optimising ping on a macbook pro

MakoFore · November 2016

hi all,
I'm running on a macbook pro- 15 inch newest model, etc, etc. however my best pings i can get from oceana on the EU server are 350-450. often it drops to 600 in cyrodil. all I'm fit to do at that range is fix walls and supply ap to enemies.
I've been trying to do maelstrom arena with this kind of lag- and i hate to blame my poor performance on it- but I'm up to the last boss- and there simply isn't room for a single mistake in terms of roll dodging and lag keeps on messing me up. i lll toll out of a red area and die anyway beasue the graphics havent caught up. or i havent caught up - not sure...

I've done certain things to improve performance:
1. - my framerate is good- i ve dropped my graphics to medium levels to optimise that- and other graphical options.
2. close off all the external applications like dropbox, evertnote closed everything else off

my question is- what else can i do? are there programs or add ons or tricks that anybody can help me with?

Vapirko · February 2017

This won't help I'm afraid but you're not the only one. I play on NA server from Thailand, internet is otherwise great 5-8ms ping, 50mb down and 4mb up, and I'm lucky if my latency sits at 350. Cyro is anywhere from 350-600 normally, and even when the latency is on the better side I often have days where I do a lot of swing and miss hits and not from people dodge rolling or using shuffle etc. I'm hoping to try killping if they ever come out with a Mac version but I'm skeptical it will work, though I know people who say it does. Also I believe the Mac client tends to have worse latency than windows in general.

KhajitFurTrader · February 2017

Two things to keep in mind regarding the latency value displayed in-game:

This value doesn't represent pure network latency, i.e. round-trip signal transmission time, like the ping command does -- just bouncing ICMP_EchoRequest packets around tends to be a lot easier and leaves a smaller footprint than what's going on here. This value additionally exhibits server-side signal processing time, i.e. how long it takes for the server to process client input and status, compute a response factoring in the input and status of every other client in the same logical vicinity, and bring said response on its way back. If there are a lot of other players in the same virtual neighborhood doing a plethora of stuff at the same time, which is likely to happen in Cyrodiil or raids, server work load and thus processing time can only increase.
No-one is allowed to cheat basic physics. Electrical signals on a wire may not travel faster than the speed of light, and on a packet switching network like the Internet, more hops (i.e. boundaries between network segments where the routers sit) in between sender and receiver beget longer times of travel. Also, an increased chance of packet loss may occur, for which communication protocols like TCP were made to compensate -- at the price of increased latency because of packet retransmissions. In the right (or lucky) circumstances, a VPN (virtual private network) service like kill ping may alleviate some ramifications of intercontinental Internet traffic, but one better makes ample use of the free test periods that are offered beforehand, for the actual -- if any -- improvements may as well coincide with measurement error. VPNs are system agnostic, btw. All modern OSs support them to be set up within their own system configuration. It's just that service companies like to offer their very own "easy-to-use" access software as a selling point.