Assistance with lag...

Ok, I'm at a complete loss, and I have no idea what to do. I have two friends who I play games with almost every day. We used to LAN, but one of them moved, so now we do it over the Internet. But, we've discovered that when all three of us play, there's a terrible and inexplicable lag. When only 2 of us play, any 2 of us, it works fine. But the second the third person joins, the lag is terrible, and the game totally unplayable.

This happened most recently with Quake 4, and at first I thought it would be an issue with Quake, but it's not. It started happening with Starcraft, and that's where I know something is wrong, because come on...it's Starcraft.

We all built our own computers, and they're pretty much top of the line, except for of course the most recent stuff (within the last few months). There's no problem with our CPU hardware. I tried changing my IP address since it was similar to one of my friend's, but it didn't change anything.

I'm running a cable connection through a Linksys wireless router, one friend is also running cable, but through a D-Link wireless router, and my other friend is running through a cable connection, but with a Microsoft wireless router.

Is it the routers that are causing this problem? I can think of a million reasons why this would happen, but now why it would only happen with 3 of us and not just 2. So if someone can shed some or any light, I will forever be in their debt. Thanks for listening.

 

If you're hosting the server that you play on, and you have it set up as a LAN server, that will make it lag bigtime for anyone that connects to it off the internet. Other than that, i dont really know.

 

Actually, at random, it won't let certain people host. Sometimes it will only work if I host, and other times it won't work unless they host. It's a bunch of complete randomness, which is why I'm so confused about it.

 

It is because YOUR playing on the same computer your HOSTING on... which uses up MAJOR resources... Best bet would to run a DEDICATED server (just for the game, maybe your parents PC for however long your going to play) which would probably eliminate the problem..

 

I thought about that too, but some of the games we're playing don't even have dedicated servers available. Especially Starcraft. It's just confusing.