20 years ago we were playing with lower latencies than a typical modern AAA online game today. People simply played servers that were actually local - their co

20 years ago we were playing with lower latencies than a typical modern AAA online game today. People simply played servers that were actually local - their country or even neighborhood. You could do have a constant 15ms ping on quake easily for a public server, or sub 5ms if it was friends from same uni or similar network. Modern AAA just puts it in "Europe West" cloud region and is done, which means realistically 50ms+ for everyone (35ms being great result) and constant raging because of huge peakers advantage and mechanisms compensating that. Servers were truly were people were. Partially because server software were available for the players to selfhost. Large centralized modern approach was supposed to solve many things like cheating on amateur servers but that was a failed promise.