[TIPS AND TRICKS] Ways on how to avoid lag and high ping in Mobile Legends

Mobile Legends, a MOBA strategy game currently out for Android and iOS has been a massive hit raking 10 million downloads in the Playstore alone. A portable League of Legends or DoTA2 you can play anywhere as long as you have a decent internet connection. And that's where one of its flaw is located.

Lag has always been a problem with real time mobile MOBA strategy games specially when you're in a country with slow internet connection or a location with poor signal reception. Here are some tips and tricks to lessen and / or avoid lag spikes in Mobile Legends.

• Ask feedbacks about your internet provider - You might want to check if your internet provider has good reviews when it comes to net speed and stability. You can do this by checking out forums dedicated for subscribers such as yourself. Or ask a friend or a colleague of yours for a feedback if you have the same carrier and ask stuff about their user experience. It's always better to get info from people that has first hand experience with the problem and they might have their own solution that may also work for you.
• Change your location - People tend to dismiss this but, location is actually a big factor when it comes to lag. You're lucky if you're near a network tower as that tends to give the user faster connection and lest internet traffic. Your area might have a heavy internet traffic that contributes to lag in-game. For example, I play Mobile legends on my balcony. It's an open area where no walls or any signal disturbing material can contribute to making my game lag. I tried playing inside my room before but my signal drops down inside and my ping goes up. A house will sometimes have dead zones. It's like one area has a force field that stops any WIFI or wireless data signals to enter. More on this later.
• Try changing from 3G connection to 4G connection - This is if you're using a wireless data connection instead of wifi. The 'G' stands for Generation, and it's no surprise 4G connection is faster. How to change to 4G? For Android go to menu > settings > data usage > open options (the 3 vertical dots located at the upper right) > cellular networks > preferred network type > then choose 4G. Note that your phone needs to be 4G capable as well as your sim card. Open Mobile Legends if 4G works better for you. For people who are in the provinces, this might not help you as 4G tends to do better in populated areas where network towers are mostly located.
  
• Change your WIFI location - Just pick up your smartphone or another wireless device, connect to your wireless network, and walk around your house, apartment, or office. Pay attention to the WIFI signal indicator on your smartphone. If signal strength drops to zero, you've found a dead zone. Try changing your WIFI router location inside your home and locate the best spot to put it where the signal is strong. It will be tedious but you can check this by launching the game to check for your ping while moving your router from different spots and see where it's strongest.
• Do a clear cache or clear data wipe - Every time Mobile Legends updates, it's accompanied by lag spikes and sometimes freeze frame. One way to get rid of this is to clear the game cache or a complete data wipe. The game will still  be in it's latest updated version but you'll need to re-download all the additional resources of the game afterwards.
• Change your in-game flag to your current location - Some players choose to display a different country flag from where they actually are (Ex. Philippine players sporting a South Korea flag or Japan flag) and this makes matching you with other players complicated. The game system detects your IP address of course but your flag also adds factors like matching you with other players from the same country. Look at it this way. the command input you enter in the game travels in a series of wires. In these wires, there are stops example: Point A, B and C. Now if all the players in your team are actually in the same country, let's say Philippines, thanks to the IP address AND flag icon, your command input only needs to travel to point A up to point B and back again to point A. Now because someone is sporting another country flag, the game system sometimes disregards the IP address and matches you with a player that, let's say, is from South Korea. Now the command input needs to travel to point A, point B, AND point C and back again travelling back to the 2 previous points. This makes the information travel longer that results in command delays. So it's better to stick to your actual country flag and, come on, be proud of your country.
• Reduce game graphics - This is already common knowledge to players, but I'll explain why. More graphics = more processing power needed and more ram consumed. So if you lessen the graphics settings, the less processing power is needed in the game. In truth, this is only has minuscule effect in the game. But if it helps, why not, right? Always go for functionality before aesthetics.
• Uninstall the game and reinstall it - A clean slate is always a good solution. There is a thing where while downloading an app, sometimes errors occur in the game resources and data that might result in lag. Reinstalling can fix this.
• Maybe it's not your fault after all - The sad truth is Mobile Legends can be easily hacked. There's already a ton of hacks for the game like the infamous map hack. This can actually make the game lag and give players high ping. I didn't believed in this first but further research on it made me confirm this.
• Buy a new device - If you're still using a dual core phone in 2017 or a model with only 1GB of ram, you really need to consider buying a new one. Common requirements these days are at least 3GB of ram and a good 32GB of internal storage with minimum of at least an octa core processor.

I hope some of this tips and tricks help you reduce your lag and lower your ping spike. If all else fails, there's always similar games like Mobile Legends popping out of the Playstore and App store. We might find a better one.