Not wanting to sound like I’m plugging a product or anything, but…. yesterday I went back to using SmoothPing. My latency is now down to 80ms in arenas/bgs and the delay between pressing Fan of Knives and seeing the animation seems barely noticable.

It comes at a price though, $6 a month or $16 for 6 months. It works by connecting you to the Blizz server via one of SmoothPings proxy servers. The data is sent encrpyted, so your ISP automatically flags this as high priority traffic, giving you a much faster connection to the WoW servers.

If you’re struggling with bad ping times, or having disconnection issues, it could be a good idea giving it a try. You can get a free account that will DC you every 20mins, but that’s long enough to see what sort of difference this will make.

Alternatively (see, I’m not on commission! ), if you’re technically minded and have root access to a decent server, you can make your own. The software needed is free and not too tricky to setup. I’ve done this before on a Linux server (to get around the Firewall at my last job) – you could install Antinat (or any other SOCKS proxy) on the server then setup Freecap and Putty on your PC to route the WoW traffic through your proxy server. Great results are not guarenteed, but hey it’s worth a try if you’re into that sort of thing

Registry Settings

Tamatar has pointed out that you can also adjust registry settings to improve your connection. There’s a lot of information about this, searching for “TCP ACK Frequency” should give you the information you need. There’s a fair bit about the technique, including testing/results, here at the http://whirlpool.net.au forums.