Tip for checking your ping before starting a game
So every few games, there's at least one player on one team complaining about how they're lagging and not understanding why. I can't explain why you might randomly be having connection issues, but I'm going to share a tip that can help you avoid being that player by checking your ping in real time before you join a game. This should be easy to do on any windows computer (I'm sure that it can be done on Mac as well, but I don't know anything about that OS).
- Open a run prompt by pressing the "windows key" and "R" at the same time.
- Type (without the quotation marks): "ping -t 8.8.8.8"
- Press "OK"
This should open a window that says something like "C:\WINDOWS\system32\ping.exe" at the top and that starts outputting about one line per second. In my case, a typical line will say "Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=51". What you care about is the "time=" because that is your ping to the IP address that you are pinging to. You can use any IP address that you want. I use 8.8.8.8 because its short to type and easy to remember. You can use the servers for LoL or any other online game as well if you know the IP addresses. In my case, if my ping to 8.8.8.8 is around 55ms (it is normal for it to fluctuate, but a good connection will be within a small range), I can expect my in-game ping to be around 115ms.
What I do is open the program before opening the LoL client and watch if the ping is low and steady. That way I can avoid playing with a poor connection. If you see many lines that say "Connection time out", don't play. Just don't. That means your connection is very poor to the point you're disconnecting and reconnecting to the internet. Wait until your connection is stable. And a line that says "General failure" probably means that you have a problem connecting to your router or modem.
Now, if you play and start to lag afterwards, well... at least this lets you know that the problem is with your connection rather than Riot's servers and you can rage against whomever provides you with internet access instead of Riot :P
Edit: A nice commenter has provided the following address for the game's new servers: 104.160.131.1
