I'm assuming that something on my end is catalyzing my lag issues but for a lack of a support forum, I'm posting this here.

Outside VO, ping looks like this:

--- majikthise.guildsoftware.com ping statistics ---
247 packets transmitted, 244 packets received, 1% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 105.737/107.654/125.629/1.376 ms

Inside my ping ranges from 120 to 300+. Movement of other people looks pretty smooth to me, though their shots often appear in front of their ship. But it sounds like some people see me jumping around a lot. Compatibility mode didn't fix it. Maybe it made somethings better and somethings worse.

My inclination is to blame my ISP or router settings but maybe other ideas will surface.

[edit]
I'm running VO on a 1.25 Ghz G4 (Mac)

[edit`]
traceroute says that I loose about 60ms getting through the ISP to the zippy end of cogent. The blame for this rests on both cogent and the ISP. But I was posting more because of the difference between OS and VO ping, and because of people seeing me jump around but not I them. Or is my outside-of-vo latency the main thing in play here?

Run a traceroute and see if you can isolate a point where the ping jumps. That could give you an idea if it's a local problem or something further out of your control.

What framerate do you typically get? I imagine it's not too bad.

Part of the discrepancy in ping times is that sometimes the client has to wait for a frame to render before responding to network events. That raises your ping average up by about 500/fps ms (I'm guessing you get somewhere between 30-40fps on average?). It also means that right after you load something from disk your ping spikes up a ton.

So yeah, the ping numbers look good actually. Packet loss really sucks, though. Sorry for the dumb question but you don't have any uploads or torrents going on in the background while you play, do you?

the issue went away. i'm not sure why.