I don’t recommend lag compensation. It’s a bad idea because it degrades the experiences of more-committed / better players in order to cater to the less-committed / worse players.
edit: Maybe you mean that lag compensation makes it harder to avoid others' shots. But does that really reward less skilled players? If anything it rewards players with higher ping, but that's not necessarily the same as worse or less committed. I suppose that really uncommitted players are more likely to try to game over some crappy Wi-Fi or even cellular connection, whereas for committed players, latency is more likely to result from distance. But that's a rather low threshold of commitment. In any case, having a really high ping comes with serious disadvantages, including rubber-banding, a harder time avoiding shots, a harder time aiming with anything that isn't lag compensated (e.g. projectiles), etc...
Also,
> High-budget games these days locate servers around the world, so that is not an issue.
Even assuming there are enough players to fill the severs, it's only a non-issue if you're matchmaking alone. If you want to play with specific people - through either a party system or traditional named/player-operated servers - and they happen to live far away, you can't avoid latency. Of course, there's always going to be some ping value beyond which the game isn't worth playing, even with lag compensation - but it's a higher value than without. And at intermediate levels of latency - say, 100ms - lag compensation can be the difference between a passable experience and an effectively perfect one.
let them run their own servers? tough luck, most games in 2017 don't allow dedicated server setup
Yes, good connections are expensive for some people. If you want to do something about that, maybe you include amount of latency in a player’s ELO or something. I am just saying that I do not like Valve’s approach to the problem (which has been inherited by many other games) because I care about games and it makes games worse overall.
exactly what I'm talking about. "around the world" may not be enough. And since they don't allow dedicated servers hosted by players, they better have lag compensation or to hell with them.