Omgcanadian

It’s Friday! How was your week?

This week I worked my full-time job, attended a Pediatrician appointment for my daughter (with my ex wife), helped my girlfriend decorate the house for the holidays, attended co-parenting counseling, scheduled days off of work next week for court appearances (because my ex has too much time and money on her hands), did some engagement ring shopping, took my kids to practices, took my son to get a haircut, had my future in-laws over for dinner, and built some bad-ass Lego creations with the kiddos. Tonight, I will attend a viewing, take the boys to basketball practice, and hopefully spend some time with my girlfriend. When I began seriously gaming two years ago, I rarely saw my kids, I had no girlfriend, I rented a small place in the middle of nowhere, and I essentially had no life. Gaming filled a serious void, gave me something to do at night when the loneliness was at its worst, and I made some great friends online, as crazy as that may sound to some. My life is now full and awesome (at least barring all the crap with my ex).

It’s also among the best free games for iPhone. Price: Free (In-app Purchases start from $0.99) Download. Here’s another puzzle game that will tickle your mind and keep you intrigued. It’s quite straightforward to play as you have to press the arrow keys in the preferred direction like up/down/left/right to move the tiles. You can play retro games on macOS with an emulator. An emulator imitates a console gaming system, allowing you to play console games on your Mac. With the instructions below, you can play retro games on macOS from NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, and a ton more. Get an Emulator.

So, why did I spend so much time this week going through the frustration of trying to install Windows 10 in Bootcamp in High Sierra, which is a complete PIA process, not to mention being scary as eff? I’m getting itchy… I really really want to play a game. I miss it. Don’t get me wrong, I play plenty of games. First our home is like a board game wonderland. Second, I teach game design at my job and play a ton of student games made in everything from Construct 2 to Unity. Third, I recently revisited 1998 by putting FFVII on my iPhone and Baldur’s Gate on my iPad. Finally, I play games with my kids anytime I can. From Lego Marvel Superheroes to Rocket League, my kids play some fun games. Still, I’m not satisfied. Can I help it if I’m playing Rocket League with my 10-year-old and thinking of how much it looks like Soccer Pitch in Scarlet Blade? Playing these pithy little games feels like eating Oreos for dessert every night for months on end while all along I’ve been craving a chocolate mousse cheesecake.

Here’s the rub. I can no longer commit to being a gamer, at least not like I want to. It’s not that I can’t have boundaries and manage my life. The real issue is that I can’t keep up. Gaming is like a second career if you want to play with friends, which is what I want. I’m a social gamer. I really really miss Joe, Donnie, Chris, and Manjengaa. I really miss talking to them on Discord about weapons and bosses food and family and dungeons and pub crawls and arts and crafts to do with our kids. If I came back to Blade and Soul (the game I really want to return to) today, I would have to commit a good 80 + hours of pretty hardcore solid play to try to even reach an area where I could hang out with my friends in-game. Not to mention, I don’t know when I can play and when I can’t. My “free-time” (what is that?) schedule is so sporadic that I don’t know when I will be available or for how long. Also, no matter what, my family and my girl are going to take precedent.

So here I am, it’s 2017. I have a house full of commotion, family, love, and holiday decorative awesomeness. I also do not own a single PC. I have an XBox One, a Switch, A WiiU, 3 iPads, and 2 Macs. In the past 3 weeks, I’ve installed DDO, Runescape, and Guildwars 2 (the only non-WoW MMO’s that work on Mac) to my Mac, but I haven’t even set up a character yet. I doubt these games are going to scratch my itch any more that FFVII or BG. I miss Old Man Cho and visiting Yehara’s Mirage. Probably more, I miss Joe, Donnie, Chris, and Manjengaa. So, I installed Windows 10, and I’ve spent 3 days trying to get BnS to completely install (a process made futile by the ever present EO2014 error). Honestly, though, I don’t know what I’m going to do once I get it. I have 2 court appearances next week and the holidays are upon us.

Awhile back, I tried to establish a community of teachers to play games together, but that never really amounted to much. Either teachers don’t game, or they have no desire to do so socially. Perhaps I need to just work on a community of Adults with lives who also want to go on an occasional game binge.

