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Gamers in Hawaii Can't Compete... Because of Latency (theoutline.com)
Sometimes it's very important to know that the servers of the web services you're using are situated somewhere in your neighbourhood. And it's not just because of privacy concerns. The Outline has a story this week in which it talks about gamers in Hawaii who're increasingly finding it difficult to compete in global tournaments because the games' servers are almost every time placed overseas. From the article: [...] The game's server is in Chicago. That means if you live in the Midwest, your computer can communicate with it almost instantaneously. If you're in L.A., it can take roughly 60 milliseconds. But if you're in Hawaii, it can take 120 milliseconds, with some players reporting as long as 200 milliseconds. And at the highest echelons of competitive video gaming, milliseconds matter. [...] In League and other eSports games, playing on a high ping is a big disadvantage. The goal of the game is to set up defenses to protect your base while pushing forward to capture the enemy's base, and there are typically lightning bolts and fireballs and slime-spitting dragons shooting across the screen. Playing on a high ping means players may not see all of the action that happens in a game. Latency can really screw things up for a young eSports scene, said Zack Johnson, who runs gg Circuit, a global tournament provider for gaming centers like PC Gamerz. Players on the mainland sometimes say they don't want to compete against Hawaii players, he said, because the high ping throws things off.
What's the news here? It's well known that physical constraints make communication over larger distances take longer. If these gamers were serious about avoiding these delays, they'd move to Chicago (or wherever the servers they're communicating with are). Why is this even on Slashdot?!
go outside, nerds!!!
The game's server is in Chicago. That means if you live in the Midwest, your computer can communicate with it almost instantaneously. If you're in L.A., it can take roughly 60 milliseconds. But if you're in Hawaii, it can take 120 milliseconds
On the plus side, they don't live in Chicago.
I would take latency, sandy beaches, perfect weather and bikini clad women over snow and death by homicide.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
San Kennison has a rant about this type of thing, except it deals with food.
In other sports, runners who live at sea-level are disadvantaged in competition against runners who live high up in the mountains.
The life of athletes is full of unfairness.
Nevermind gaming competitions, go outside and enjoy some goddamned sunlight!
This, from an ex-avid fan of eSports.
I tend to rant.
If I'm living in Hawaii the absolute last thing I'm doing is playing video games. I'd be more concerned about rising ocean levels thanks to global climate change.
Holy fuck.
Someone is in Hawaii and they elect to stay inside playing games???
I tell you what...you come here and stay in my suburban home in the states with a high speed connection that will allow you to pwn everyone in the game, and I'll stay in your home in Hawaii, surf, scuba, hike, and lay out on the beach.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Other reasons for developing the necessary technology would be resources (most of Earths heavy elements have long sunk below the crust) and harvesiting geothermal energy.
Any decent game will have lag compensation, so the server allows the player's reaction to (approximately) what they saw on their screen at the time they saw it to apply.
For example, let's say two players shoot a killing shot at each other at exactly the same time. With a typical game the 200 ping player's action would be delayed enough for a low-ping player to kill before the server receives the "shoot" action from the high ping player. The high ping player fires at the other guy who takes no damage and the game eventually receives the "you died" message (in reality, the high ping player never fired since he died first). With lag compensation, the server can see the player with high ping fired when he was still alive, according to his lag, and can do damage to the low-ping player, resulting in both players killing eac other. In some cases such systems can favor high-ping players, as low-ping players will see side effects such as bullets seeming to bend around corners to hit them (as the high-ping player hit them before they rounded the corner, from their point of view), while low-ping players will see less benefits from lag compensation themselves. But overall things are more fair than without lag compensation I think ,and really weird lag compensation side effects are thankfully rare.
they just need to play turn based games.
If you're looking for a break down of what pings look like globally, we've got the data: http://wondernetwork.com/pings
Or for Honolulu specifically: https://wondernetwork.com/ping... (101ms to Chicago)
paul reinheimer
Paradise ain't everything
But you're still in Hawaii and he's still in Detroit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Man, I feel for you, living in Hawaii and suffering though long latency when you play online games. I guess you cannot surf every day of your life and surfing the web is all frustration because it takes too long....Sorry but you cannot break the laws of physics...
Next you are going to be complaining about the UV exposure rates and the price of gasoline, I know, life is hard and not fair. You have it really bad there...Maybe we can come up with a way to change the value of "c"...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I think as you go east in Montana like Bozeman the speeds are worse with Charter, and they throttle, something Hawaii Telecom (Fiber) does not. Soo overall I have lived in Waikiki and Kailua and the speeds are way higher than I have received living in Montana. Maybe not missoula but in Bozeman the internet really sucks.
