There are plenty of things that can go wrong when playing your favorite game. Some confound you so much that you don’t know what to do. And a few others are so standard practice that you know precisely what to do—Bang your desk until it comes apart or break your keyboard in two.
Here are 4 issues gamers grapple with and how to potentially solve them.
1. Colors of Death
There’s only so much load that your hardware can bear. And heat, being one of the staunchest enemies of gamers, introduces us to various colors of death such as a blue screen of death, a white screen of death, or PS3’s yellow light of doom. All of these are due to some GPU malfunction, more often than not.
Thankfully, most blue screens of death (BSOD) in Windows come with an error code that you can Google. This, however, will only tell you what the issue is likely to be about, not how to fix it. The majority of colored screens are one-off cases that temporarily affect your PC and are not too frequent.
- If you’re frequently getting errors typically caused by GPU errors then you might want to lower your in-game graphics settings, double-check your drivers, or upgrade your hardware. Windows Report has a comprehensive coverage of typical BSoDs.
2. Fraud
You’d be surprised how many gamers fall victim to fraud.
If your personal information is stolen, then people could make purchases on your payment card. Or, they could also find out your passwords and use them to access other logins that you have online. This could be digital banking logins or your email. Anything like this will give a criminal more power to disrupt your life.
This is why you need to make sure that you know a little about things like MOTO payments and phishing that could impact you. You can learn more about MOTO payments by completing your own research online. For phishing, we recommend starting with Microsoft’s guide.
- Stay protected online by not falling for traps that feel to go to be true.
3. Lag
Lag is to multiplayer gamers what heat is to AAA single-player gamers. The arch nemesis. A lot of us are fortunate enough to have a game server nearby and a stable internet connection. But not everyone is lucky.
If you’re experiencing significant lag then sadly, the only thing you can do to remedy the situation is invest in a better internet speed.
- We have a guide on this. Basically, you want to focus on stability and not pure speed. And there are a few tips that can help you improve your situation that we also talk about in that guide.
- If nothing else works, check the Arris Surfboard Thruster — a couple of towers that improve your existing WiFi speed with the help of a 6GHz band dedicated connection.
4. Social engineering
A few months ago, a friend that I sometimes play online with was on a Discord call and was narrating a story. It was regarding someone he knew. This person was playing a multiplayer game where his teammate was raging non-stop. When this guy tried to calm him down, the troll resorted to personally attacking him. And to everyone’s surprise, this troll knew stuff like the real name, location, and native language of this person.
This was too strange for everyone in the lobby and I got in touch with my friend’s friend to investigate further.
Turns out, the troll opened the Steam profile of this person, copied the username, and used some software to find matches of that username all over the internet or at least social media accounts. This gamer username was being used by him on multiple websites and this led the troll directly to him.
This was no hack. This was simply social engineering that anyone can do quickly.
- Don’t use your “gamer” username elsewhere, and keep your gamer identity as far away from social media identities as possible.
But that doesn’t mean that hackers with a personal vendetta don’t exist. If you’re not using any security tools and trying very hard to protect your identity online, it’s too easy to snoop into your communication, IP address, and so on if a seasoned hacker directs their resources toward you.