I don’t know whether I will ultimately make it back. Maybe this intense craving will pass as I gorge myself on holiday food, make love to my girlfriend or play some new games with my kids. Maybe I will never get BnS to install and I’ll give up, a defeated and broken man… Either way, I just want my gaming peeps, Joe, Donnie, Chris, and Manjengaa, to know that I miss you, I really do value and cherish (hopefully that’s not too mushy) the times we spent hanging out when I was at my lowest. Thank you for everything, and I hope to hang with you again sometime soon. We’ll see what 2018 brings.

If you’re an avid gamer, you’ve come across one trouble that most gamers have come across: high ping. Whether you’re playing MMORPGs or FPS games, ping heavily impacts your gameplay. It could mean the difference between you getting off that one skill and winning, or having that 50 millisecond (ms) delay and losing. You can’t begin to imagine how many times I’ve missed a kill or couldn’t use that one skill that just came off cooldown - simply because of high ping.

I’m sure you can all relate to this. Playing games means there’s always some kind of ping. Professional gamers go the extra mile to reduce ping, and so should you if you want to be a top-tier gamer or even just to have a more enjoyable gaming experience.

Ping reducers are programs that run in parallel with your games. By providing a direct connection or another faster route to the game servers, these programs are able to lower your ping in games. If you’re wondering how to reduce ping, you can either optimize bounces on your local NSP (managed by you and your ISP), or you can optimize your game provider’s network.

In most cases, you will not be able to optimize your game provider’s network. Modern ping reducers will attempt to optimize your computer to send the packets in the most efficient way while trying to minimize the bounces within your local NSP. Besides reducing ping, these apps also create more stable connections to reduce jitters and ping spikes which reduce things like rubber banding. Keep in mind, sometimes ping reducers will NOT be able to reduce your ping as the alternative route they provide could be less efficient than your default one. Ping reducers are also not a silver bullet to lower ping. For connections with terrible routing a 30-40% reduction in ping is possible but most of the time ping is only reduced by 10% or so. Connection stability though can be improved which oftentimes improves the gameplay experience even more so than ping.

Some ping reducers also monitor your activity in real-time and provide live network insights to reduce the latency more efficiently. So, what are the best ping reducers that work the best? The ping reducers below are the most popular ones on the net. Keep in mind that some people will get better results with one over another. Most of these have free trials, so if they don't work well for you just cancel during the free trial period.

Best Ping Reducers for Gaming

On average, WTFast reduces game ping by 30-60%. WTFast gives you a “VIP connection” to the game servers directly, so you aren’t routed through different servers to play your game. This reduces ping or latency, and also helps reduce jitter, spikes and packet loss. WTFast also prioritizes your connection to the game vs. your connection to other programs you may be running. With partnerships and hardware integration with companies like MSI, ASUS and GIGABYTE, it’s no wonder they’re the leading ping reducer for all things gaming. WTFast works on a monthly subscription-basis, with a 17% discount if you subscribe annually. With only $8.25/mo, you can reduce ping and improve your gameplay. They also offer a 14-day free trial, risk free - so if you want to lower your ping in games, this is worth checking out.

NoPing is a popular ping reducer that's designed to work out of the box for over 600 games from MMORPGs like World of Warcraft to FPS games like Valorant, Fortnite, and CSGO. The NoPing software calculates the best route between your client and the game server and works to re-route traffic in the most efficient way possible, reducing ping and even disconnection issues. The best part about NoPing is that it offers a 3 day free trial that doesn't require a credit card to activate, so testing out NoPing is totally free. Unlike other ping reducers, NoPing also has an option to boost fps in games like Black Desert Online and World of Warcraft by optimizing settings. Given that this is one of the few ping reducers that doesn't require a credit card to try it out, there's absolutely no reason not to give it a chance. Pricing wise it's also one of the cheapest on this list at $5.33/mo for a 12 month plan or $6.90/mo on a monthly plan.

