Please teach me how to test my Ping to AOE III

Hi Guys,

Please could someone explain to me how to test my Ping (or latency if thats what you call it) to Age of Empires III in idiots language.

I have recently discovered online gaming and think its brilliant. But very few people will play with me because my ping sucks. I have a 192 line with Axxess. I do not want to change to more expensive options like unshaped etc.

Also could you explain to me how to interepret the results of the ping test.

Thanks guys

I'm not sure how AOE works, but with most online gaming systems you need to connect to a server to play. If this is the case, then pinging the server is pretty easy. Click start, go to run, and enter in cmd, click ok. this will bring up a dos promt. then type in ping <and the name of the server>.
you will then get 4 replys, the only thing you really need to know is the value after the time= part. This is a roundtrip time for your ping in milliseconds. so your computer sent the data out, the server received the data, and it returned to your pc in this amount of time. For online gaming, you want this value to be as low as possible, as this will determine how long it takes to update the server when you do something, or how it will take the server to update you when someone else does something. to run a longer ping use the ping -t <name of server> command, and use ctrl + c to break it.

Nicely said Jah

Here's an example:

C:\>ping www.google.com

Pinging www.l.google.com [216.239.37.99] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=344ms TTL=237
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=341ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=342ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=343ms TTL=237

Ping statistics for 216.239.37.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 341ms, Maximum = 344ms, Average = 342ms

C:\>

So it takes about 340 milisecond for a packet from my PC to reach the google server. Keep in mind that some servers can block "Echo requests" (another name for ping) , but you'll still be able to connect to them.

Thanks Jah,

This is what I got.
Pinging www.ensemblestudios.com [72.3.239.150] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 72.3.239.150: bytes=32 time=395ms TTL=107
Reply from 72.3.239.150: bytes=32 time=392ms TTL=107
Reply from 72.3.239.150: bytes=32 time=393ms TTL=107
Reply from 72.3.239.150: bytes=32 time=395ms TTL=107

Ping statistics for 72.3.239.150:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 392ms, Maximum = 395ms, Average = 393ms

So I presume this is good?

Its alrite but dont be fooled, by just pinging the web server, often the gaming server is hosted in a different noc, or different location, so ping times to the web site, and to the gaming server could very well vary :\ ping the gaming server itself, and u should get a betta result