Tarkhis, yeah cutting the tail off is fine. Windows tracert will keep trying for a max of 30 hops, even if the route is much shorter than that. WinMTR does a better job but I dont expect people to have it installed.
Swish, yeah that's because network nodes often ignore or de-prioritize meta traffic. Its actually a bad idea to use packet loss of meta traffic for determining where issues occur, but people (even tech support) still does it all the time.
Tahlvin, optimizing the MTU will not help. EQ uses datagrams of size 512 (576 including the header)
which is guaranteed to not fragment. It also wouldn't suddenly start acting up for big groups of people all of a sudden.