The meaning of ping in computer terms is very much like that used by sonar operators. It is a measure of round trip time to target. You send out a ping to a machine and measure how long it takes that packet of data to arrive back on your machine.
Ping times can be affected by many factors including network latency, hops to target, etc. Obviously, the more "hops" a packet has to make to reach its destination, the higher the ping time will become. So, if your machine is on a private network it will inherently have a higher ping than a similarly configured machine with a direct connection.
The symptoms of a "bad ping" are that you do not send and receive packets as fast as the guy with a "good ping". So, what you see on your monitor will not be what he sees. As an example, you may see your opponent at 800 behind you, while he sees you as 450 in front of him.
Disco's and warping are not so much a function of bad ping, but of packet loss. Aces High utilizes a network protocol called UDP. This is basically a fire-and-forget method of sending data. There is no guarantee of arrival at a destination of the packet that was sent. So, if you send out a bunch of packets to the Aces High servers, but they only receive and process a portion of them, you will experience warping. Disco's occur when you and the AH servers cannot communicate with each other for a given amount of time. AH maintains connections via TCP/IP traffic. This differs from UDP in that it IS guaranteed. I send a packet to you, I expect a response back. If I do not get a response, I assume that you are unreachable and terminate the connection.
You can monitor the activity of your connection with software tools. A good one is Ping Plotter. This will give you a visual display of the route a packet takes from your computer to a destination and where the bottlenecks are. It will also display any packet loss that occurs.
I hope this helps.
