But then again, they're probably just a bot.
PS: I had 7 ms ping* to a Q3 server at Stanford but I still sucked, unlike one of my college roommates who stuck to Q II and the railgun and was quite good.
* Verio/NTT 768kbps SDSL for $70/month in 2000-2001
From me to Australia should be ~37 milliseconds if we look at the speed of light, but it's closer to 175 milliseconds (meaning a ping of ~350). Nevermind the latency of being on wifi adds to that.
https://www.pingdom.com/blog/theoretical-vs-real-world-speed...
Ping is largely a product of distance and the speed (200km/s). It's not the distance a bird would fly but it can be close to it sometimes. And then the internet is a collection of separate networks that are not fully connected, so even if your target is in the next building your traffic might go through another bigger city as that is where the ISPs peer.
- Network conditions
- High port/traffic oversubscription ratio
- QoS/packet service classification, i.e., discriminatory tweaks that stop, slow, or speed up certain kinds of traffic contrary to the principles of net neutrality
- Packet forwarding rate compared to physical link speed
- Network gear, client, and server tuning and (mis)configuration
- Signal booster/repeater latency
- And too many more to enumerate exhaustively
As such, point-to-point local- and internet-spanning configuration troubleshooting and optimization is best decided empirically through repeated experimentation, sometimes assisted by netadmin tools when there is access to intermediary infrastructure.
In my case, I was 3-4 hops away and 34 mi / 55 km straight line distance, 110 / 177 driving, and most importantly roughly around 142 / 230 of cable distance approximately by mapping paths near highways in Google Earth. I doubt the network path CalREN/CENIC was used because it never showed up in hops in traceroute (although there was nothing preventing intermediaries from encapsulating and transiting flows across other protocols and networks), but it definitely went through PAIX.
* Per technology, zero-distance minimum delay is a function of the single maximum channel bit rate and data size + lower layer encapsulating protocol(s) overhead which was probably UDP + IP + 1 or more lower layers such as Ethernet, ATM, ISDN/frame relay BRI/PRI, DSL, or POTS modems. With a 1 Gbps link using a billion 1 Hz|baud channels, it's impossible to have a single bit packet latency lower than 1 second.
Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.
[1]: https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/quakeSourceNetWork.ph...
I'm still working three days a week, because it's not like I hated my job, but it was quite demanding at times.
I wrestled with the idea of just reducing hours for way too long. If you do too, just do it.
I have to sacrifice sleep for anything I want.
So need sophisticated logic to filter what needs to be updated in a given frame based on relevance, to fit within a packet,
And of course now you need cloud systems for matchmaking, telemetry, etc.