I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.
I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.
Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.
I agree about the big comercial servers/games. The community driven servers are often better latency, e.g. I got 7ms in this game, the same server was 60ms when gaming through the VPN and enterprise proxy.
I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.
I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.
Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.