91% Packet Loss

DeliriousBadger · March 31, 2020

Hi there,

I am trying to play League of Legends with my roommate, but am having insanely unstable ping and high ping spikes (200+). My ping is all over the place and fluctuates all the time. For periods of time it is stable, but then seemingly at random this behaviour starts again. The strange thing is that this happens on both my laptops, but not on my roommate's Macbook. His ping is perfectly stable at around 12, spare the occasional ping spike that stays below 50.

We live in an anti-squat building and have to game on wifi. Running an ethernet cable is impossible since the router is located in another person's room. If I had to, I could try an 'internet over power' solution, but I don't know if that would work since the building is quite large and old.

League runs fine on any other network (both via wifi and ethernet), and so does my internet connectivity in general as far as I have noticed.

I ran PingPlotter on the League server and I have included the data in the attachments. As far as I can tell there is some packet loss and spikes in latency at the first hop. Also, I have no clue wtf is going on at hop 3 (91% packet loss)

Things I have tried so far:

- Closing all other applications while gaming

- Factory resetting both laptops

- Reinstalling League of Legends

- Buying a wifi extender and connecting via its ethernet port (thought my wifi chip was broken for a while and it seemed fixed using this solution, but now things are f**cked again)

- Making sure power settings are set to maximum performance for League of Legends

- Making sure League of Legends is added to firewall exceptions

- Running League of Legends' "Hextech Repair Tool"

- Rolling back to older network drivers for laptop #1

Any help as to what the hell is going on would be greatly appreciated!!

Edit: I forgot to mention that sometimes I have a friend over and the 3 of us play League. He also has a Windows machine and has never experienced ping issues.

Laptop #1: 4700MQ, 765m, 16GB Ram, Windows 10 64bit (1903 I think)

Laptop #2: 8130u, integrated graphics, Windows 10 64bit (1903)

Roommate's laptop: Macbook Pro 13" (2018, touchbar)

Falcon1986 · April 2, 2020

On 3/30/2020 at 7:58 PM, DeliriousBadger said:

Hi there,

I am trying to play League of Legends with my roommate, but am having insanely unstable ping and high ping spikes (200+). My ping is all over the place and fluctuates all the time. For periods of time it is stable, but then seemingly at random this behaviour starts again. The strange thing is that this happens on both my laptops, but not on my roommate's Macbook. His ping is perfectly stable at around 12, spare the occasional ping spike that stays below 50.

We live in an anti-squat building and have to game on wifi. Running an ethernet cable is impossible since the router is located in another person's room. If I had to, I could try an 'internet over power' solution, but I don't know if that would work since the building is quite large and old.

League runs fine on any other network (both via wifi and ethernet), and so does my internet connectivity in general as far as I have noticed.

I ran PingPlotter on the League server and I have included the data in the attachments. As far as I can tell there is some packet loss and spikes in latency at the first hop. Also, I have no clue wtf is going on at hop 3 (91% packet loss)

Things I have tried so far:

- Closing all other applications while gaming

- Factory resetting both laptops

- Reinstalling League of Legends

- Buying a wifi extender and connecting via its ethernet port (thought my wifi chip was broken for a while and it seemed fixed using this solution, but now things are f**cked again)

- Making sure power settings are set to maximum performance for League of Legends

- Making sure League of Legends is added to firewall exceptions

- Running League of Legends' "Hextech Repair Tool"

- Rolling back to older network drivers for laptop #1

Any help as to what the hell is going on would be greatly appreciated!!

Edit: I forgot to mention that sometimes I have a friend over and the 3 of us play League. He also has a Windows machine and has never experienced ping issues.

Laptop #1: 4700MQ, 765m, 16GB Ram, Windows 10 64bit (1903 I think)

Laptop #2: 8130u, integrated graphics, Windows 10 64bit (1903)

Roommate's laptop: Macbook Pro 13" (2018, touchbar)

A wireless extender might work well for extending signal range, but it can introduce more latency of which regular web browsing won’t suffer too much, but other sensitive programs like games might.

Secondly, wireless “boosting” technology, whether at the access point end or the network adapter end can also introduce the same problems especially with incompatible hardware. So, it’s best to turn these features off (Yes, I know. It sounds counterintuitive!). From your end, you can access this through your WiFi card’s hardware properties.

Thirdly, what make/model of WiFi adapter are you using? Is roaming aggressiveness set too high? Is the WiFi signal being broadcast on 2.4GHz or 5GHz? Which is your WiFi adapter using to connect?

How “busy” is your neighbourhood’s WiFi signals? Run a site survey with a WiFi scanner. If channels are overlapping a lot and everyone is using WiFi then that can contribute to problems. Try to steer clear of 2.4GHz and use 5GHz. If any band is crowded, you might want to consider narrowing the channel width (maybe 20MHz for 2.4GHz band and 40MHz for the 5GHz band) at the cost of reduced maximum throughput.

Finally, if you’re sharing WiFi with a neighbour, slowdowns for everyone can be due to anyone’s internet usage at the time. This is common in college dorm setups. Someone might be downloading large files or hogging most of the bandwidth, which will cause all other users to suffer if proper traffic prioritization isn’t being enforced at the router.