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Dealing With Fairness and Balance In Video Games
MarkN writes "Video games are subject to a number of balance issues from which traditional games have largely stayed free. It can be hard finding players of comparable skill-level to create even match-ups, diverse gameplay options can quickly become irrelevant if someone finds a broken feature that beats everything else, and some online games make your ability to play competitively a question of how much time and money you've invested in a game, rather than the skill you possess. In this article, I talk about some of the issues relating to fairness and balance in games, in terms of the factors and strategies under the player's control, the game's role in potentially handicapping players, and the role a community of gamers plays in setting standards for how games are to be played. What are your thoughts on managing a 'fair and balanced' gaming experience?"
You obviously haven't played online much. The important thing here is latency, not throughput. Any latency under 80ms is more than playable, and a 768k DSL line is more than capable of that. Hell, with fastpath I used to hit ~30ms on a 1M line.
Just use a server that's in the same country instead of halfway around the world.