Just do it like the jockeys do it, the lighter ones get some lead to carry.
Sports? Good grief, computer gaming is not "sports" by any stretch of the imagination. The only reason sponsors and cheerleaders try to equate it to real sports is because real sports has a large stream of money flowing through it.
That should make it fair for everyone
Ahhh, the return of the LPB -- the Low Ping Bastard from Quake days.
There's a solution to this, 1-and-1 home and away contests, which people regularly did for intercontinental matches.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Ver Peliculas Subtituladas en HD Online Gratis, sin plugins, los ultimos estrenos en HD, la mejor calidad de imagen y sonido (HD). PelisPedia.Tv. http://www.pelispedia.mx/
As long as it's fast enough to cripple idiotic bills from orange Hitler by some judge, it's fast enough for me.
And that openly-stated, closed-minded, over-the-top, bald-faced hate is just one reason why it's President Trump.
But you'll never understand, will you? You're so self-righteous - everyone who disagrees with you is a "hater" or a "fascist". But I bet you don't even understand "free speech", do you? Kinda ironic from someone calling others "intolerant" and "Hitler".
Makes me wonder if you can tie your own shoes.
Surfers in Denver can't compete either, and neither can skiers in Phoenix!
Another place you can't compete as a gamer is *most places in the United States*. In order to compete in a latency-relevant game online, you pretty much need to be in one of several major metropolitan areas. Because those areas are population dense, they serve plenty of people. But it doesn't take anyone a very far car trip to get somewhere that you can end up with no broadband.
The real reason Hawai'i, with pretty high population per land, is screwed, is because the servers are never really in Hawai'i either. But try to play competitive games with folks in Europe, or Asia- either you end up with a crappy ping, or they do. If a server set is in Chicago, then it effectively serves most of the US and Canada, but it won't help Tokyo or Berlin.
It's not particularly surprising, and I doubt that anything will change until the infrastructure does. We've already seen a lot of gaming get redesigned around the internet's latency (plenty of instant-fire guns, plenty of server-side driven movements of environment, not many projectile weapons that are barely dodgeable or physics effects that players originate and share), favoring the types of games that can be played over tens of milliseconds instead of milliseconds or less, and the types of games that require limited data from the server to the client. The semi-famous article about X-Wing versus TIE Fighter being designed for a reasonably less capable internet ( http://www.gamasutra.com/view/... ) might have aged a bit on its tech requirements, but remains relevant when pointing out how the internet already fundamentally limits games.
Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second and Earth has a circumference of 40,075,000 meters. Unfortunately, light is impeded to about 66% it's original speed when traveling through glass which includes fiber.
Assuming you only have to travel a quart of the way to connect to Hawaii (check a map!), that's a 20,037,500 meter round trip.;
20,037,500 / (299,792,458 * 2/3) = 0.10025685836 seconds
Add to that the response times of routers and you got yourself a 120ms ping.
Until we get faster than light communications, you're SOL if you are half a world away... or even a quarter.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Use Geo-sync satellites as the communication path. Everybody gets a level playing field. Like in society where there's imbalance, we always have to dumb down the solution to the lowest common denominator.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Like Delaware
Answer: Play games in Hawaii that don't require twitch reflexes and latency requirements.
It's unfair to Iowans that Hawaii has oceans and big waves. I tried surfing on top of the corn fields, but it's not the same.
It's funny how people confuse internet speed (which is measured in time) vs throughput (measured in bits). I'd FAR rather pay comcrap for QoS of my packets to the border of their network rather than more throughput.
That's what you git for losing O's birth certificate!
Table-ized A.I.
I'm amazed that a gamer sitting on an island in the Pacific could unilaterally block a tournament.
For an actual tournament with significant money on the table, if they need that improved ping they'll simply have to travel to attain it.
You do realize that describes a tiny minority of the people who actually play any given game, right? Most people just want to play and compete with their "friends". Less fun to do that if you are experiencing a significant handicap even for casual play.
Gets worst pings than 120 ms. And it has more to do with the ISP than the speed of light.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You're so self-righteous - everyone who disagrees with you is a "hater" or a "fascist".
Funny, coming from a group that calls everyone a "cuck".
