No doubt ZOS could improve the service... but right now my problems seem to be associated with Comcast/XFinity (the intractably inept and apathetic de-facto monopoly on internet service in my area).Their service has, for whatever reason, observably deteriorated MASSSIVELY in the past 3 months. Unfortunately I am not in a position physically (in an apartment, no yard or other secure place to deploy a transceiver) to switch to satellite.

I can stream video OK... most streaming architectures can adaptively buffer around latency and variable bandwidth (except, paradoxically, HBO Max... adaptive buffering doesn't seem to be a part of their feature set... I invariably experience long pauses and relentless degradation in video quality, which requires me to download all content as a workaround... fortunately this is an expedient most/all streaming services offer these days).

But all "rea-time" applications, like "online games" (including ESO and GuildWars2) are experiencing continuous latency in the 500ms+ range, and often over 1000ms (GuildWars2 will show you a real number... like "1603", which is what it was just now when I looked; ESO will show you 999+", which is where I spend most of my time these days), with all the associated problems (warping around the map, skills fail to fire, hostile mobs materialize out of nowhere, gathering vanishes, have to retry all interaction repeatedly... and right now, in ESO, I am unable to delete in-game mail). Power cycling my modem, varying time of day away from obvious peak times, VPN/noVPN, switching cables/switchies/other glue in my home network, etc... nothing helps.

Maybe there are continuous denial-of-service attacks underway in various parts of the internet that are affecting wide-area throughput and round-trip latency, or maybe my service-provider-from-hell is just incompetent. If it keeps up, I am going to have to suspend all my online game subscriptions and either switch to purely captive desktop games or do without gaming entirely (gasp!) until I can find a workaround to Comcast/XFinity.