What does Packets / Packet Loss mean

This is referring to your internet connectivity.

Information is sent over your network in little segments, or “packets”.

In this particular instance, this is a test to check the integrity of your connectivity. It sent 12 packets, and all 12 packets were received, meaning that there was 0% loss – therefore no issues with your internet.

To get a little more technical, this process is used to test the integrity of your internet connectivity to ensure that your inputs from your PC are received on the game server. The way this is done is through the use of TCP/UDP (by default, UDP being the standard) to send the information from your PC (Your IP Address) to the Server and back again.

While things such as Internet speed and Bandwidth can affect your ability to play (low speeds or bandwidth can cause latency – a delay between the send/receive) Packet loss is different. Packet loss is whether or not the information you sent is received by the server, and vice versa.

A good analogy of this is a freeway. Imagine lots of cars travelling back and forth on a freeway. Each of these cars represents a “packet”. This freeway is the Internet. When you connect to the internet, you create an entrance/exit to the freeway.

When you download things, or receive information from a server, these cars will turn off the freeway to your exit. If each car represents, say 250MB (in reality they can’t be bigger than 65,507 bytes), and you download 1GB of information, then 4 cars will turn off, each reaching you one after the other. The potential that sometimes, due to multiple downloads and uploads happening, this can confuse the instructions, or some cars may simply just “fall off”, due to communication errors.