What is 'Lag'?
'Lag' is a term players use to describe a slow-down in their links to Arctic. It has many different potential causes, the most common of which are discussed below.

Low Throughput
Any of you who used to mud back when we all had 1200 baud modems knows that combat, or speedwalking can cause the mud to send you information faster than your network connection can handle. Unless you still use a 1200 baud modem, this type of lag is almost unheard of today as far as mud players are concerned. If you use RealAudio and RealVideo, then you might have problems with low throughput, but pure text (like muds use) is extremely quick.

Dropped Packets
This is the type of lag we all hate. When the internet "fills up", it stops sending new info until it can finish sending all the old info which is backed up. If Arctic sends you a message, the internet doesn't tell Arctic when it is refusing to send it, the internet just ignores it. Arctic will keep sending more stuff, assuming that everything is fine. Eventually, your computer will tell Arctic that "hey, something is missing. Resend some stuff." Then Arctic will resend the missing "packet" and continue where it left off. This results in a long wait, usually followed by a big burst of text. (Your computer won't print a message until all the previous messages have been received, so it just waits for the dropped message to be resent.) This dropped packet is NEVER Arctic's fault. It is because one of the computers between Arctic and your computer became overloaded. For technical reasons, this will happen every so often, even if there is no other network traffic. It's just a fact of life we have to deal with. (Some ISP's have too little network capacity, and they will have much more problems with congestion. In that case you can improve performance by switching to a better ISP.)

Machine Lag
This is the ONLY type of lag which is Arctic's fault. It is also the only type of lag which affects mobiles just as much as it affects players. If the mud is running, and the host computer is doing lots of other stuff, then sometimes it won't be able to do things quite as fast as normal. This will result in a slight slow down of combat, and a slight lengthening of the tic time. Since the mobs are slowed down exactly as much as the players, this type of lag has virtually no effect on the game and is very minimal in any event.