Ping (video games)

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Players of multiplayer online video games often use the term ping to refer to the network latency seen between their computer and the game server (or another player). This could be reported as an averaged time in milliseconds, or more generally as "low ping" or "high ping". This usage is common with players of a variety of FPS and RTS games. In most cases, having a low ping is desirable because lower latency provides smoother gameplay by allowing more frequent updates of game data. In some cases, though, games seem to give unfair advantage to high-ping users, as in some iterations of the Half-Life engine.

In this sense, ping is conflated with lag – one may "lag out" due to high ping.

The method used by the game programmers to determine ping times will often not use the traditional ICMP echo request and reply packets, but instead piggyback the functionality onto existing game data packets (often using UDP).