This isn't a rant. It's a plea for someone to look into a problem.

I've been noticing some intermittent lag recently, actually what I notice is a whole party commenting on it in voice chat. When it's only me I figure my barely-within-range DSL is hiccuping.

It's incredibly bad when it spikes up. Whole parties and the creatures they're currently dancing with jerking around the area like crazy. We've recently seen it in the Vale, in Feast or Famine, and on Sorrowdusk Isle but I suspect it could happen anywhere. It's not like the old lag, where everything paused for several seconds then resumed like business as usual. This is the stuttering type where either the players or the monsters actually get to begin actions, but the actions have absolutely no (useful) effect because the other creatures are in wildly different places in the next tick, whenever it gets around to happening, and often the situation has changed dramatically.

It's not a regional ISP thing, either, because I regularly play with folks in Canada, the Midwest and Australia and I am on the West Coast.

I've seen orcs bounce around the screen like orthons, from one tick to the next, and the health bars of both monsters and PC's change with no apparent reason. (no nearby foe, no heal effect at that creature's feet etc) I've found my character 100 feet in the air between lag tics, then after I've fallen for a second or two (with feather fall item) another lag tick happens and I find myself once again upon the ground. I've had a whole combat move completely off the screen in one tick. I've had my character do a 180 degree turn during a tick, and the spell I'd clicked to cast into the middle of a crowd instead sails harmlessly over a lake instead. Once I moved about 30 seconds' worth of movement in one hiccup, I was about 3 hills away in the Vale at the time. Nearer my destination, which was cool, but still - it wasn't right.

The most annoying thing is that I've had my character die several times while unable to move, react, drink potions or really do anything at all. Time did not pass for that character, but apparently one of the monsters was not similarly frozen in stasis. Now server lag costs gold (thousands of it each time) when it happens in such a way that characters die. And the lag is happening a LOT, especially on weekends.

I don't mind when I misjudge how hard it'll be to kill a monster and it gets to snack on my bones. My character falls into a deep pool of lava because I can't jump right, no big deal. I blunder around a corner ahead of the party and land on the dinner table of a party of 12 spiders, my bad. But when it's glitchiness beyond my control and it's happening frequently, something's wrong and needs to be fixed.

Please look into it?