I been playin soldat with bots till i got my registration key yesterday and to my dissapointment almost all the soldat servers i pinged were 150-400 and the 150 ones were empty. I have a 500k cable connection and in other online games i ping under 80 pretty well.

Is it just because ppl are running servers off their PC's and not actual severs?

some servers are empty because the lobby server is down..
try dnagames server.
you should get good ping there

yeah could be casue i can play 33 ping on set server then i go to a friends and i get like 100