Team Fortress 2 lag: causes and fixes

Team Fortress 2 shows you more about your connection than most games, if you ask it to. Here's how to read what it says, why Valve's servers and community servers lag in different ways, and what fixes each.

Two kinds of server

TF2 has Valve's own servers, which casual and competitive matchmaking put you on, and community servers, which their owners run wherever they like.

• Valve's servers sit behind Valve's network. Your traffic enters it at one of Valve's relays, in Europe in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw or Madrid, and travels the rest inside it.
• Community servers are reached directly, over the open internet, to wherever the server is hosted. How good that path is depends on the host as much as on you.

So if your matchmaking games lag and your favourite community server doesn't (or the other way round), it isn't your PC: it's two different routes.

Read net_graph

Turn on the developer console in Options → Keyboard → Advanced, open it with the key above Tab, and type net_graph 1. The numbers in the corner are the ones to watch:

• ping: the round trip to the server. High and steady means distance or a detour; jumping means queueing somewhere.
• loss: packets that never arrived. Anything above zero shows up as hits that don't count and players that jump.
• choke: updates the server or your client held back because the connection was full. Usually your own line, or old rate settings in a config.

Watch them for a whole round. A problem that comes and goes is a different problem from one that's always there. Ping, jitter and packet loss explains what each does to a game.

What helps

1. Remove old network commands from your config if you copied one years ago. TF2's defaults are sensible; a wrong rate setting causes choke.
2. Use a cable. Wi-Fi's jitter and loss do more damage than a few milliseconds of distance. Wi-Fi or Ethernet has more.
3. Keep the line quiet: downloads, uploads and streams in the home make packets wait.
4. Pick close community servers: the server browser shows each one's ping before you join.
5. Change the route when Valve's servers are slow for you every evening, or slower than your distance explains. That's your provider's path, and it's the part you can't fix from the game.

When it isn't the network

TF2 is an old engine, and on a busy server the frame rate can drop. If ping, loss and choke are calm while the game stutters, it's your PC. Windows settings for FPS covers what's worth changing.

Where NoSpike fits

NoSpike's TF2 entry is Valve's own servers, verified from Valve's published list, so it moves only TF2's matchmaking traffic. Community servers run on their owners' machines elsewhere and aren't part of it: those games keep your normal connection.

For Valve's servers, NoSpike measures your route and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes the game only when a relay is faster. It checks every minute, doesn't move you mid-match unless the route fails, and tells you plainly when your own route is already best.