[Spartacus]

Didn't really understood how networking/latencies/ping/servers worked until Rival's post a year back.

I have an average of 200ms latency on the servers. Layman terms, i'm supposed to be viewing what's happening "real-time" in the game at about 150 to 170 ms later than what the local players of where the server(with low latency) is located is viewing.

However, there is only a few players with 30 to 40+ latency who managed to take advantage of my situation.

Honestly, you have a huge advantage over those with high latencies.

How does latencies affect gameplay?

The ever popular Physics 101 experiment, "The Ruler Drop" consistently shows that human reaction time is about a tenth of a second. Pings above 100ms are generally going to be noticeable. The maximum ping I can tolerate in an FPS is 150, although in L4D I will go up to 250 since it is generally pretty laggy anyway, plus their prediction scheme is pretty good. Let them know that their lag isn't all that matters either, too. 100ms lag just to ping the main infrastructure will translate to an unacceptable amount of lag when interacting with anything outside your state (or country, in Europe). Prediction schemes (heuristic methods of compensating for lag) tend to break down beyond 200ms, since the frequency of paradoxes and the time it takes to respond to them is too great. Saying ping is unimportant to gaming is like saying bandwidth is unimportant to video streaming. It is, in fact, the only thing that matters (when bandwidth is the limiting factor, game servers/clients compensate by increasing their ping so they can get the whole frame). You can use me as a credible source too; I am currently programming for Eternal Silence, a mod for HL2 (and the only mod with lag-compensated vehicle motion).

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=47869