What Type of Gamer Are You (Based on Your Wi-Fi Habits)

Home & Lifestyle Blog | MATE, Entertainment & Internet Blog | MATE | 16 December 2025

Your internet setup says more about your gaming personality than your Steam library ever could. Let’s be real.

Look, we can talk all day about whether you’re a casual, competitive, or hardcore gamer. We can debate console vs PC until the servers shut down. But there’s one truth that cuts through all the noise: your Wi-Fi habits reveal your actual gaming identity better than any personality quiz ever could.

So grab your energy drink of choice and let’s find out who you really are.

The “It’s Fine” Optimist

Wi-Fi Setup: Stock ISP router sitting behind the TV, probably covered in dust. Still on the 2.4GHz network because “it reaches everywhere.” Running on NBN 25 because “I’m just playing games, not streaming 8K.”

Gaming Habits: Plays literally anything. Jumps between Valorant, Fortnite, and Fall Guys without a care in the world. Pings hovering somewhere between 60-150ms. “It’s fine,” you say. It is not fine.

Signature Move: Blaming the game when you die, never the connection. “That hitbox is broken, bro.” No, your ping is broken, bro.

What Actually Happens: You’re hardstuck silver/gold in every competitive game you play. You’ve convinced yourself you don’t care about rank, but secretly it bothers you. Your teammates can tell you’re lagging before you even use voice chat. You’ve been booted from raids more times than you’ll admit.

The Truth Bomb: That “lag spike” that always happens during clutch moments? It’s not a spike. That’s just your internet, bestie. Your Wi-Fi is getting absolutely demolished by your housemate streaming Netflix in 4K while your little sister watches TikTok.

The Fix: Upgrade to at least NBN 100, get a mesh system, and for the love of all that is holy, use an ethernet cable. You’re literally handicapping yourself and calling it “playing on hard mode.”

The Ethernet Cable Purist

Wi-Fi Setup: What’s Wi-Fi? You’ve got 50 meters of Cat8 cable running from the router, through two rooms, taped along the ceiling, down the hallway, and directly into your battlestation. The router itself is probably enterprise-grade. You’re on NBN 500 minimum, possibly 1000. Your ping is 8ms and you’ll mention it unprompted.

Gaming Habits: Exclusively competitive. Valorant, CS2, League, maybe some fighting games. You’ve got your monitor overclocked. Your mouse has a 1000Hz polling rate. You’ve optimized your BIOS. You play ranked like your rent depends on it.

Signature Move: Posting your Speedtest.net results in Discord without anyone asking. “Just hit 4ms ping to Sydney servers, built different.” Yeah mate, we know. You told us yesterday too.

What Actually Happens: You’re legitimately good at games. Your setup is objectively optimal. You’re probably high plat/diamond/immortal depending on the game. But here’s the thing… you’re insufferable about it. Someone complains about lag and you immediately launch into a 10-minute explanation about bufferbloat and QoS settings.

The Truth Bomb: Your setup is perfect. Your personality is not. Also, that ethernet cable running through the hallway is a tripping hazard and your housemates hate you for it. Your mum has asked you to remove it six times.

The Reality Check: You’re not wrong, you’re just annoying about it. Yes, ethernet is superior. Yes, people should use it. No, they don’t need a 45-minute TED talk about it every time they mention Wi-Fi.

The Mobile Hotspot Warrior

Wi-Fi Setup: You don’t have one. You’re tethering from your phone. Sometimes it’s your phone, sometimes it’s your mate’s phone. Once you tried gaming at Maccas and got called a legend in the group chat, but also got kicked from the match for 600ms ping.

Gaming Habits: Mobile gaming is your bread and butter. PUBG Mobile, COD Mobile, Genshin Impact. But sometimes… sometimes you get ambitious and try to run Apex Legends on your laptop tethered to your phone’s hotspot. It goes exactly as well as you’d expect.

