I had a weird ping situation yesterday.
Weird jerky game play, with a very regular hiccup. Every 5 seconds or so, I had about a second where the client failed to get updates from the server. It was the kind of lag where everything repeats doing what it is doing. Things in motion continued in a straight line to be put in their correct positions once my client caught up. Also, animations kept repeating until the catch-up moment. At no point did the screen freeze.
So, that’s lag, it happens.
I prompted the game for the IP (/ip) for the server I was on and put that into pingplotter. Perfect result, a clean trace with no hop having a ping over 49 and no packet loss at all. Mmm… maybe the issue cleared up while I was putting up pingplotter. Back to the game and check.
Nope, still the jerky game play. I opened the options window to see the ping reported by the game itself. It was reported as a very surprising “Ping: 0 (Avg 0)”. I sat staring at that for a while, expecting it to update to a more realistic figure. It didn’t happen. This is probably when I should’ve taken a screenshot, but instead I decided I might’ve made a typo in pingplotter and be tracing the route to a different ANet server. So I alt-tabbed out back to pingplotter to double check. I was in fact tracing the right IP.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make any relevant screenshots at that time because when I got back into the game I was looking at a black screen with a network error (7:11:3:191:101).
So: Perfect connection to server. In-game ping reported as a never-changing 0 (I wish we had that kind of technology). Jerky game play culminating in a disconnect.
The actual bug? I have no idea what was going on on that server. At the very least, the game shouldn’t be reporting a ping of 0.