A proxy might reduce your ping in WoW.

Here's the information about it.

Here's a link to Freecap, the program you should use.

Here's step-by-step instructions.

Remember:

• This is for Westnet and iinet customers only.
• Nothing is guaranteed.

Annoyed by this sudden non-working of Freecap I decided to look into this problem.

I didn't find anything to fix the Freecap solution in the original post but I think I may have found something better. This took me an hour or two of digging around and experimentation so you all owe me one.

Actually I didn't discover anything myself, I just followed the trail of disappointed AU/NZ players to this lengthy post (which you needn't read). The short of it is that some niggling part of WoW's implementation of TCP/IP causes unnecessary delays of about 100-200 ms. Supposedly proxy services (like the one mentioned in the original post above) fix this problem to give you a better ping.  (Though that is not to say they are obsolete in light of this fix, as they are still a more direct route at the very least.)

The thread suggests lots of things but I implemented just one, a very simple one. I'm sitting in-game with a ping of ~380, down from ~550. Go take a shufti in that thread if you want to try additional solutions which, supposedly, make things even better -- just make sure you report back here with your findings!

Here's what I did:

• open regedit
• go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces
• here are listed many adapters with funny names (GUIDs), find your network card by looking for the one with your IP address (I imagine this will be your LAN address unless you have some dial-up or USB modem)
• now that you've found the correct adapter, insert amongst its settings this key:
  Name: TcpAckFrequency
  Type: DWORD
  Value: 1
• you'll need to apply these changes -- the most fool-proof was is to restart your PC

Now I've no idea if this will mess up other TCP/IP things, but I daresay we should be fairly safe, as most latency-important things use UDP and hence would not be affected by this change.

If you do notice problems, change the registry key's value to 2 to return it to its "normal" state.

If you try this, common courtesy demands you report back with any latency improvements you may or may not experience.  

SmoothPing is another WoW tunnelling service. This one's free, and I've found it to be quite good so far. If you decide to try it out, go for one of the Seattle servers.

Instructions are on the SmoothPing website. Alternatively if you want to set up the tunnel manually, create a connection to the server (I'm using seattle02.smoothping.com) and add a dynamic port forward on port 1080.

After downloading a new proxy program (ProxyCap) and trying to connect to Ravenholdt using the 3FL proxy server again, I found that it offered some error logs and consequently some useful information in the form of an IP address and port number. I then supplied this information to a 3FL admin who tinkered with the proxy server.

You should be able to connect to Ravenholdt using the 3FL proxy once more (see Joel's original post for instructions on how to do so). Freecap should work fine. I've dropped over 200ms in ping as a result.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, you have to use gameproxy.3fl.net.au on port 1080 for the proxy address.