Outfox users can expect to outperform the average gamer with an optimized gaming network. This ping reducer routes your internet traffic through its own network while showing a live session graph of your connection performance. Outfox is also built by the same makers of VyprVPN, which we’ve recommended in our article on the best VPNs for gaming. With a brilliant engineering team like this, you can expect world-class performance as well. Like other ping reducers, Outfox offers a 14-day free trial. It’s the most expensive out of our list at $9.95/mo, but you can expect top-tier performance and support from the team.

Haste boasts its own network infrastructure with private fiber optic links and mesh network of relay servers. By dumping the old, outdated VPN technology, Haste was able to build a ping reducer from the ground up. When you use the Haste client, you join the Haste network which leads your connection to the servers with the fastest possible route. Haste is a next-gen ping reducer because as you use Haste, it learns about your network paths between you and the game servers. This means you’ll be receiving a better connection each time. You can sign up and get a 14-day trial with no credit card required. It’s priced at $120/year or $15/mo and despite being a bit pricier than other ping reducers, it's our favorite. Why? Because it just works. We've tested countless ping reducers and for us Haste has delivered the best performance. They also regularly update their supported games list to include all popular titles. They even have newer titles like Apex Legends on there. Since there's a free trial, there's no reason not to give it a try.

Mudfish is a favorite amongst many MMORPG players. I know It's been recommended on Final Fantasy XIV's subreddit several times and countless people have reported good results with it. Perhaps Mudfish's best selling point is its price - instead of paying monthly, people pay based on how much data they use and since gaming requires minimal banwidth a $5 spend on Mudfish can last up to a year easily. They also support countless games right out of the box with basic configuration. They're owned and operated by the South Korean company Mudfish Networks, and if anyone knows MMORPGs it's the South Koreans.

At $29.88/year, Pingzapper comes out to $2.49/mo. It seems like a huge bargain, but the performance you’ll be getting isn’t nearly as good as WTFast or Outfox from my experience. You can predict the quality of the program by comparing their website with the rest. It does seem to work and I can see a difference in ping with the MMOs I regularly play. The beauty of PingZapper though is that you can try it without having to enter a credit card or providing any kind of payment information. It's the only true free trial on this list that doesn't need payment information.

Kill Ping simply boosts your game performance. With over 100 servers across 30+ locations around the world, Kill Ping allows you to pick your own server or you can let it auto-pick the best server for you. They also boast a guaranteed uptime of 99.99% with tier 1 support every time. Some players have seen a ping reduction of 60% with Kill Ping. For a limited time they are offering a 2-year plan for only $40, which comes out to a measly $1.66/mo. If you’re running an internet cafe or a cool gaming basement, maybe you’d also need a multi-login plan. Kill Ping seems to be quite the affordable ping reducer for enterprise needs.

How Do Ping Reducers Work?

At times, your ISP may provide a sub-optimal routing path for you. This is because ISPs want to route your traffic through cheaper and less efficient servers to save money. For example, if you live in California, your ISP may route you to a server in another state - far away from the game server. The time that it takes for the data to travel determines your ping. If you are wondering how to reduce ping, this is the bottleneck.

With a ping reducer, your game data is routed nearest to the game server. This drastically reduces the time that the data takes to travel, thus being the best way to reduce ping in games.

Typical internet routing works like this: your computer broadcasts packets of data using your router. The router “routes” the packets to different Network Service Providers (NSP), then to the game server and eventually back to your computer. This routing system will have multiple transfer points depending on the NSP and the game networks.

One way to see the routing in action is if you open up your command prompt and type in this command: “ping vie.valve.net” Once it finishes and outputs the approximate round trip times, type in this command: “tracert vie.valve.net”

The first command, “ping,” simply showed the average ping times while the second command “tracert,” showed all the routes it takes to reach Valve’s game server. As you can see, there are multiple steps needed for the data to be sent out from your router to reaching the final destination: the game server.

While these two methods output the response times, these figures are not entirely accurate in terms of how your game packets will go. “Ping” and “tracert” use the response time of an ICMP packet and doesn’t accurately portray the in-game UDP packets you receive from the game servers, but still shows the routing process.

Lastly, these PingReducers are not meant to be workarounds for IP blocks/restrictions. VPNs are better suited for that purpose. If you're looking to get around an IP block check out out guide for the best VPNs for gaming.