Yikes, I was a windy bastard right off the bat:
"A real quick lesson for those of you wondering about ping... Fibre cables will help slightly, but they won't fix the problem... Ever. Physics and the speed of light are where the real problem lies.
Light travels at roughly 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. That equates to roughly 3000 miles in 1/60th of a second. To ping something, a signal has to leave your computer, reach the host, and return the signal. So you can cut that 3000 mile number in half for the initial and return signals, turning it to 1500 miles. Add in slight delays in hardware, routing, processing, etc. and that number drops even further. Add in even a few more delays in the stall time between another player contacting the host being offset slightly from your own connection (say you're both half a heartbeat off kilter, add another 1/90th of a second to the communication time).
So, to reach Sega's magic number of 1/60th of a second response time, rough math tells me that in a perfect world with a perfect internet connection, I couldn't play anyone farther away from me than Denver or so (I'm in the Los Angeles area). Now do people really need that kind of response time? No, they really don't in most games, but fighters are their own special entity that rely on twitch gaming even more heavily than do shooters. In short, don't expect improved connections to help one damned bit in future online gaming. You could have a 256k DSL connection or a 10 MB T1 connection, the inherent problems of ping and online gaming are still there."
I was soooooooo tempted to edit that post right now and change it to "You're an idiot, Soriku." just for this thread.
Or check out my new webcomic: http://selfcentent.com/
