Eli5: what is ping in games and how can you fix it?
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“A ping” or “pinging” has multiple meanings, so some history of the word might help. It starts out as [onomatopoeia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia) for a short impact on a hard object; a hammer might make a ‘*ping*’ noise when it hits an anvil. It was then used in sonar as the noise it makes, and then the timing of the echos from that ping tells the operator how far away everything is.
In basic networking (of which the internet is an advance version of), “a ping” is a single message sent to another computer with the instructions “send me a basic message back”; the time to get the message back is then measured. Similar to sonar, this tells the computer how ‘far’ away the second computer is. If the pings are going between a client and a server, this is an effective measurement of the latency of the client: how much time it takes between the client trying to do something and the server acknowledging that the action has been taken. You can actually do this really easily; on windows, opening a cmd terminal and typing “ping google.com” will send 4 pings to the google ip address and tell you how long it takes to hear back from it.
In online gaming, there’s two similar terms: “the ping” refers to the latency of the client program, and is covered in the other answers pretty well. (I typed the following when I thought the question was “how do I find it?”): >!Because it’s between the game client and the game server (and not just computer to computer), the only way to reliably find a game’s ping is if there’s a setting to display it. Otherwise, finding the server’s ip address and typing it into a ping command (like I mentioned above) will get something similar.!<
On the other hand, “***a*** ping” or “pinging [object]” goes back to an earlier meaning: it’s a short, single message. It is a way for players of certain games (like Apex or League of Legends) to share certain types of information (such as “here’s a weapon” or “I see an enemy over there”) through the game with game supported data (the weapon flashing on their GUI or an icon on their minimap), instead of just through chatting and trying to describe the location with words.
TLDR: More information about the word ‘ping’ and how it applies to video games than you want, but maybe some extra information will be fun for you to read.
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