I play internet games (on Demigod) on a LAN with some friends on weekend, and we always knew how horrible the in-game chat was, but we tested it by just chilling in a lobby and sending messages to each other.
There are various peculiarities. Messages take between 15 seconds and x amount of time, x being infinite. The longest we saw was about five minutes. However, we noticed this weird trend:
Person A: -sends message to Person B-
Person B: -chills in lobby and waits to receive. This takes a very long time-
*Same scenario*
Person A: -sends message to Person B-
Person B: -types something into the message box. A's message is received a lot quicker-
If you're typing, for some reason, the messages seemed to arrive quicker. This may've just been a fluke though.
tl;dr: Friend chat is balls. Use xfire.