Signature Move: “Hold on, let me move closer to the window.” This is your catchphrase. You’ve memorised which corner of your room gets the best 4G signal. You play ranked matches standing in specific spots like you’re trying to summon a demon.

What Actually Happens: You’re built different, but not in a good way. You’ve developed inhuman reflexes to compensate for your 150ms minimum ping. You’ve learned to pre-fire corners not because of game sense, but because you’re literally playing in the past. Your bullets arrive fashionably late to every gunfight.

The Truth Bomb: Get NBN. Literally any NBN plan. Even NBN 25 is better than mobile hotspot for gaming. Your phone bill is probably costing more than an internet plan anyway. Also, your phone is overheating and you’re going to brick it eventually.

The Intervention: We love your energy. We respect your resourcefulness. But my guy, you’re gaming on hard mode with a blindfold on while hopping on one foot. Just get proper internet. Your K/D ratio will literally double overnight.

The “I Pay for Gigabit” Flex

Wi-Fi Setup: NBN 1000 plan. Wi-Fi 6E router that cost more than your first car. RGB lighting on the router because why not. Multiple mesh nodes even though you live in a one-bedroom apartment. You’ve got ethernet running to your PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and somehow your smart fridge.

Gaming Habits: You own every platform. You pre-order collector’s editions. Your Steam library is 847 games deep and you’ve played maybe 40 of them. You’re simultaneously downloading three games while streaming your playthrough to an audience of 4 viewers.

Signature Move: Casually mentioning your internet speed in completely unrelated conversations. “Yeah, that YouTube video buffered for you? Weird, doesn’t happen on gigabit.” Sir, this is a Coles.

What Actually Happens: Your setup is overkill in the best way possible. Game updates that take others an hour? Done in 8 minutes. Want to download Warzone’s 200GB update? Finished before your pizza arrives. You’re the friend everyone hits up when a new game drops because you can download it and test if it’s worth buying.

The Truth Bomb: You’re still hardstuck gold in Rocket League. All that internet speed doesn’t buy you game sense or mechanical skill, king. Also, you don’t actually need gigabit for gaming. It’s objectively awesome, but gaming uses way less bandwidth than you think. You got it for the downloads and the flex, and honestly? Respect.

The Reality: You’re living your best life and we’re not even mad. You’re the reason game developers don’t optimize file sizes anymore, but you know what? You’re having fun and that’s valid.

The “My Parents Control the Router” Victim

Wi-Fi Setup: It’s complicated. You don’t actually know what plan you’re on. The router is in your parents’ room and there’s a password that changes monthly. There might be parental controls. There’s definitely a “bedtime” where the internet shuts off. You’ve tried to explain that you can’t pause an online game, but they don’t believe you.

Gaming Habits: You play what you can, when you can. Mostly single-player games with quick save points. You’ve become very good at games you can pause. You speedrun your daily quests in everything because you never know when you’ll get DC’d.

Signature Move: “Guys I gotta go, my mum’s yelling.” This is said mid-match, at least three times a week. You’ve abandoned more games than you’ve finished. Your Destiny 2 clan stopped inviting you to raids.

What Actually Happens: You’re fighting a two-front war. One against the enemies in-game, another against your family’s Netflix habits destroying your ping. Your dad starts streaming a movie and suddenly you’re rubber-banding across the map. Your sister opens Instagram and you’re teleporting like you’ve got anime powers.

The Truth Bomb: This is rough, not gonna lie. You’re in gamer purgatory. You’ve got the passion but not the infrastructure. The good news is this is temporary. The bad news is it absolutely sucks right now.

The Future: One day you’ll have your own place with your own unlimited data NBN plan and you’ll go absolutely feral with freedom. You’ll download games at 2am just because you can. You’ll play ranked until sunrise with nobody to tell you otherwise. That day is coming. Until then, we salute your struggle. You’re building character, as they say. Terrible for your ELO, but great for character.

