My best friend and I came to the same conclusion last night. We've played CoD religiously since MW1. We always have complaints and stuff after playing for awhile (normally when people start knowing the maps and formulating their play to maximize douchiness), but almost always started out playing and thinking "This is such an improvement!". Not so much with this one.
Yes, lag exists in all online games, but If I have 4 bars, I shouldn't be stuttering. When I aim down my sights, my frame rate should not falter, especially in a game like this. Most notably for me, it lags bad when I place claymores. I go to place my claymore, the frame skips and I place my claymore 5 five away from where I wanted. So I pick it up and try to re-place. Then I die. I am happy with the game overall. But it's issues like lag that take all the good they've done and wipes it from my memory. I know there will be apologists saying that I just suck or I need to disregard my killcam (what the fuck is it even there for if not to provide a representation of what happened?) but I never had problems like this in the other games in the series. Yeah BlOps had shitty hit detection, but rather that then not even getting to shoot someone period. I'm a middling player, not great, but not bad, but this game is killing me. This may be my last Call of Duty purchase. I'm not sure I want to wait around for them to fix THIS one.