It’s always been useful in figuring out if you need to lead or trail a target more in a shooter, but all these modern shooters have taken that bit out of the scoreboard.
Checking out The Finals and for the first few games, I thought it used projectiles for the guns because I hit more often shooting ahead of moving targets, only to find they are indeed hitscan and hit better when actually looking directly at the dude when nobody is lagging.
It used to be the first thing you checked on 56k.
Hold tab for the score and stats, see if your pingtime was under 350, and crack on.
There was a certain art to playing as an HPB, especially when ISDN or leased lines were the domain of the rich and famous… and students.
These days, it seems that anything over 30 is… suboptimal, and only single digit pingtimes are good enough for competitive non-LAN play.
That said, before multiplayer was centralised, you checked the server pingtime before joining the server. Private servers seem to be a dying breed now.
Scrolling through servers on CS:Source trying to find one that wasn’t pinging harder than my anxiety… Those were the days.