I'll admit I used to be one of those people who thought that everything depended on your ping, and how nice your keyboard, mouse, and pc were. My mind has changed somewhat. I generally consider myself to be the worst of the worst when it comes to sword PvP, and I am only mediocre at bow and fns. I have no skill whatsoever when it comes to the fishing rod.
My perspective changed one day I was playing on Excavation Zero and I was running away from corn when I saw a guy with full iron and a stone sword wreaking havoc on a little platform near corn. I figured I could get a clean-up, which was risky considering I had only a wood axe and 2 armor bars, but I went for it anyway. I jumped on the platform right as he killed the undergeared guy he was fighting and I engaged him. Instead of jumping and clicking fast in a slow, circular motion like I usually do, I decided to try something new. I didn't jump at all and moved in and out of him in rapid circles and switchbacks. I got around nine or ten hits on him while he only got two. I killed him! This was the point in my career when I stopped making excuses as to why I would always, and started making ways that I could win.
I started to use the bow in a new way. Instead of shooting as quickly as possible, I would wait a fraction of a second for them to change directions, and then I would take my shot. I miss far less nowadays. With fns I have learned to do it earlier when charging people, and later when being chased. With fishing rod... well... I still suck, but I'll work on that. For strategy in general, I have taken a more aggressive approach to the beginning of the game, making to target and wipe out teams and good players, and I always skip corn. I have also began playing on servers 1-50 more, and I have found that they are actually a little easier to win on than servers 100-150. (Which is what I have always done.)
If you start looking at how you can win, instead of what is stopping you from winning, you will come to get better regardless of how bad your equipment is. When I came back around two months ago, I was winning 3-5 of the 50 games on my statistic page. Now I am winning 10 or more, but my equipment is the same. I still don't think I could ever get to the point where I am winning 30-40% of games with my equipment. My keyboard is hard to press the keys on, my mouse is bulky and inprecise, (can't reel in the fishing rod) and my fps are mediocre, (Though with optifine I get a slight boost, that is at the expense of not being able to play Valleyside University, Moonbase 9, Turbulence, Lobby Games, Eye of Horus, and Icarus. For some reason optifine makes those maps have unplayable at 10-20 fps.) Finally, I get 170 ping, with lag spikes of several hundred ping a couple times a minute. I don't focus on the things that are unfortunate though, I focus on what I can do.
While you can do a fair amount with bad equipment and ping, it does severely limit your abilities in ways you can't imagine. Those of you with good ping can't imagine what it is like to start playing this game on an old clunky computer until you have. Most of your deaths are a mystery. You just saw a person approach and then you were dead. You don't know that he strafed you, or got critical hits, you just know you're dead. You may take ages to come to realize when someone is about to use fns, or when someone has good or bad ping. For me, it took me hundreds of games for me to even come to a realization that I was at a disadvantage to most players, and by that time, I had still learned nothing about PvP and I had 500 losses. On the other hand, someone with good ping will learn to recognize dangers and tactics very early on, because of the swift correlation that deaths had with certain behaviors. When I first saw someone swinging their fishing rod on land, I wanted to say, "Dude, it doesn't do damage." A person with high fps and ping would instead say "He used the fishing rod to get an extra knockback on me." People don't realize that ping affects learning.
Though you can do a lot with 200+ ping, you will not win every fight. It is like the fact that no woman has ever ran a four minute mile. Though women can be very fast runners, their genetics are not as geared toward long-distance running, and men hold the record for the fastest mile, and marathon. Bad ping will always be a disadvantage.
