battle.net as the colored bars next to users'
names in the chat channels, as the colored bars next to public
games in the Join screen, and as the colored bars next to
other players' names in the Game Setup screen.
The fewer the
bars a user sees next to another user's or game's name, the
lower the latency. The bars are color coded to further help
users quickly gauge latency - green bars denote low latency,
yellow bars denote medium latency, and red bars denote high.
When looking for games to play or people to play with, keep
latency in mind; playing in low latency games with low latency
players will minimize lag within the game.
The latency
bars you see next to players' names in the chat channels are
determined by measuring the amount of time is takes to send
and receive internet data between that player and the battle.net
servers. Your latency to a particular public game is determined
by measuring the amount of time it takes to send and receive
data between your computer and the computer of the public
game's creator. Your latency with respect to another player
in the Game Setup screen is determined by measuring the amount
of time it takes to send and receive data between that player's
computer and your computer. In all cases, the less time it
takes to for this data to travel from source to destination,
the lower the latency.
How do I reduce
my Latency?
Updated modem
drivers
Alt connection numbers
to your Internet Service Provider
Try connecting at off peak times
Turn off music
Disable unit portraits (under video)
Tell the other players in the game to do the same.
*There are
lag hacks for downloads but I have not confirmed whether they
will do damage to modems. If I am sure it is safe, I will
put them under downloads.
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