Ping Pong Ping Time

If you’ve played online multiplayer games, you may be familiar with the concept of latency. From an internet service perspective, latency is the time amount of time it takes for data to be transmitted from your device to an internet server and back to your device. Also known as ping time or ping, latency is typically measured in milliseconds. It is distinctly different than bandwidth which is the rate at which data can be transferred from one point to another in a given amount of time.

Lately I’ve been playing a table tennis (usually used synonymously with “ping pong” but there is a difference) game called Eleven on my Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset. Since the game is fast-paced and requires split-second decisions during gameplay, it is vitally important that the movement of the ball feels like it is happening in real time. In my personal experience, I’ve found Eleven to offer amazingly realistic gameplay due to realistic ball physics and seemingly real-time interactions with the ball.

Given that any transaction over the internet is not instantaneous, developers of online multiplayer games must ensure that they are able to measure latency and compensate for it in the rendering of graphics in the game. The developers of Eleven (For Fun Labs, Inc.) have done a really nice job of discussing the concept of latency by illustrating its PingBall feature:

From within the game, players can view ping times and how they vary over time. Suffice it to say that in general, shorter latency is better. According to this website, the optimal latency for online gaming is 20 ms or less, while 20-100 ms may be considered acceptable, 100-150 ms may result in noticeable differences, and latency of more than 150 ms may result in frustration. I submit that these are general guides, and actual gameplay experience will likely depend on the nature of the game.

According to the Eleven Wiki, even more significant than the latency is the stability of the latency. It asserts that “A game with significant stable ping will be much more enjoyable than a game with low unstable ping.” That being said, I am not aware of any standard measure of ping variability that is commonly measured, so the best information we typically have available is ping. Since ping times are influenced by distance between 2 players, opponents in the Friends list are presented based on proximity, with closest friends listed first.

There are many websites that offer internet speed tests, and while all the ones I’ve seen measure bandwidth, not all of them measure latency. Speed tests at Bandwidth Place and Speedtest clearly report ping times in addition to download and upload speeds. Does your ping permit you to properly play ping pong?