I've been told I warp horribly during games. In fact, it's probably to the point where people avoid even joining games I'm in. The shittiest part of the issue is that I don't notice any lag on my end. It's seriously like cheating, and I fucking hated it.

I read countless forum posts on other people experiencing the same issue. I was even reading white papers on DOCSIS 3.0 in hopes of finding some answer: maybe my modem didn't support the latest cable interface standards? Maybe my ISP sucks? I live in an apartment building; maybe it's just high-usage issues?

Well just in case someone else "Googles" the shit out of "quake live warp" like I had to, I'll provide what my solution was in the hope they find this post and are experiencing the same issue.

It was my wireless router! I have a linksys wrt54g which was flashed with DD-WRT firmware. Don't get me wrong DD-WRT is pretty badass, but as soon as I removed it from the equation my lagometer resembled a flat-lined electrocardiogram. I still can't really explain what the exact cause was.

The point of this post is that I'm a fucking idiot for not initially removing my router from the picture. Oh also hopefully it will save someone else some time in troubleshooting their warp issue.

Also, although this is basically common knowledge, I changed my network settings to:
cl_packetdup 1
cl_maxpackets 125
rate 25000

Just trying to help!

Edit: I do not use the wireless. I don't even think the wireless radio is enabled. I'm wired to the router LAN ports.

Edit: I did a tracert to a couple of different IPs and I think it's the first hop after my cable-modem (gateway) that is causing my ping fluctuations, which is probably the cable tap that my entire apartment complex uses. I called my ISP about it. They'll probably never call me back.

Edit: Another possible cause is that my cable modem might not support DOCSIS 3: it's a linksys BEFCMU10 - version unknown