I play from the UK. I use a small wireless ISP because I live too far from a cabinet to get an ADSL connection,but for all other games (eg Diablo 3, the Blizzard WoW realms, Quake Live and so on) my pings are fine. In Nostalrius they range from 300-500ms, at both peak and non-peak times. Nostalrius's server IP appears to be 5.196.82.39. Here's the result of a traceroute to that address:
Tracing route to ns360830.ip-5-196-82.eu [5.196.82.39]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 192.168.123.1
2 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 109.205.156.129
3 20 ms 23 ms 13 ms 10.16.109.1
4 293 ms 234 ms 345 ms ge-4-1-6.edge3.london2.level3.net [195.50.125.49]
5 218 ms 207 ms 180 ms ae-225-3601.edge3.london1.level3.net [4.69.166.146]
6 142 ms 132 ms 137 ms ae-225-3601.edge3.london1.level3.net [4.69.166.146]
7 197 ms 147 ms 215 ms ldn-1-6.uk.eu [178.33.100.213]
8 176 ms 241 ms 215 ms rbx-g1-a9.fr.eu [178.33.100.63]
9 229 ms 239 ms 268 ms vac1-0-a9.fr.eu.vaccum [178.33.100.149]
10 141 ms 182 ms 211 ms vac1-1-n7.fr.eu.firewall [178.33.100.152]
11 206 ms 131 ms 102 ms vac1-2-n7.fr.eu.tilera [37.187.36.245]
12 53 ms 100 ms 90 ms vac1-3-n7.fr.eu [91.121.215.13]
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
A bit of Googling suggests that the last few hosts are something to do with an anti-DDOS system made by a company called OVH (If you google the hostnames you can find people complaining about legit traffic being dumped by the DDOS protection).
Is there anything that I can do, or that Nostalrius can talk to their hosting company about? The Google topics suggest this is affecting a fair number of people, so I might not be the only player experiencing problems.