Tired of seeing those red spikes in your Call of Duty: Black Ops lag-o-meter? We hear you. Five days after launch, Gameservers.com are still pursuing a resolution in hand with Treyarch, but still do not understand the source of the problem, nor have an accurate estimated time of arrival for a working fix. They have decided to keep us in the loop despite that, making another statement on the matter earlier today....

Treyarch community manager, JD_2020, has posted on the Steam forums notifying us that Black Ops has just been graced with a client-side update, hopefully resolving the stuttering issues that have been such a hot topic over past days. The patch claims to fix the non-operational "friends" tab in the server browser, improve performance for dual and quad core computers, as improve the connectivity of the Black Ops Remote Console. ...

Update: users already playing on 'fixed' servers are claiming the network lag has been resolved, but the intermittent stutters and freezes remain. We'll continue to monitor feedback and report back as soon as we know more.

Getting any real information out of anyone regarding the Call of Duty: Black Ops lag issues plaguing players has been like squeezing blood out of stone. Twitter updates and blog posts from various representatives have been non-committal, vague or entirely ignorant to the problems many PC gamers are experiencing. Finally though, we have some real news. It's not much, but it's something....

We've had an official response from Gameservers.com regarding the performance issues that are effecting PC owners of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Service representative, Beau Young, has told us that "there is a known issue with major FPS lag on the servers, even with a low number of players. Treyarch is aware of this and we are in contact with them to find a resolution for it as soon as possible."...

Update: the problem is now being reported in Europe, as well. MayDay on the official Black Ops forums says "I'm getting lag spikes on all servers in europe, everyone i have talked to seem to have the same problem."

Australians felt somewhat lucky to have a Steam unlock schedule that favored us, being the first in the world to get our hands on some Call of Duty: Black Ops action. Unfortunately, very few are having any success. It turns out that we've been forcibly made beta testers, whether we like it or not....