Lag

Latency is the defined in Blizzard Tech Support as, "A measure of the quality of your internet connection." Latency, or Lag, determines the speed of your gameplay. Because it's a real-time game, the game will only go as fast as it's able to get information to all the computers of the players involved in your specific game. For example; If your super fast, speed demon, awesome, new $5000 computer is playing against a slow, old, turtle like computer, the game will only go as fast as the slower machine. This is because to keep the game sincronized, your computer will only go the speed that the slower one can take in the information. Otherwise, you would attack him, and he would respond 10 minutes later. Meanwhile, he's dead and your waiting for his comp. to catch up so you can record your victory. That will never happen though, thanks to lag. Almost all cases of bad lag, however, is due to a poor internet connection. Low latency is good, high latency will slow your game. Now that you know this, you are going to want to avoid lag as much as possible so you can have a smooth, fast moving game. Blizzard developed a system so you can gauge your latency and the latency of the people your going to play a game with. Next to people's names, are colored bars. The lower the bar, the lower the latency. These bars are color coded to further gauge the person's latency. Green shows you low latency, yellow shows medium latency, and red shows high latency. You will want to play with a person showing 2-4 green bars, because they will have a good connection, and shouldn't slow your game down. Games are also gauged, so when picking your games, you can see whether or not, the game has players with low latency. Latency in any case in measured by sending and reciving data between the players computer, and other sources (like B.Net servers, other players computers, etc.). Players with a plug next to their name, for some reason, cannot process UDP packets which means they will only be able to chat until this problem goes away. Many times, the problem is just their connection. Sometimes, it is their service prodiver. If this happens to you all the time, you may need to talk to your service provider and tell them your problem.