Ahhh.but was that a simple ping (4 hits in roughly 1 minute), or a more extensive monitoring of continuous 200 or more pings over an extended time frame that may show signs if heavy jitter or the odd dropped packets every dozen or so pings.

Need to be tracking things over time to see the range of responses. Just one or two retransmits here and there is barely noticible, but if it is happenenig regularly enough it knackers things up. It may even trigger TCP/IP error correction to flag it for slow start and clamp down the receive windows. It serves it's purpose well in some applications, but for a game like this it can complicate things further.