I HAVE had the game ignore a shield command. I've had a shield up, walking away from an enemy, and during the sudden bit of lag (I get them often, I'm fairly certain mine is caused by my wireless signal being problematic) I lose a second, finding myself hit by the monster while my shield was supposedly up the entire time. It happens. I complain to the people I'm in voice chat with, maybe type it out if that knocked me on my butt, and go back to playing. It is very annoying, as I cannot play Tier 3, even with full 5* gear, without a strong chance of dieing from lag, but life goes on, and some day I'll futz with my internet more to get it working better.
Oh, and no, I have no idea that I'm lagging until I suddenly teleport halfway across the room, generally into spikes. At least it amuses my companions.
@"...there have been numerous occasions where the server hasn't accepted my block input so I get hit regardless if I have a full bubble up before the attack animation goes through."
What you may be experiencing here is not actually the server. If you attack and fail to shield cancel immediately, you will experience the attack delay and any shield commands will not go through until the attack animation is over. I have never had the server not read my shield key and everytime I have been hit from not getting my shield up I know that it was because I failed to shield cancel on time or didn't try. Also I find if you're just more cautious then you won't have the problem either. One sword swing and then shield cancel. If they attack you and you can dodge it and get an attack off before they're done attacking then you can get in a second attack generally, or at least in my experience.
@OT:
An argument could also be made that "Bugs = Exploits = Free Crowns/Tokens". I mean, prove to me they didn't purposely design Vanaduke to bug out sometimes on corpses and thus allow for an easy kill? Prove to me that they didn't design the zombies so they could be stuck in the corners. Under this logic they would be actually trying to help out us players and I see no further suspension of disbelief in this statement than in the statement made by the OP.
Also to those thinking that this game is hard, you're either too greedy while attacking or you don't know the strategies to do the various rooms. Especially in Firestorm; there are a lot of ways to reduce the difficulty by simply doing things a certain way.
I experience lag as well. Though I personally can notice when I'm lagging before seeing the results. To those who can't then sure lag sucks. But if you notice that you're lagging. For the love of all things chocolate, get your hands off the movement keys and just hold your shield until the lag is gone. 9/10 when I do this I end up perfectly fine and I haven't even run into anything or caught on fire.