Instead of homicide, you just have to deal with ridiculous amounts of homeless people that make Hawaii resemble a third world country, sleeping on sidewalks, defecating and peeing everywhere.
I've been to Hawaii a number of times and not in the tourist trap parts either. Doesn't remotely fit my anecdotal observations. There are more homeless people in Chicago than in Hawaii.
What about gamers who live in Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, Africa and have to contact US based servers? They also have latency.
They can call it the coconut network, with speeds up to ten coconuts a second!
In other sports, runners who live at sea-level are disadvantaged in competition against runners who live high up in the mountains.
Actually not true. High altitude training is most effective when you aren't at high altitude all the time. It's the people who can train at altitude for periods of time and then return to low altitudes that see the best results.
The life of athletes is full of unfairness.
Which has what exactly to do with this conversation? I have mad respect for top gamers but they aren't athletes in any widely accepted use of the word.
When I lived in HNL a number of years ago, HI was considered to have fastest IP in the US, unless the main HNL-SFO Pacific Undersea Cable went offline. The backup cable or switching to SATCOM was noticeably slower until the main cable was brought back online. Upon moving to the US mainland, IP was noticably slower. Gamers experiencing latency should ask their ISP which undersea cable is being used or if its switched to SATCOM.
Having lowest latency Chicago just passed 1,000 gun shot victims this year makes me wonder is there correlation or causation?
It sounds like these people are trying to use global game servers instead of setting up their own game servers.
Don't do that.
Oh, you don't have a choice? Hmm.. I normally advocate that it doesn't necessarily suck for games to be proprietary. Other than the security risks (strike one, but you're not out; I don't think the insecurity is necessarily a deal-killer), most of the disadvantages of proprietary software don't really apply to games, because you don't get dependent on them (especially with other things integrating with them), so if you suddenly completely lose a game, it's not so bad. If you can't maintain a game, so what?
But nevertheless, this looks like a reason to eschew games that don't let you set up your own server. And you know that problem is going to be limited exclusively to proprietary games. So... strike two.
competitive video gaming should have local lan play at the very least for big events or some kind of system to make it fair over all pings.
Out of curiosity, how would you define 'sports', and what is it about, say, competitive LoL or StarCraft that doesn't meet that definition?
The answer is fairly straightforward though perhaps unsatisfyingly ambiguous. If you say you play sports to someone, nobody is going to ask which computer game you play. They are going to be thinking something involving gross motor skills 99.9999% of the time. Ergo it isn't a sport under commonly accepted uses of the term. That might change in time but ask 100 people today if computer gaming is a sport and the answer will overwhelmingly be no. QED it isn't a sport.
If you want to get pedantic about definitions you can make all sorts of activities that aren't widely regarded as sports fit a given definition but I think that serves little purpose. Poker is on ESPN but is it a sport? Few would say so. That's not to say poker or computer games aren't fully deserving of respect but calling them a sport is something most people will not agree with. So called eSports are their own thing but saying they are sports a bit of appropriation of a term that doesn't fit. Like how soy milk is marketed as "milk" when in fact it is actually a type of juice. It conflates two concepts in order to profit from the confusion. Getting overly pedantic about the definitions merely leads to pointless arguments. If you want to call competitive StarCraft a "sport" I'm not going to call you foolish and I get what you are saying but I still don't think of it as a sport and neither will most other people.
Of course there are differences between even the "traditional" sports. If you watch the Olympics you'll see two major categories. There are competitions with objective criteria (i.e. track) and those with subjective criteria (i.e. gymnastics). The former determines a winner through objectively measurable criteria such as who can run a course in the least amount of time. The later typically judges aesthetics and in practical terms are simply dance competitions. Nothing wrong with either one but in some important ways they aren't quite the same thing and one could argue they might be deserving of different labels.
I would not move to Hawaii to play video games.
Get out and surf. Sheesh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
eSports leagues demand local lan only / maybe even no internet needed. What about if some must be online DRM trips up in the middle of an match??
late night an forced IPS update takes you off line for a few min?
Network outage??
Will an leagues shell out $1000+ mo per site for an fiber link with an SLA and an 2-3 year contract?
Outrageous. Some gamer on some island in the Pacific thinks they should have good internet!
why one server (farm) for the usa? the usa is big and has quite a few big pop areas where servers should be.
Democrat run cities seem to be the worst, you can check the stats on that one.
