[placidpanda]

I'm confused about the using the greyscale map tiles to estimate ping.

You don't want to have the users ping the servers themselves because those pings could be inaccurate or noisy, so you use historical average data for users in that region instead to get a nice simple number. But... how do you know where the user is? IP Geolocation? Can't that be wrong also?

Isn't it better to have a direct measurement which could be a little wrong than an average of a guess which could be really wrong?