I'd like to disagree, I was part of a run that spawned 5 snowman at once and there was not a single lag spike or dc the whole time. I was online for 10 hours without any lag earlier too.
That's not to say it didn't lag tonight... But to say "this didn't fix anything" Is to ignore all that we've done and all the improvements.
Adding onto this, I was in an extremely long boss run yesterday while all of this was going on and I don't believe any of the lag we felt was due to the snowman/snowblower. Over a span of like 6-7 hours, one person disconnected after a short lag we felt and then right near the end of the fight we all disconnected but I doubt it had to do with the snow. All throughout the fight my guild/buddylist endlessly announced the fact that there were multiple snowmen and we were seemingly unaffected.
I exaggerated the staffs improvement have been a major one, but a soon as snowman spawned whole party dced.
Once more we just completed a snowman "run" where we summoned 5 back to back...and no d/cs. There was probably something else that went on too to cause that d/c.
It is pretty much confirmed now that the snowman is no longer contributing much to the lag. So I'd still like people to be reporting whenever the big lag spikes are so that we can investigate and try and figure out what needs fixing.
If you get the stuck in game and cant interact with anything but aren't feeling "laggy" it's a freeze. If you get a 10-15 second screen freeze and then the unable to connect message at login screen, it's a freeze. If the home page still lists 250+ online when this is happening, it's a freeze. If it requires a server restart to fix, it's a freeze.
The lag happends when the snowman's dead, when people try to exchange their gifts. It's there for like 10 seconds now, it's way better than 5 minutes like it previously was.
