Am I joining foreign matches?

[Vandell]

I ask because my latency is currently 53~ ms when I ping google.com, but joining a game on Modern Warfare 2 results in me always having 1 red bar with everyone else having 3-4 green bars. What's going on with the lag!?

[Brusilov]

First of all I would not use the standard ping bars that are the default. The reason for this is that most players appear to have decent ping yet at times the game lags very badly.

There are two things you can do;

1) Manually edit your config_mp.cfg file to change two settings (this does not get you banned as I did this four months ago)

2) Use the MW2 Config utility to change it for you (I now use this utility - www.mw2confog.com).

These are the two lines to modify;

seta cg_ScoresPing_Interval "20"
seta cg_ScoresPing_MaxBars "10"

This will give you up to 10 ping bars each with an interval of 20

It looks like this (once changed): http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a184/simonkevnorris/Modern_Warfare2/COD_What_Are_They_Doing_2.jpg

I'd suggest using the MW2Config utility as it's easiest to use - also I'd recommend taking backups of your player files to protect yourself from amy bad effects from being hacked.

Anyway, it could be that you are playing with people far away. A lot depends upon when you play. If for instance you are playing from 2am to 6am there is a good chance that you won't be able to play with people in your own time zone.

The ping value you get is relative to the 'host' of the game - which can change from game to game.

The host should be the player with the highest number of green ping bars - it's usually stated that it's the player with all green ping bars but I've been in games where the highest number of bars was two or three (the game had really bad lag).