I live in San Francisco on an E3 visa (Australian), but got caught out by the Schengen/UK bans and am currently in the UK where I am fortunately also a citizen. I can't go home to SF right now, and my visa expires in June. It remains to be seen whether I'll be able to renew it before then, or if travel restrictions will be lifted.
Residents on non-immigrant visas are getting a raw deal. The world has got bigger problems but this really sucks.
I'm not sure it's the fact that it's walkable. London is very walkable but unless it's the last train home on a Thu/Fri/Sat night and everyone is very 'merry' then talking to strangers just does not go down well.
I'm relatively new to SF but find the random interactions here beneficial in much the same way with regards to personal growth, and they seem to happen all the time. In the UK it felt like you can't talk to strangers - here it feels like you can't _not_ talk to strangers.
So not sure if it's SF, California, or Americans in general, but it's refreshing for someone who is usually quite introverted.
NQ (NetQuake, as the original Quake is sometimes known) 'feels off' on just 10ms. Movement becomes slightly just out of sync with your input.
10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography. Many ADSL/VDSL connections, best case, start with 5ms of latency, and often higher (say 20ms) due to interleaving. Cable tends to be around 10ms IIRC but can suffer from significant jitter which makes things worse. So for a lot of players the servers would need to be in the same city to achieve that target.
I think the effect on other players would be pretty jarring, especially if said projectiles / explosions jolted players in the air at high velocity.
IIRC QW's client side movement prediction didn't attempt to predict the effects of, for instance, shooting a rocket at your feet/rocket jumping, which meant on high latency connections there'd often be a bit of a delay before your view caught up with where the server thought you actually were. This also applies to rockets fired by other players. Lower latency had the effect of not only making it easier to fire rockets at enemy players, it also made everything seem smoother when people fired rockets at you.
Later versions of QW created from the GPL source release have introduced lag compensation for hitscan weapons, but I'm not aware of any attempts to do so for projectiles.