PS2 confirmed to only have servers in one area of USA

[kaffis]

Electrofreak, it's really not worth talking networking nitty gritty to the masses.

Tell them you are a packet-mancer, and that the arcane wizardry of netcode is beyond their ken to understand. The best way to judge the quality of the netcode and their respective connections to the server is not through the ping tool, but rather through gameplay experience in either beta and/or the final FREE game.

At the very least, you won't get a *smaller* audience willing to listen to your message that way. Half the time, trying to educate people about the definitions, effects, and differences between latency, jitter, bandwidth, TCP vs. UDP, protocol overhead, error detection and correction, prediction code, and the like is just arming their ignorance by giving them enough detail to think that their 5-minute crash course in term definitions gives them the whole picture.