Ok, in an effort to clear things up: here is how the situation presents itself in Europe:
1. Some realms are more prone to lag then others, though at this point all realms are subject to some kind of latency issues.
2. The severe latency issues don't seem to scale with server population. Some of the most affected realms are in fact low pop realms.
3. The severe latency issues occur almost exclusively during prime time hours. This means weekdays 18:00 to 22:00 and on "raid sunday" 15:00 to 22:00.
4. People are seemingly randomly affected by the latency issues. This means for some the ping is fine, for others it is unplayable. Wether someone is affected or not can change daily or even hourly (tuesday in ZG my ping suddenly improved significantly, while for others that were fine so far, it has turned into red).
5. The latency issues seem to be more prevalent in instances then out in the world, and also scale somewhat with raid size (i.e 20 man ZG performs better then 40 man MC or BWL).
6. "Database lag", i.e. the delay experienced when trying to sell something to a vendor or put into the AH is what it always has been.
Some additional information:
Even long before the current lag crisis (I demand special coverage on CNN ;) ) login servers were prone to instabilities, meaning they sometimes completely crashed or had very poor performance.
I'm of course aware that lag is as much a part of the MMO world as is grinding for lvls, it is annoying but one learns to live with the occasional lag spikes. The problem with WoW EU just is, that the situation never was really optimal in the first place (recurring login server problems) and has slowly worsend over the course of the last weeks. At the beginning there were just the login server issues, then came the occasional lag spikes in MC and BWL, annoying but not really gamebreaking, up to the point of the last two weeks, where lag has become so severe that it raids during prime time hours are not possible atm, and it generally has become somewhat of a lottery, wether you'll be able to play WoW at all during prime time hours.
1. Some realms are more prone to lag then others, though at this point all realms are subject to some kind of latency issues.
2. The severe latency issues don't seem to scale with server population. Some of the most affected realms are in fact low pop realms.
3. The severe latency issues occur almost exclusively during prime time hours. This means weekdays 18:00 to 22:00 and on "raid sunday" 15:00 to 22:00.
4. People are seemingly randomly affected by the latency issues. This means for some the ping is fine, for others it is unplayable. Wether someone is affected or not can change daily or even hourly (tuesday in ZG my ping suddenly improved significantly, while for others that were fine so far, it has turned into red).
5. The latency issues seem to be more prevalent in instances then out in the world, and also scale somewhat with raid size (i.e 20 man ZG performs better then 40 man MC or BWL).
6. "Database lag", i.e. the delay experienced when trying to sell something to a vendor or put into the AH is what it always has been.
Some additional information:
Even long before the current lag crisis (I demand special coverage on CNN ;) ) login servers were prone to instabilities, meaning they sometimes completely crashed or had very poor performance.
I'm of course aware that lag is as much a part of the MMO world as is grinding for lvls, it is annoying but one learns to live with the occasional lag spikes. The problem with WoW EU just is, that the situation never was really optimal in the first place (recurring login server problems) and has slowly worsend over the course of the last weeks. At the beginning there were just the login server issues, then came the occasional lag spikes in MC and BWL, annoying but not really gamebreaking, up to the point of the last two weeks, where lag has become so severe that it raids during prime time hours are not possible atm, and it generally has become somewhat of a lottery, wether you'll be able to play WoW at all during prime time hours.