The true question is: may I be able to play an online video game in the deep Sahara before the modern human civilization collapses?
whippersnappers who complain about 20ms ping should watch some quakeworld or quake 3 cpma where this dude rat used to destroy everyone on 300ms.
Whether there's a clear advantage to having 50 vs 20 ms ping I can't answer. I'm quite certain that's an advantage I personally can't make any use of, but a Quake pro might be able to.
Also, today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
I played a lot of Quake and that was not remotely close to being the case. There were the high ping and low ping players, with not much of a % inbetween. In 1996-1997 the vast majority of people were playing Quake online via dial-up modems. The best players had low pings and were playing over ISDNs or better (a lot of players were on fast university or corporate networks).
> today's pro gamers are likely at a higher skill ceiling than the best players were 10 years ago.
The pro-level players in the later half of the 1990s were as elite as anything that exists today in the FPS space. They were playing like it was a job even when it wasn't, and they had been doing it for a while (Doom LAN competitions were common before that). Quake clans were prolific. They also had professional caliber competitions / tournaments back then, see: the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake tournament in Atlanta, where Dennis Fong won Carmack's Ferrari.