Peculiar lag in select games and peculiar high pings

[Aeonar]

I've been noticing patterns with my FA client lagging the game for others, being so bad that the game is barely playable, but only when I play with certain other players.

One pattern I've recently noticed is that in custom team games playing against "SiN", it shows as me being behind -2 or -3 in data (according to ren_shownetworkstats). He was rather rude about it, so I marched my ACU into a swarm of tanks and jets before I left. The next game, he was pretty vocal about it as well, so I left. I don't remember the last game I had with him, as I left as soon as I noticed the issue.

I also get strange pings to certain players, like "Odysseus-Gr" and one other guy I forgot the name to, who says he's from Italy (last time I saw him, he was playing 6 castles with LosSpaca-something *Edit* locristus). The pings are more often normal, around 230ish (normal for west coast US to European players), but occasionally ~400 and rarely 500+, which would make the game lag for others. I tried playing one game, despite having a borderline ping, but learned that it wasn't an enjoyable game with that kind of lag.

Doesn't seem like anything specifically wrong with my setup or client. I've tried to see if DNS flush, various resets with my network adapter, router, & modem, and alternative firmware & firmware configs would change things with the pings, but I haven't really tried anything to see what's up with the connection issues are behind the games with "SiN" in it. I did a tracert and it seems hitting the LA seabone hop adds ~150ms, causing the 400 ping, and maybe another hop adding another. I guess that's why I sometimes get 400 ping to Australians too, since data going across the Pacific is maybe getting more clogged than data going across the Atlantic during some times of the day, typically around lunch time (PST time).

Not really expecting to find a solution, but mainly sharing the story to see if anyone else has a very similar experience. My PC's never the one with the lowest sim speed during end game battles, but rarely is the one with the fastest, so upgrades aren't out of the question, but I doubt that'd solve the problem. I have no troubles with lag in basically all my other games, but whenever I see SiN or a high ping in a game lobby, I just leave if I come after them or if they don't leave. It's just leaving me wondering if I can help it at all, besides moving out of my house or spending at least $400 to upgrade some things in my PC, when I'm not really dissatisfied with its relatively average performance. I know stuff like sending altered data packets is possible, but I'm not sure how it'd work in a peer-to-peer based game like this, but imagine the symptoms I'm experiencing would be something that would be caused by it; for example, if send altered packets to all others except me and I sort of have a light desync that my client keeps refusing to update with. I don't know if there's a way for me to counter that without significant unwanted side effects, but I don't want to believe SiN is doing such, or capable of it. Could be a simple file difference as well... don't wanna dwell on it, when I can simply avoid it, but still curious if I'm not the only one with these specific issues.