Let's see...San Francisco, median household income: $78,378. Los Angeles, $55,909. Chicago? $63,153. Detroit? $26,095. New York City (Home of the President, Donald Trump), $50,711. Looks like your examples are mostly doing well. The only one that's significantly below average is what, Detroit?
So you've got one. Except Detroit is in Michigan. A state run by Republicans for years. Why haven't they fixed any of that city's problems? Why haven't they done what they did for Flint...oh wait, that wasn't a good thing.
Besides, you want to know what's done about the Homeless? Bus tickets. Out of sight, out of mind.
Of course, this has been a problem for decades problem for decades, but you're too busy blaming Democrats, as usual for yourself, but then...why can you offer no solutions, no miracles in your partisan bastions of prosperity?
Oh wait, you think because you can rail about a few high-profile cities, you think nobody has driven through rural Mississippi and seen the abject poverty there.
And you know what? A lot of those homeless are veterans. Maybe you're just not patriotic enough?
esports union can help fix this and it can give the players some say over what the people running the events do.
Try playing games from the southern tip of Africa. Closest LoL server starts at 160ms, that's with perfect conditions and you don't have a sucky ISP and your exchange isn't congested and you live close to the 2 major centres with routes out of Africa and you are being routed via the left side of Africa and not the right.
It seems some US citizens are only realising (yeah, notice the non-US spelling) now that sometimes the world isn't just the US.
Umm, how is this 'news'? It's self-evident, or have we failed to even school a generation on the fact that the speed of light is a constant?
We referred to folks as LPB's - Low Ping Bastards, who were able to dominate a match because of their proximity to the server.
In related news, people in rural areas can't get cheap/fast internet either. Maybe if fast internet is an important part of your life, you should MOOOOOOVE to an appropriate location. I know people who moved to Arizona then moved back to Wisconsin because it was too hot there. Some people are just that fucking stupid.
correlation of population density.
Lower latency means it's harder to dodge the bullets.
#DeleteChrome
Seriously? Maybe they should just grow up and find an adult hobby instead of complaining.
*jumping around*
Boom! Headshot!
I can dance all day!
ping latency. Athletes move to train, so if there's enough money on the table people will move I guess.
i used to hold my own on the demon uk quake 2 and 3 servers on dialup just fine with like 400ms pings from northern indiana >_> filthy casuals
FWIW, Detroit has had 100% democratic mayors since 1962....
Michigan has about 50-50 democrat vs republican governors in the same time period...
Similarly, Chicago has had 100% democratic mayors since 1931... and the governor of Illinois have been about 50-50 split.
Although the median income is not bad in Chicago, the crime rate is significantly above average. One might conclude from this that democrats are apparently really good at increasing the divide between the haves and the have-nots, which is probably not the conclusion that you might expect...
Detroit, in addition to having a low median income, has the second highest homicide rate in the nation second only to St Louis Missouri which has also had a democratic mayors since 1949 and a median income of $52,343...
Why don't the local ISP's host game servers ? :) Now a low latency cable connection is the standard and things are even for most of us.
Things like that can really make a service stand out and playing against local competition at low ping is always more fun. I remember when DSL first became a thing and some friends of mine in Washington state had a T1 and I finally got a decent connection via a close DSL line vs my 56k modem. Life was good then
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
So California didn't have the "Govenator" for years? Illinois doesn't have a republican governor right now? And for New York? The last three governors there have had their fare share of controversy. They have had a mix of mayors. So to pin anything on one side is biased at best and a down right stupid observation. As far as Detroit goes, Democratic leadership had a LARGE hand in what is wrong with Detroit. One of it's former mayors is still in prison and last time I checked he was a democrat. He had even spoke at the 2004 democratic national convention. He is also involved in Flint's water cost issues that caused them to switch water sources and led to using lead contaminated water. The Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright even hired Sam Riddle, a democrat and Detroit official under Kilpatrick, as a consultant on Flint water permits THAT then led to Wright being a FBI informant, recording conversations with Riddle to assist in prosecuting ending in 37 months of prison time for Riddle on racketeering, among other things. That doesn't even bring in the other in the bid rigging scams that pushed Flint in to bankruptcy. Not sure I believe him but Kilpatrick said from his prison cell that former governor Jenifer Granholm knew all about Flint's toxic water. I like how people a thousand miles away bring up Detroit and Flint like they know what's going on and them blame people who are in office now or quote the average income only the inner city of Detroit, ignoring that the population around Detroit, even if average with the inner city included is almost double what you listed.
