I have had some games with no lag. But most games have really bad lag. And yes, it [i]is[/i] as bad as I say. Maybe it only affects some people, or some geographic locations? For the record, lag is sometimes so bad that I literally cannot open special ammo crates. The more lag, the faster the crate "open" progress indicator fills up, I have no idea why. And with enough lag, it fills up nearly instantaneously and doesn't actually open. I just had to leave a game because the lag was so bad this happened.

proably your local networ is having issues then. either your home network, or your isp. Maybe they throttle your connection at times and dont tell you. Some comapnies do since the game used udp which is the same packet type used by most file sharing programs which a lot of companies throttle to limit the effectiveness of torrenting, and to cut down on overhead. Plust it could be the times your trying to play it that maybe many in your area are on the same pipline bottlenecking the isp.

Time of day doesn't matter. My local network works great for everything else (I've done all sorts of latency tests because of this). I have business-class internet too, so my ISP definitely doesn't throttle me (not even if I am actually using BitTorrent).