Ping, Latency and Servers in an MMO: What the ms Are and How to Improve Them

Ping is the time, in milliseconds, a message takes to go from your PC to the game server and back. In an MMO or an online survival game it decides when you see what happens in the world and when the world learns what you do. It has no direct relation to frames per second: you can play at 144 fps with a high ping, or at 40 fps with an excellent one. They are two different “ms”, and they are fixed by different things.

The terms, one by one

Term	What it is	What you notice when it is bad
Ping / network latency	Round trip of a message to the server	Actions that answer late; the world looks “delayed”
Jitter	How much ping varies from one message to the next	Choppy movement; ping that looks normal but feels bad
Packet loss	Messages that do not arrive	Teleports, actions that do not register
Bandwidth	How much data per second fits	Almost never the problem in games: they use little
Update rate (tick rate)	How many times per second the server simulates	A world that reacts more or less finely

Bandwidth is what providers advertise, and it is the least relevant for gaming: an online game uses a small fraction of a normal connection. What matters are latency, stability and packet loss.

A steady ping beats a low but unstable one

A constant 40 ms ping feels better than one that swings between 20 and 120 ms. The game client adapts to a constant latency; it cannot adapt to one that changes. So, besides the value, look at its variation. A saturated Wi-Fi connection, a background download or a router with full memory produce jitter.

Physics rules

Light in an optical fiber travels at about 200,000 km/s: that is about 200 km per millisecond one way, or about 100 km of route per millisecond of round trip. It means that over 1,500 km of route there are at least about 15 ms of ping from distance alone, not counting the equipment in between. Real routes are longer than a straight line, and each router adds something.

That is why the server region weighs so much. A server near you gives a low ping without you doing anything. When an MMO has a single persistent universe, players in distant regions have more ping, and no configuration of your PC fixes it.

How an MMO hides latency

Online games use techniques so that, at 50 ms of ping, the game does not feel 50 ms late:

1. Client-side prediction. Your PC applies your actions instantly (moving, aiming) without waiting for the server, then reconciles what it predicted with what the server decided.
2. Interpolation. Other characters are drawn by smoothing between the latest updates received, so you see others with a small deliberate delay.
3. Lag compensation. For combat, the server “rewinds” the world for an instant to how you saw it when you fired, and resolves the hit with that. A shot well aimed on your screen counts even with ping.

The server keeps the truth (it is authoritative), and your machine makes it look smooth. But this has a cost: your CPU does more work (predicts, reconciles, interpolates), as covered in why MMOs and survival games depend on the CPU.

What counts as a good ping

An editorial guide, not a standard:

Ping	Feel in an MMO
Under 30 ms	Excellent
30 to 60 ms	Very comfortable
60 to 100 ms	Playable; noticeable in reflex combat
100 to 150 ms	Noticeable; compensated by the game, but uncomfortable
Over 150 ms	Hard for action; acceptable for calm activities

Slower-paced MMOs tolerate more ping than a team shooter; first-person combat, less.

How to measure it

• The game’s own indicator, if it has one, is the most reliable: it measures to the real server.
• ping in a Windows terminal toward an address gives an idea of the route. Use it in a test of about 60 seconds (for example ping -n 60 <address>) and look at the minimum, average and maximum: the gap between them is jitter.
• pathping or tracert show where the traffic goes through and at which hop packets are lost or delayed.
• Measure at different times: a ping that worsens at night is usually your provider’s congestion.

How to improve it

1. Cable, not Wi-Fi. Ethernet removes most of the household jitter.
2. Free the line. Downloads, cloud backups and high-quality video saturate the connection and spike the ping. Many routers have a queue-management feature (sometimes called SQM or smart QoS) that prevents that effect.
3. Pick the nearest region if the game lets you.
4. Restart the router now and then, and keep its firmware up to date.
5. Talk to your provider if the ping to a destination is always bad at the same time or at a specific hop.
6. Do not expect a VPN to fix it. It adds a hop; sometimes it improves a bad route, but normally it does not.

What does not improve ping: a faster processor, a more powerful graphics card or raising the frame rate. Those improve something else, frame time (see frames per second and milliseconds). And technologies that trim system latency, such as NVIDIA Reflex, act on the render chain, not the network; frame generation adds latency (when to use it).

Common mistakes

• Confusing ping with fps. If you see the world “choppy” with a normal ping, look at packet loss, jitter or the CPU: average ping does not explain everything.
• Blaming the PC for what belongs to the server. If several players notice the same thing at once, the origin is usually the server or the route, not your machine.
• Measuring with a speed-test website. It measures bandwidth to a test server, not latency to the game’s server.
• Leaving a download running. A background update can double your ping without you noticing until you play.

The case of COLONIZED

COLONIZED is a space survival MMO for PC with persistent dedicated servers (closed alpha applications open, first waves planned for winter 2026-2027, not yet playable). In the development build, every shot is resolved by the server with lag compensation. Server regions and latency targets have not been announced, and we have not published system requirements; we give no ping figures. What we have measured, on video memory and effect cost, is in our guide to optimizing Unreal Engine 5 games. When there are regions, they will be announced in the development diary.