It was revealed by CS Nation’s Site Director that the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, that your ping is terrible with the exception of the host.

Apparently the bars are deceiving. If you go in and see three bars next to your name, just let it go yet. This means your connection is terrible.

Original Guide from here:

Zips (Site Director) states:

The sad truth? You might wanna pound a few beers before you read this:

• The host is immediately obvious, he’s the guy with 0-20 ping (full green).
• I usually connect with about 101-200+ms.
• Most people are connected at 200+ms (3 or less bars on normal cfg settings).
• On regular cfg settings, 4 bars means up to 0-100 ping, 3 bars 101-200, 2 bars 201-300, 1 bar is 301+.

If you go into a server and everyone’s ping appears to be good, but there’s still a lot of apparent lag and rubber-banding going on, this may be the reason why.

This is what host advantage looks like:

If you want to see the real representation of ping do the following:

• Navigate to the folder: ‘program filessteamsteamappscommoncall of duty modern warfare 2players’ and open the file config_mp.cfg
• Change scoresping_interval from 100 to 20, and maxbars from 4 to 10 (10 is the max).
• This means that each of the 10 bars represents 20ms, with full green being 20ms or lower, and 1 red being 200ms or higher.