L - Latency

Why is it that over the past 10 years many things have changed, but latency still plays such a large role in the success of most online games. Those with lower pings consistently do better and find themselves at a huge advantage. In several more modern games they are even more unbalanced (because they are hosting the game) and make it impossible to have any sort of real competition via the game.

I thought surely programmers and providers could get past this sort of barrier and allow the game to compensate better (like games did almost 15 years ago) or the servers and providers could hammer out some of the issues to even out pings. The difference between 160 and 60 are insane. The difference between 30 and 60 is pretty big, too. It has been a problem for a long time, but with so many people on high speed internet the gap has closed a little, but not by enough.

Development left behind the thought of packet smoothing, apparently. Years ago, the original FPS games that helped kick off this revolution, had very good ping adjustments. Things updated more quickly. Everyone now and then you'd get some jumpiness, but everything evened out pretty well and the hitboxes worked like a charm. Somehow we have made countless jumps in power and design, but failed to fix this issue? Why? LPBs and HPBs are a thing of the past, yet latency is even more important today. It's sad.

It must have something to do with console gamers, because a lot of the games today are ports. Consoles must handle the packets differently or something, I'm not quite sure. All I know is I am looking forward to a day when everything is so fast that we don't even sweat a ping and everyone is in single-digits.