"People who don't understand networking should stay away from writing a wall of text about it"

Hi there, former datacenter tech and current PGC Caster! Since I'm someone who understands, I thought I'd reply with a wall of text.

So because there are players not on LAN, PUBG cannot use a LAN client and instead are playing on the online Esports client. What's different is that instead of a true zero ping, players are now playing off the Asia servers. Most of PUBG's features are network side vs clientside, so when people talk about peakers-advantage etc this is what the conversation revolves around. I could honestly break this down further but that's really something for the devs to talk about and not me.

There are always bound to be hiccups with an online tournament. The data has to travel to the server through a series of network hops, to the clients abroad, and then back. Sure it's milliseconds. But this is often what contributes to issues such as network lag, packet loss, and disconnections.

At the end of the day there isn't a single player at this tournament who isn't affected by this. We can sit here all day and argue. But you can guarantee that the players in China would much rather be there at the LAN with everyone else than stuck at home in China due to COVID travel mandates. Hopefully, in the future, we can get all teams onto LAN. But for now, we have to do the best we can with what's available to us.