In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.
We used to play these games on dial-up where ~300ms pings were pretty common.
Moving to a cable connection in ~2001 was shocking in comparison!
Geostationary satellite internet has garbage pings too.
Unless you are playing Quake through Iridium.
When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.