since this box that the server is hosted off of is in Germany, everyones ping HAS to be higher the farther away from Germany you are... unless you have T1 or a good upload speed, your ping will always be higher, the farther away you are...
The bit about distance is correct however throughput does not affect latency (unless you're torrenting or something but that's to do with router's queuing). So even if you can download at 1,000mbps and are tens of thousands of miles away it'll still be very laggy.
yes^ i forgot about that... as usually am posting from my iphone (be jealous putty)
but if nobody is downloading and they play in the server, it would be like heaven! i say we stop torrenting for a day and watch the server be non-laggy