Originally Posted by Electrofreak
This is true, less hops means less opportunity for you to hit some overworked WAN link or device where your packet is going to be delayed. But they're not the same thing.
You could have 200 ms ping time but if you don't have any jitter your game will be reasonably good assuming the algorithms used to calculate your position, bearing etc are accurate. I can't speak to that since I'm not a game programmer but I've read about it and apparently it's pretty high tech stuff.
Think of it this way. A constant stream of positional data is going from your PC to a server. The server keeps track of the latency on the connection and takes that into account when a packet from a shooter arrives saying it's fired a shot at you. It does a whole bunch of maths to determine where the shooter was at the time the trigger was pulled and where the target was and decide if the hit happened.
If the stream of data is constant, it doesn't really matter how much delay is involved. But if the data comes in via fits and spurts, there's a lot of guesswork left to the server to estimate where you were and fill in the gaps.
That produces those "WTF man I totally shot him" moments.
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Even with hit prediction coding though, you still run into problems when playing at a high ping or like one layman put it here "wall hacks" there's also issues with kill packets arriving after other peoples even though yours was really first.
I also imagine there willbe still all sorts of issues with getting in vehicles, implant activation or reloading since that will require server authorisation, again putting people with a higher ping at a disadvantage.