Pings are more complicated in this setup. A low ping to a server won't help too much if you have high ping to the online client itself. Are there different clients in different locations so you can select a low-ping client?
No, ping is as complicated as for any gaming server. You have one central server and many clients connected to that central server. I don't think the game is running somewhere else, it's running directly in the browser, so only ping you care about is from your computer to the central server.
There's definitely not "one" central server. Depending on how they route your connection (do they proxy you or redirect you), you might still just be connected to the server you're playing on, but the "ping" is also more complicated in itself since the protocol is more complicated. Instead of information from the client to the server which updates all the dynamic entity states, you are instead sending input commands and getting video and audio back. So, not only would "ping" measure something entirely different, it would possibly be optimized for in the path between you and the remote differently as well.
They may have decided that instead of providing a metric that might lead people to believe it's similar to and implies the same thing as it did in the past, they'll remove it. If so, I would hope they would put something semi-equivalent in it's place. Maybe they did, but it's so removed it's hard to locate?
A traditional server browser pings each game server from the client, so the ping you are shown is roundtrip time between your client and that server. CS follows this client-server architecture.
The server browser retreives a list of game servers from a directory server, and all that directory does is manage the list of game servers for presentation to clients.
> if you have high ping to the online client itself
that doesn't make sense, you download the client and you run it locally (even if in browser) so there's no notion of client ping here (unlike something like cloud gaming)
Pings are more complicated in this setup. A low ping to a server won't help too much if you have high ping to the online client itself. Are there different clients in different locations so you can select a low-ping client?