From a high-level view, this trace looks like what we would expect when coming from Croatia to the US. The traffic went from your modem, through two hops inside Croatia, then through two hops in Germany, then across the Atlantic Ocean, and into the Level 3 backbone carrier within the USA, and then though three hops inside Texas before reaching the EA117 server. The only "major jump in ping" is the one you would pretty much expect; crossing the Atlantic:
tracert dc.ea117.com wrote:Tracing route to 47.190.52.113 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms Gateway.Home [192.168.1.1] (your modem at your home)
2 24 ms 24 ms 65 ms 85.114.32.150 (Optima Telekom, Croatia)
3 22 ms 22 ms 21 ms 85.114.32.149 (Optima Telekom, Croatia)
4 31 ms 31 ms 30 ms 80.157.206.5 (Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany)
5 42 ms 43 ms 42 ms 80.156.160.98 (Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany)
6 * * * Request timed out. (unknown router that doesn't reply to ICMP Time To Live timeout)
7 197 ms 197 ms 197 ms 4.15.44.126 (Level 3 Communications, USA)
8 196 ms 195 ms 195 ms ae3---0.scr01.dlls.tx.frontiernet.net [74.40.4.13] (Frontier Communications, Texas, USA)
9 199 ms 199 ms 199 ms be10---0.lcr21.dlls.tx.frontiernet.net [74.40.3.18] (Frontier Communications, Texas, USA)
10 194 ms 195 ms 195 ms 172.102.51.237 (Frontier Communications, Texas, USA)
11 207 ms 199 ms 207 ms 47.190.52.113 (dc.ea117.com)
Trace complete.
So you had about a 22ms ping if you had been staying inside Croatia; about a 42ms ping if you had been playing a server in Germany; a 197ms ping in order to just cross the Atlantic, and then +/-5ms to get to Texas. Meaning it took 42ms to get out of Europe, 155ms to cross the Atlantic, and then about +/-5ms inside the US to get to the EA117 server.
When looking at this trace, one thing that should catch your eye is one of the three pings sent to 85.114.32.150 inside Croatia ended up with a 65 ms round trip time instead of just 24ms. That doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem there; but it's something you would keep watching as you continue to run traceroutes, to see whether the 85.114.32.150 hop is "usually 24ms, but keeps spiking every once in a while." Since if that's happening, it's likely going to cause your Battlefield 1942 communication to spike too.
You kind of "have to" look at traceroutes using multiple examples over time. Looking at just a single trace, it's informative, but you can't really conclude where the issue is occurring, if you're seeing a possible issue. For example, there was a +45ms spike shown in just one of the round-trips for the Croatia router. Was that just a one-time anomaly? Of if you keep taking traces, will that anomaly continue to show up at exactly that same router?
When trying to interpret the numbers, you also have to keep in mind that the packet also had to still go through all the previous hops. Meaning if we were seeing a +40ms spike on a Frontier Communications hop in Texas, that
might be because the Frontier Communications hop in Texas was actually overloaded or slow.
But it could also be because "at that moment, the 85.114.32.150 hop inside Croatia was spiking." Because when sending a ping to the Texas router, the traffic still has to pass through the Croatia router, and Germany, and cross the Atlantic, etc. And so the Croatia router being slow at that moment would cause the Texas ping measurement to spike, too.
So it's only by viewing multiple traceroutes, taken over time, to see where -- if anywhere -- spikes are more consistently appearing.
-Trench