People like to cheat. As a result, competitive online games have had to use a client-server model where a server holds a Truth world state and transmits it to the clients at regular intervals. The clients then reconstruct that (slightly delayed) Truth state as best they can, allow each player to send an action (e.g. fire at location xyz) back to the server. The server then evaluates if the action results in a hit. Since all decisions are made by the server, people can't hack their client to cheat (other than the human-computer interface - e.g. aimbots).
My first job out of grad school was working on multi-user networked simulators for the DoD. We'd take what were normally single-user sims, modify them to report their state on the network, allowing multiple sims to operate together in the same virtual environment. Once users started shooting at each other, we ran into the latency issue. But since we trusted our clients (a pilot isn't going to hack his F-16 sim to get an advantage by cheating), we didn't have to rely on a server. In fact there was no server. Each client knew the Truth state of the entity it was simulating and reported it over the network Hits were determined by the client doing the shooting - if you can see the target on your client, you take a shot, and your client calculates if it was a hit. (For guided munitions, the munition acts as a separate entity, and the target determines if it hits since the "attack" happens local to that client.) Latency becomes a non-issue because things like hits are all determined locally.
If you can trust the other players in the game, then there's no need for a server which controls the Truth state for the game world. Time-sensitive interactions can be calculated on the appropriate client, resulting in almost no latency. Players might complain about delayed actions - e.g. sticking your head up from behind cover to take a peek, ducking back down, then getting killed. At first glance that seems unfair - the other player was able to shoot you while you were behind cover. But only the consequences are delayed, not the actions which produced those consequences. On the other player's screen, he saw your head pop up and killed you before you were able to duck down. Your head was exposed for the same amount of time on both computers, so it was a fair shot. It's just that your computer didn't know the other player had taken a shot before it allowed you to duck down.
"And it's not just because of privacy concerns."
What is meant by this?
So pickup hearthstone or a lockstep RTS like Dawn of War or Startcraft.
You're aware that state and city govs are distinct and the states typically don't interfere with city management, correct?
Democrat run cities seem to be the worst, you can check the stats on that one.
San Diego, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Jose, Charlotte all have Democrat Mayors they seem to be doing well.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
San Diego is a republican stronghold......
Good-bye
Did the big bad lag monster kill the newbie? Tough, been fighting that guy since the early 90's back on the MUDS.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
SF, LA, Chicago, Detroit, NYC, all full to the brim with ridiculous amounts of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks
Democrat run cities seem to be the worst, you can check the stats on that one.
You hypothesis : democrats causes homeless people to run amok (democrats run the cities like shit and let such homeless people happen in the open, instead of ... huh.. rounding them all and throwing them into prison ?)
My bat-shit crazy hypothesis :
Cities with the most homeless people, make their inhabitants more aware of the human misery, which in turn encourages the population to vote for democrat candidate, the closest you have in the US to a socialist party who'll try to spend money on health (specially mental health) and other such social program which might help the homeless people's problems ?
(in other words: exposure to homeless people cause population to vote less far-right)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You Americans are such pussies, you want to try playing an online game from New Zealand if you want to know what lag is.
We took pictures and everything. Readers Digest had a story about it.
Kids these days, 120 ms latency unplayable LOL!
When I first started playing Quake over the Internet 200 - 320 ms latency was the norm. There people in college on T1's or T3's could whoop your ass. Hence QualeWorld which helped but you still had the anticipate what your opponent was going to do and shoot first.
Not a cure all to be sure, especially among slashdotters, but a start would be to level the laying field somewhat by building in delays based on location. If the server is in Chicago, delay all transmissions to/from the Chicago area by 200 milliseconds so those in Hawaii, tired of bikinis and surf, are on equal footing.
Some stock exchanges do basically the same thing by using extra miles of wire to connect to a closer market.
You're aware that state and city govs are distinct and the states typically don't interfere with city management, correct?
Maybe on Bizarro Earth, on this planet, State governments are sovereign, and control a lot of what lesser governments are allowed to do. From the Neighborhood Association to the County, and Beyond.
Just in Michigan alone, we have the Emergency Managers.
And then there are the Federal policies. Or lack thereof. That whole mortgage crisis was really beyond the city.
He is also involved in Flint's water cost issues that caused them to switch water sources and led to using lead contaminated water.
The water supply wasn't lead contaminated, it was acidic, which caused the pipes (made of lead) to corrode as it was delivered.
What they failed to do was treat the water properly so that wouldn't happen, which is different from a source being lead contaminated.
