So you're having a good morning, everything has gone exceptionally well so far until you decide to play some Diablo 3. So you run around for a bit, and lo and behold Diablo decides to fit in with the rest of the day and deliver EXCEPTIONALLY good ping. Bloody nice things happening all day long. It makes me sick. So you're playing but then for some reason, you still teleport around like you're from Diablo 2 and wearing a skirt. So the ping says it's good, but in actual fact, it isn't.

So how do you test whether or not your actual ping to the diablo servers is the 200 or so it says it is. You can't trust Diablo because it of course wants you to get off Blizzard's forums and play the damned game. So you need to find someone who isn't going just say the ping is good when it really isn't.

I got really suspicious, so I went and did the following.

So you do the following:

You run Diablo 3: Check the ping in game giving you this screenshot:

Great, so you get 200 odd ping.

Now you go and you run a proper ping test using the windows netstat command.

Click start, Run. Or press the Windows Key + R

Type CMD, press Enter.

Then in the DOS window type the following:

netstat -abn

You will get something that looks like this:

Scroll up through the list until you find [Diablo III.exe] or equivalent game exe

Now look through the exes that the app has pinged, and you'll see the following: it will have [Diablo III.exe], your IP, and the destination IP.  

Now type the following:

Ping 173.194.34.150

This is to find out how long it takes for your signal to get to their servers and back to your PC. Obviously you have to replace the *173.194.34.150* with whatever server your game is connecting to. But either way, by this method you can make sure you're not being lied to.

You're probably not this paranoid, but if you are, there are the steps, and you can catch any dodgy moves by EA, Activision or anyone else trying to cheat you out of perfect ping.

Unfortuantely, Diablo 3 is still lagging, but at least I'm now sure that Blizzard might actually be doing something about it.