Microsoft Windows [Version 6.2.9200]
(c) 2012 Microsoft Corporation. Alle rechten voorbehouden.

<C:\Windows\system32>
[SYSTEM@LIGHTNING]$ tracert 199.91.189.74

Tracing route to 199.91.189.74 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.178.1
2 7 ms 8 ms 7 ms 5354A001.cm-6-5c.dynamic.ziggo.nl [83.84.160.1]
3 8 ms 8 ms 5 ms gv-rc0052-ds101-vl201.core.as9143.net [213.51.161.33]
4 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms gv-rc0011-cr101-ae12-0.core.as9143.net [213.51.158.187]
5 42 ms 16 ms 7 ms asd-tr0042-cr101-ae8-0.core.as9143.net [213.51.158.12]
6 10 ms 10 ms 7 ms ae7.ams60.ip4.gtt.net [77.67.64.61]
7 100 ms 104 ms 100 ms xe-7-3-0.mtl10.ip4.gtt.net [141.136.106.106]
8 97 ms 98 ms 101 ms ormuco-gw.ip4.gtt.net [216.221.156.110]
9 98 ms 103 ms 100 ms 192.34.76.2
10 100 ms 97 ms 99 ms 199.91.189.234
11 103 ms 101 ms 98 ms 199.91.189.74

Trace complete.

<C:\Windows\system32>
[SYSTEM@LIGHTNING]$ tracert 199.91.189.30

Tracing route to 199.91.189.30 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.178.1
2 8 ms 8 ms 16 ms 5354A001.cm-6-5c.dynamic.ziggo.nl [83.84.160.1]
3 8 ms 18 ms 9 ms gv-rc0052-ds101-vl201.core.as9143.net [213.51.161.33]
4 6 ms 6 ms 5 ms gv-rc0011-cr101-ae12-0.core.as9143.net [213.51.158.187]
5 10 ms 14 ms 8 ms asd-tr0042-cr101-ae8-0.core.as9143.net [213.51.158.12]
6 11 ms 8 ms 10 ms ae7.ams60.ip4.gtt.net [77.67.64.61]
7 100 ms 102 ms 101 ms xe-7-3-0.mtl10.ip4.gtt.net [141.136.106.106]
8 103 ms 99 ms 98 ms ormuco-gw.ip4.gtt.net [216.221.156.110]
9 100 ms 99 ms 99 ms 192.34.76.2
10 99 ms 99 ms 101 ms 199.91.189.234
11 101 ms 99 ms 99 ms 199.91.189.30

Trace complete.
What's this lag you people are talking about?

Here are my tracert results to the Lobby server in NA (199.91.189.74) and Balmung server (199.91.189.30). As you see, the ping responses I got were < 105 ms from both destinations, with 1 hop taking 100~110 ms to respond. For the NA crowd, sorry to say this, but I live in Europe, not the US or Canada or where ever in the North American continent. It's been stated that it can depend on where you are geographically. It doesn't mean distance per se but in quality of connections. If it mattered how close you lived then I should be having issues left and right while NA players should be pointing and laughing at 'my lag'.

I'm not here to white knight SE. But here's the fact, while I do notice some latency (which is pretty natural to online games) it hasn't been so bad to a point where I couldn't play. Save for 1 recent day. I've seen people from NA lag a lot more often and extreme than I have ever noticed myself. I had a spike here and there, which have been as often as once every 3 months. But rubber banding never happened until 'that day'. It was one of the few days before the patch when SE announced a several hour maintenance, not due to their servers, but their datacenter's ISP going down for maintenance. The servers themselves weren't even actually down during that maintenance, preserving the current game state that would have reset from a restart (e.g. Odin/Behemoth timer not resetting, hunt marks timers not resetting, market board wish list <= (What gave it away to me) not clearing. The two days before it is when I had severe rubberbanding issues and inability to stay logged in for more than 5 minutes, if getting on at all. The next day a similar thing happened to another group of people from the NA, though still not everyone was affected with the issue, my connection being close to normal at that point.

Any actual connection issues I experienced in the last year have been caused by my own connection dropping/hampering or my own ISP going into maintenance. I'm suspecting that NA in general has issues in the network. If someone from your side of the pond tries to transfer files to me, it might take a minute. If I send something, it takes mere seconds. I have even uploaded a file of close to 1 gigabyte to 4 people simultaniously with their download speed capping before my upload bandwith was affected.

I do agree on one thing OP and a few others mentioned. It's the 'need to use' third party programs like WTFast or PingBuster (2 common names I've heard) to get a decent connection. I think it's absurd even. But SE doesn't require or insist you need those programs/services. Because that is just it, another service and it isn't related to SE in any way. What those programs do is allow you to have an encrypted data connection directly into their network commonly termed VPN (coined by Microsoft for 'Virtual Private Network'). Those services charge you for it, and it was mainly designed for business-to-business or home-to-business connections as if it was a local (and private/privacy sensitive) network. What they do is put a proxy at the other end that has access to stronger network lanes, which might actually make your direct connection to those services, 'skip a few hops' you might normally do in exchange of making 'a hop' to them. As stated on PingBuster's site, they provide a 3 day trial (which is severely short impo) but the service doesn't work for 'everyone' because 'it depends on the connection speed between you, your ISP, and from ISP to their servers'.

I'm actually suspecting there might be more going on than meets the eye when it comes to lag and connection issues. That fragment from "last week tonight" might be satire packaged news, but it's still based on true news. Not here to brag about my connection speeds or lack of lag or white knight SE. But I do want to make you aware that it shouldn't make sense that a European player has better connection performances a lot of NA players. Think about it, my data has to go through either space or "a frikkin' ocean" while yours shouldn't need to.