It is important to understand the problem.
FWIW, Detroit has had 100% democratic mayors since 1962....
Michigan has about 50-50 democrat vs republican governors in the same time period...
Similarly, Chicago has had 100% democratic mayors since 1931... and the governor of Illinois have been about 50-50 split.
So what you're saying is, partisan attributions are really not determinate. Unless you think a Mayor outranks a governor for setting policy.
Especially if you include Presidents at the Federal level.
Although the median income is not bad in Chicago, the crime rate is significantly above average. One might conclude from this that democrats are apparently really good at increasing the divide between the haves and the have-nots, which is probably not the conclusion that you might expect...
Sure, if you like coming to conclusions on scanty evidence. And to be honest, I do expect that, it is a common refrain from the right. S.petry has said it numerous times.
Of course, you might also conclude that the Chicago PD is a bastion of racism and bigotry, if you were the DOJ. They did do a report. Jeff Sessions might not read it, but you can.
It is enlightening.
Detroit, in addition to having a low median income, has the second highest homicide rate in the nation second only to St Louis Missouri which has also had a democratic mayors since 1949 and a median income of $52,343...
And yet both are half of what they were at their peak. Which was over two decades ago. I do wonder why people like yourself never mention how the crime numbers have been steadilyâ dropping. Nationwide.
Though the DOJ also had a report on police departments in St. Louis. Ferguson did not do well at all.
Another thing to look at, huh?
Compared to Seattle, SF, LA, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, NYC, Milwaukee, New Orleans, and I could make this list go on and on for hell holes.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
(trolling)
If we in oz has gotten our nation-wide optic fiber NBN like the labor party had promised, our ping times would be much more better then the 250+ms we're getting to the US currently. Unfortunately, some people don't understand the internet, and voted for corrupt right-wing government who put in crusty old copper cable vdsl network. now we only get 100mbit/s link to our ISPs and our ping times to the US are no beter then they were!!!
Impeach Malcolm turnbull for this atrocious mess.
I say this all the time; "Games are not sports until they are regulated like sports".
I'm offering the same deal, but plan to spend plenty of time inside playing single player games.
Ok, so it's like the SCOTUS and pornography; you'll know it when you see it.
Sort of but really it's more of a consensus thing. There is debate about it but by and large the dividing line in most people's heads between sports and games seems to be the involvement of gross motor skills and manipulation of physical objects and/or other people. It's not clear to me that we would need to be dogmatic about it but that seems to be where the consensus about it lies at the moment. I don't see any principled reason why there couldn't be a sport involving gross motor skills centered around a computer. There just don't happen to be a lot of them currently. But I think few people would say that Starcraft or the like involve meaningful gross motor skills and it certainly doesn't involve manipulating anything tangible. Like most bits of language things mean what they are accepted to mean by consensus. The consensus might change but for now it seems pretty clear that few people think computer games are accurately described as a "sport". Whether this is a useful distinction is a separate question which I leave to others.
So, the followup question would be: you have teams of competitive StarCraft players who train in amounts and methods very similar to atheletes, and who play for cash prizes, sponsorship deals, and what not; what term would you say applies?
What's wrong with "gaming" or "professional gaming" if money is involved? They seem to want to use the word "sport" to eliminate stigma (real or perceived) around the activity but I see nothing wrong with simply being proud of it being a game and owning the term. Kind of like how geek and nerd don't carry the stigma they once did. I certainly like to play games and I don't feel any stigma in calling them games.
And if you are a pro surfer, living in Des Moines won't work too well. There is no story here.
If big-gaming hadn't killed off self-hosted dedicated servers then we wouldn't have this problem because people in isolated regions (e.g. Hawaii, sub-Saharan Africa) could spawn their own servers.
Hawaii is freaking 2000 miles from the mainland. No shit there is latency!
WTF
Get off my lawn!
The concept: the server measures the ping time to each contestant. It then adds delays when it processes packets from the people with shorter ping times so that the actual time for each contestant is equal. (It might be easier to implement by putting a ping equalization server between the internet connection and the server that actually runs the game.) Now all the players are on an equal footing, at least so far as internet delays are concerned. They can still gain some advantage with faster computers and high refresh rate monitors, but those tweaks are available to everybody.
Of course, some of the gamers in Chicago won't want to play because they enjoy being more equal than others. Application of social pressure might be necessary. "What's wrong, Chicago gamer? Chicken?"