The original one back in the day multiplayer on dialup was awesome!

Agreed that close helps in general but 200-300ms isn’t really that noticeable unless it’s something where latency is important. I’m also surprised that some of the larger instances aren’t using Cloudflare for caching. If things like images etc… are cached all over the world then I doubt anyone would notice any speed issues.

Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.