No problem. Your example (Why excuse? Nothing wrong with your example!) may have several explanations:

- You are quite close to California; well, a lot closer than I am to the US! That fact, coupled with the total bandwidth that North America, and especially the US have, will give you the average 40ms pings.

- The people on that server could be friends that live nearby; they may even be playing in the same location (LAN Cafe, LAN party), and probably through the same ISP, so it's no wonder they achieve those insanely low pings. Next time, check if those guys are part of a clan or something like that (easily identifiable by their telltale server names like "==The_Wolf_Clan==") and if you can, you can always text them in-game to find out (although they may be more busy fragging your laggy @$$ to reply! )

As for the 8-20ms, I think that you'd have no problem with lag at all, since (if my sucky-sucky math skills don't fail me yet again) 8ms = 1/125th of a second, which is higher than most people's framerates are anyhow.

I don't know about DOA4 (never played it online) but again, if those vast distances are to be accounted for, it won't matter if players connect directly; the packets will still take their precious time to travel to its destination, and 0ms pings are a pipe dream (or wet dream for "geographically challenged" people like myself)... 

 The choice was made BEFORE the PS3 version went on sale. So sales had nothing to do with that.

I am pretty sure Tekken is gonna have online this time, I can't be 100 percent but I'm pretty sure it will. Don't compare the needs of VF5 to the needs of Tekken it's not the same at all, VF5 is somewhere else altogether, you can say anything about which game is better or funner, but when it comes to precise pinpoint movements, VF is much more fine tuned and that is purposely so.

Tekken isn't targetting the same crowd as VF does anyway, it's more like DOA... 

Thing is, 90% of fighting game fans outside of Japan don't give a damn about Virtua Fighter. Gamers in the US and Europe care a lot more about Tekken and Soul Calibur when it comes to 3D fighting games.

 As for not having online play, the frame-sensitive nature of the game has already been brought up, but since most of VF's money is made in arcades, Sega and AM2 aren't going to put much thought into the online aspect.

VF5... Can you really polish a turd?

 The popularity of Tekken in the west is another reason why I am sure there will be online for Tekken 6 and I think it's manageable. I honestly don't think online for Virtua Fighter would be good with the way internet connections are right now...

^^^

I'm sure it will, there's no doubt about it.

Online play would also serve to further its popularity because arcades have really declined in N. America and Europe.

Tekken is just about as frame oriented based game as VF.  If VF isnt managable neither is tekken. 

DOA on the other hand is designed and tuned for online-lag play so thats a bit different.

Either way its always better to have a online play option than no online play.  It shouldnt hurt consumer players.

What it can possibly hurt is the arcade income and the arcade players.  Which is nearly dead outside of Japan and even in Japan, fighting games are already a niche group. 

Thats ok, cause VF sucks anyway. Tekken is much better.

ms stands for millisecond, 1 thousanth of a second So 50 ms would be 0.05 second, thats fast enough for any game, including VF or Tekken. The problem is that most users will average between 150 - 300 ms. Being a quarter of a second slower then your opponnent does make a drastic difference, just ask any Halo/Gears of War player