The Streamer (Or Trying To Be)

Wi-Fi Setup: You did research. Too much research. You’ve got upload speeds prioritised because you learned about bitrate the hard way. NBN 100 or 500 with unlimited data because VODs eat storage for breakfast. Ethernet to your PC, obviously. Mesh nodes covering every angle because you tried streaming from Wi-Fi once and the horror still haunts you.

Gaming Habits: You play what’s trending. You check Twitch categories before deciding what to boot up. You’re good at games, but you’re even better at talking while playing. You’ve bound your streaming hotkeys to muscle memory. You say “Let’s gooo” at least 47 times per stream.

Signature Move: “Sorry chat, had a lag spike.” Except you never have lag spikes because your setup is dialed in. You just whiffed that shot and needed an excuse. Your 6 viewers know the truth. They know.

What Actually Happens: Your streams are buttery smooth. You’ve optimized your OBS settings to perfection. Your audio is clean. Your gameplay is… fine. You’re better at networking than actual gaming, and honestly that’s valid in 2025. You’ve made three affiliate bucks and you’re considering it passive income.

The Truth Bomb: Your production quality is legitimately great. You’ve got the tech side figured out. The streaming grind is real though, and you’re learning that internet speed was the easy part. Building an audience is the hard mode you didn’t see coming. But hey, at least your connection never drops mid-clutch.

The Grind: You’re investing in your dream and that’s admirable. That NBN plan with unlimited data is paying off because you’re uploading hours of content weekly. Keep grinding. The algorithm will smile upon you eventually. Probably.

The LAN Party Legends

Wi-Fi Setup: Trick question. You don’t use Wi-Fi. You’ve got a network switch with 8 ports and a box full of ethernet cables in various lengths. You know which mate’s house has the fastest internet (it’s Ben’s, it’s always Ben’s). You’ve got a group chat dedicated to planning the next LAN session.

Gaming Habits: Whatever works on LAN. Age of Empires 2? Yep. CS 1.6 for nostalgia? You bet. The latest co-op game? Already downloaded on everyone’s rig. You play together or not at all. Online matchmaking is for people without friendship.

Signature Move: “Remember when we played [game] for 14 hours straight?” Yes. Everyone remembers. It was legendary. You bring it up monthly. The group chat has 4,000 messages and 87% of them are planning the next LAN or reminiscing about the last one.

What Actually Happens: You’re living in 2008 and it’s beautiful. While everyone else is dealing with servers and ping and toxic randos, you’re in someone’s garage with your mates, trash-talking in person like civilized humans. Someone’s always on snack duty. Someone else brings the energy drinks. Ben provides the internet because his parents got NBN 2000 and don’t understand what they’re paying for.

The Truth Bomb: This is peak gaming and you know it. Your Wi-Fi habits don’t matter because you’re not using Wi-Fi. You’re using the power of friendship and local network connections. Your ping is measured in microseconds. Your banter is immaculate. Your setup might be ancient but your memories are timeless.

The Reality: Never change. You’ve figured out the cheat code to gaming. It’s not about graphics or internet speed. It’s about the crew. Though maybe chip in for Ben’s internet bill occasionally. His mum’s getting suspicious about the electricity usage.

The Cloud Gaming Believer

Wi-Fi Setup: You’ve convinced yourself Wi-Fi is fine for cloud gaming. You’re on NBN 50, but you should be on 500. You swear you can’t tell the difference between native and streamed. You absolutely can tell the difference, you’re just in denial. Your latency-sensitive gameplay says otherwise.

Gaming Habits: You play everything on GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, or PS Plus Premium. You don’t own a gaming PC or console, just a tablet or laptop. You tell people “hardware is dead” and “streaming is the future.” They nod politely while playing on their local hardware.

Signature Move: “The technology is almost there.” It’s your mantra. Every dropped frame, every compression artifact, every input delay of 80ms is just proof that we’re in the early adopter phase. The future will vindicate you. Probably. Maybe.

