When did you play? I started playing a year or so in beta, and It was already in. I assume it was in from the start.
They are pretty good about providing information: http://www.bloodlinechampions.com/bloodline_harbinger.php
You're not unlucky. That service hides its inability to deal with routers by piping all the game traffic through their central server instead of going directly from player to player. This is why you see major lag.
The majority of people play AoE2 on GameRanger, where you won't have this problem.