Thanks for the various comments ... sort of.

@ gallp13 - I fell asleep before your last post to the thread, lol !

@ sweatyclam - I ran tests on both speedtest.net and pingtest.net. My ping was only slightly higher than normal and not something that, IMO, would cause the extreme conditions I saw last night. In fact, the ping I had was well within normal variation that can happen at any given moment. My "packet loss" was a bit higher, though. I don't know what would cause that or what's considered "high" packet loss. Normally packet loss on my line is between 0 and 5 ... last night it was 14. And how the heck would I control that anyway???

@ jcostanzo27 - Don't know how familiar you are with COD or FPS games in general, but some level of what you describe has been experienced by most players at some point. When the game released, I did not experience any of that to a noticeable extent. Like you, however, I am seeing it more and more ... and it usually is worst a day or two after a patch. Why? that's why I posted the thread - I dont know.

@ opdrams19 - For the life of me I do not understand how a game developer can sell a product and not have a legal obligation to support that product. It would be one thing if the game was no longer sold - maybe. My personal opinion is that consumers have a reasonable belief that an online game will not be hacked and that there will be some referee system that minimizes the number of cheaters playing the game. Otherwise anyone can sell game software that promises one thing and completely fails to deliver on that promise, aka - anyone can legally commit fraud.

@ voracious5 - I think you're jealous of 5 year olds because they get a little diploma when they finish kindergarten and you never did get one ... because you dropped out. Couldn't handle the pressure to do things like color within the lines or count to two.  I never asked for a patch, moron. In fact, if you want to read between lines you could more easily assume I'm tired of IW patching the game. My point was that every time they do patch the game, it gets worse. Why would I want another patch with that kind of track record? Idiot.

@ illegalfreq - I guess you're sitting over at voracious5's house having a circle jerk. There's nothing wrong with my connection. It is far in excess of the requirements the console maker puts out there. I have no idea WTF "granny tranny" porn is, but to bring you up to speed, I have posted in the past that the game plays best for me when I have 4 bars. I'm the exact opposite of people that say they play better when they lag. I don't. So go back to your circle jerk with voracious5.

@ triiviium - hey, how's it going? I never said anything about one console over another. I double checked and did not see where anyone had posted about one console being better than another. But I do agree with you - I've seen tons of posts about lag on both consoles.

....

So, in general, I welcome and appreciate any legitimate ideas as to what happened yesterday evening. As gallp3's comments show, I was not the only  one that experienced this phenomenon. Sounds like jcostonzo27 and opdrams19 also experienced the same things, as well. I'm not really interested in "lag compensation" theories because this was far beyond lag compensation. The last "update" was supposed to include a means to do "hot fixes" and was supposed to rely heavily upon user feedback. Does anyone think they may have sent out different patches to different users to see how various potential fixes affected various players? In other words, send out three different fixes to users with very similar connection characteristics to see which fixes worked best?

Ok ... so not only did others experience this, it has been an on-going issue for a while.

Hmph. I am totally baffled.

Here's another thought that came to my mind - maybe there was work being done on COD services? I did not check the COD status thing last night. Maybe I should have.

In any case, after doing a little checking, from what I can tell, there was a spike on the WWW last night ... but the spike was in packet loss. Now that makes total sense.

What's more, a server close to me (not the one my service usually goes through first, that one is over 40 miles away) apparently went down completely. There's some other servers down, as well. Maybe that caused excess traffic on other servers?

Doesn't make sense why I still have service overall and why other games played just fine, though.

But if those things did make a difference, I can't help but wonder how often things like that happen. Maybe other times - before MW3 was around - when the game dropped suddenly to four bars the same thing was happening then.

I'm also wondering if this net traffic control thing is not a factor. Some ISPs reduce the amount of traffic to certain sites at times. This is why Google supports net neutrality (which I do not support). Could that have been a factor? Some ISPs decided to reduce the amount of Activision traffic?