What Actually Happens: Sometimes it works great and you feel like a prophet. Other times your game looks like a YouTube video from 2007 and you’re getting clapped because your dodge button registered 200ms after you pressed it. You’re living in the future, but the future is laggy sometimes.

The Truth Bomb: Cloud gaming is genuinely cool technology. It’s also genuinely not ready for competitive gaming yet. You’re beta testing the future and calling it your main setup. Respect for the vision, but maybe admit that the execution needs work. Also, get on ethernet immediately. If you’re streaming your entire game, wireless is actively sabotaging you.

The Compromise: Keep believing in the dream, but also acknowledge reality. Cloud gaming is perfect for casual playthroughs and trying new games. It’s terrible for anything requiring frame-perfect inputs. Use the right tool for the job. And seriously, ethernet cable. Do it for yourself.

The “I’m at Uni” Survivor

Wi-Fi Setup: You’re on the campus network and it shows. You’re dealing with thousands of students all hammering the same infrastructure. The Wi-Fi is free, which means it’s worth exactly what you paid for it. You’ve learned which buildings have the best connection. The library basement is your sacred gaming spot.

Gaming Habits: You play when the network allows it, which is sporadic at best. You’ve become extremely good at turn-based games because they’re the only thing that works. You tried playing Valorant once at 7pm and got banned for suspected cheating because you were teleporting so badly.

Signature Move: Explaining to your ranked teammates that you’re on university Wi-Fi like it’s a valid excuse. It’s not a valid excuse. It’s an explanation. There’s a difference. They dodge queue when they see you anyway.

What Actually Happens: You’re in hell, but educational hell. You check ping before launching any game. Anything under 100ms is a good day. You’ve filed IT support tickets that go nowhere. You’ve tried using VPN to get around throttling, which made things worse. You’ve considered gaming at 3am when everyone’s asleep, and you’ve actually done it more than once.

The Truth Bomb: This is character building whether you want it or not. You’re learning patience. You’re learning to adapt. You’re learning that maybe university is for studying and gaming is for when you visit home. Just kidding, game on you legend. But maybe invest in mobile data for online games? Or find a mate who lives off-campus with proper internet.

The Light at the End: Graduation is coming. When you get your own place with your own MATE NBN plan with unlimited data and no network congestion from 10,000 other students, you’re going to ascend to your final form. Until then, we honor your struggle. Stay strong, campus warrior.

The Console Remote Player

Wi-FI Setup: Your PS5 or Xbox is on ethernet, which is smart. Your phone or laptop that you’re remote playing on? Pure Wi-Fi, and it’s the Wi-Fi from 2016. You’re trying to play God of War while sitting in your car in the air-con. You’re remote playing Elden Boss fights from your mate’s couch. You’re living dangerously.

Gaming Habits: You’ve convinced yourself this is convenient. You can play your games anywhere! Except anywhere means anywhere within Wi-Fi range where the stars align and the networking gods smile upon you. Spoiler: they rarely smile.

Signature Move: “Hold on, it’s buffering.” You’ve said this in the middle of boss fights. You’ve said this during cutscenes. You’ve said this while literally sitting in the same room as your console because you’re testing the feature for the 47th time.

What Actually Happens: When it works, it’s black magic and you feel like a tech wizard. When it doesn’t work, which is 60% of the time, you’re watching a slideshow of your character dying in real-time. You’ve died to lag more than actual enemies. Your “anywhere” is actually a very specific spot in your house where both the console and your device get perfect signal.

The Truth Bomb: Remote play is a cool party trick, not a main way to game. You’re adding layers of  Wi-Fi compression to an activity that already demands low latency. You’re basically playing games through two tin cans and string. It’s impressive that it works at all, honestly.

