[Sephiroth]

None of the packets destined for the VM nodes on the route to BBC.CO.UK were lost. The only packets lost (other than in the BBC leg) were at the router as you say - but they were packets addressed to the router and don't matter. You could have DoS prevention on, firewall on, all sorts of reasons for packets of low priority pings to be rejected or discarded at the router.

In your game play, there wouldn't be any packet loss. Data packets don't get lost unless they contain uncorrectable corruptions. What you are prolly suffering is from lag or latency (in other words).

In game play, you send very small packets frequently. So bandwidth demand is low. But if lots of peops are doing this in your street or on all the streets connected to your CMTS, then there is congestion and you can't get the upstream timeslot as frequently as you need it.

You can see this in the Pathping:

2 43ms 4/ 100 = 4% 2/ 100 = 2% pmth-cmts-09-lback-20.network.virginmedia.net [213.104.244.1]

This hop should take no more than around 13ms IMO. So, it's congestion and you could report it to 2nd line support on the newsgroups and see what they say - whether it's something that needs upgrading at the hub end or whether it was a temporary matter.