Huh??? Where'd my lag go?

Pardon me if this is in the wrong subsection. It's a question certainly... which might make the Q&A subsection more appropriate... but it's a question about a technical condition that affects virtually every player... lag... so, here I am.

With the April 19 update (the BIG one), my lag suddenly disappeared... for the most part. There is still the occasional slight lag in highly populated areas, but not the frequent freezing I was experiencing ever since the update just prior. In fact, I believe it's smoother now than it's ever been for me. I spent most my weekend in hard mode instances, and the FPS rate was good and the light was always green. Weird eh?

Anyone know what happend to the lag? Not that I want it back. I don't! I just want to understand.

Thanks!

EDIT: PS - To answer Takuna's very valid question... I'm on the American servers.

What's your home server? European? If so, that brilliant. I stopped playing due to the insane lag getting me killed all the time.

I'm on the European servers and my lag is just as bad as ever. Constantly 250ms+ and spiking up to 2,500ms+ at times. I know it's not my connection as Guild Wars is the only game that this occurs in.

It's gotten that severe in the past month or so that I've got my ISP looking into it, just on the off chance that they discover something that can be passed along to the relevent people at ANet.

You mean 250ms+ is bad? o_O

I consistently play at 400-450 when in battle, and I thought that was decent...I guess having Windows Firewall, Symantec Client Firewall, and a router firewall really do cause problems.

I consider it pretty bad because in the majority of my other online games I'm getting a very decent and constant 30ms-50ms.

I ran the -diag switch earlier, both on my normal ISP connection and also under a RIN trial that I'm on and both came back the same. Somewhere after jumping into the ANet servers the packet loss sky-rockets to 75%, and in some cases it's 100%. This is on two different networks from two ISP's. So that pretty much rules that out of the equation.

Yeah, I was wondering about that a couple nights ago. Whilst in Prophecies I was cruising along with no lag, no rubber banding no loading times no ground textures clipping it was beautiful. Great FPS and great ping....then I went to Factions/Nightfall and got all the hate back -_-

Lucky you.
I had exactly the opposite.
... Relatively speaking.

I was comfortably in the 150 to 250 ping zone until the weekend... then suddenly my average ping time came to around 5000.

LOL... yup. I feel your pain. I went to Kamadan last night... and I loaded... and loaded... and... went and popped a movie into the DVD player.

I have that problem to But i play on 56kb/s , and it goes fine, only had problem when loading some new areas, but downloaded whole update and now work exelent, exept casual lags

Well, my ISP has reported back after going through all the traces and diagnostic reports I sent them and the conclusion is :-

All the problems with severe latency spikes are down to ANets servers and nothing at all to do with my connection. I'm glad to have some form of conformation of my suspicions.

Like I said above, I'm on a decent 8Mb MaxDSL line with no traffic shaping applied on my package and considering every other online game works fine, it's all happening once the connection jumps into ANets servers.