The Solution: If you’re serious about remote play, at least put your streaming device on 5GHz Wi-Fi and make sure you’re on a decent upload speed. NBN 100 or higher recommended because you’re uploading 1080p video from your console to the internet and back down to your device. That’s a lot. Also maybe just… sit at your console? Wild idea, I know.

The Truth We’re All Avoiding

Here’s the thing about gaming and internet: you can be any of these types, and that’s fine. We all started somewhere. Most of us were the “My Parents Control the Router” victim at some point. Some of us evolved into the Ethernet Cable Purist. Others discovered the joy of LAN parties and never looked back.

But there’s one universal truth that applies to everyone: your Wi-Fi habits directly impact your gaming experience, and pretending otherwise is just cope.

You can have the best gaming chair, the most expensive headset, the RGB everything, but if you’re on 1 bar of Wi-Fi and NBN 25 trying to play competitive shooters, you’re basically playing a different game than everyone else. And it’s a harder game. Much harder.

The Actual Advice (No Memes, Just Facts)

If you’re serious about gaming, here’s what actually matters:

1. Wired > Wireless (Always) Every millisecond counts. Wi-Fi adds latency. Ethernet doesn’t. Simple as that.

2. Speed Matters, But Ping Matters More NBN 1000 with 50ms ping is worse for gaming than NBN 100 with 10ms ping. Check your latency, not just your download speed.

3. Upload Speed is Underrated Especially if you stream, upload clips, or play games with peer-to-peer connections. Don’t sleep on upload bandwidth.

4. Unlimited Data is Non-Negotiable Game updates are massive. 50GB here, 100GB there. You need unlimited data or you’ll be rationing your gameplay like it’s 2005.

5. No Contract = Freedom to Upgrade Your gaming needs will change. New games, new habits, more housemates. Being locked into a 24-month contract on NBN 25 is a nightmare waiting to happen. Flexibility matters.

Look, MATE offers NBN plans from 25Mbps all the way up to 2000Mbps, all with unlimited data and no lock-in contracts. Whether you’re the casual “It’s Fine” Optimist who needs to upgrade to NBN 100, or you’re going full gigabit for the flex (and the downloads), having options is important.

Start with what makes sense for your gaming. If you’re only playing single-player games casually, NBN 50 or 100 is plenty. If you’re streaming, downloading constantly, and playing competitive games, look at 500 or higher. And if you decide you need more or less speed? Change it. No contracts, no stress.

Final Boss: Your Excuses

“I can’t run ethernet to my room.”

• Yes you can. They make flat ethernet cables that fit under doors and along walls. They’re like $20.

“Wi-Fi is good enough.”

• It’s really not for gaming. You’re handicapping yourself and blaming the game.

“My internet plan is fine.”

• Is it though? When’s the last time you ran a speed test during peak hours? Do it right now. We’ll wait.

“I can’t afford better internet.”

• You’re buying new games every month and you just bought a $400 headset, but internet is where you’re cutting costs? Make it make sense.

“My housemates would get mad if I upgraded.”

• They would literally benefit from better internet too. Pitch it to them. Share the cost. Everybody wins.

The Real Takeaway

Whatever type of gamer you are, own it. The Mobile Hotspot Warrior is valid. The Ethernet Cable Purist is valid. Even The “It’s Fine” Optimist is valid (though please, please get better internet).

But don’t lie to yourself about your setup. If you’re lagging, fix it. If your ping is terrible, upgrade your plan. If your Wi-Fi is spotty, get a mesh system or run ethernet.

Your gaming experience is too important to settle for mediocre internet. You’ve invested in your setup, your games, your skills. Don’t let your connection be the thing holding you back from that next rank, that perfect raid clear, or that clutch tournament win.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go restart my router because even writing this article made me paranoid about my connection.

GG, no re.

Find your perfect NBN gaming setup at MATE. Plans from 25Mbps to 2000Mbps, all with unlimited data and no contracts. Because your internet should level up with your gaming.

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