I've been playing Black Ops Multiplayer for about a week now, and something's been annoying me for a while. I can never find any servers with ping lower than 180. Ever!
I live in Brazil, and there are dozens of servers available in my country, but all of them are above 180 ping for me. It's so bad that sometimes I get USA and Canadian servers show up above the Brazilian ones on the browser. Other people in these servers don't have the same problem, so I think it's not an issue with the servers. But I've never had this problem with other online games before (ping < 100), so I don't think it's an issue with my connection.
I've tried a lot of stuff, from disabling sync and steam community, to customizing the cl variables, but it hasn't changed a bit.
The only explanation I can think of is that all servers are geographically far from me (Brazil is a big country, and I kind of live on the edge). But there are so many servers, I find it hard to believe that not even a single one is close to me.
Has this issue been documented somewhere? Does anyone have any idea of what might be causing it and how to solve it?
UPDATE!!
I think I have almost tracked it down. While playing TF2, I noticed a few local servers also showed very high ping for me. Looking into it, it seems all of them have IPs that start with 189.1. All the local TF2 serves that good start with 200.xxx. give me great ping.
I tried tracking down the location of these servers, but they both vary between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, so it's not a geographic issue. The issue is certainly NOT in the game either, Doing ping IP_address on the command line returned the same ping values I am getting in-game. I'm starting to think it might be my ISP, so I'gonna keep looking into it.
Second Update:
Ok. I just tested, and all computers in my house have very bad latencies when pinging the IPs in question (tested on wireless and wired). I think it's a network issue, but it's complicated. A friend of mine has the same ISP as me, and his house is about 1 mile from mine, and he doesn't have this problem. When he pings the same IP from the command line, he always gets latencies below 50. It might also be my router, but why would my router have bad latency for one IP but not for others? I think this has turned into a SuperUser question, so I'll post it there. Feel free to post here if anyone has any thoughts.
Best Answer
It seems like your problem is a common one. Unfortunately the PC latency has been very bad for a lot of Black-ops players, and by the look of it it is even worse in Brazil.
Are you behind a firewall or anything that would limit your connection speed? Does a port need to be forwarded on you router? How has your connection been lately on other things? (movie streaming etc) If the network in your area is one that experiences heavy load it could easily take a toll on your bandwidth. You could also go through this ping boosting guide and see if any of these help you.
Let me know if this helps.