Quote Originally Posted by 'softflow',index.php?page=Thread&postID=126334#pos t126334
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but the US servers are not necessarily located in their 'game time zone.' Here's the list of the US servers by datacenter from the wowwiki:

http://www.wowwiki.com/US_realm_list_by_datacenter

I'm in North Carolina, as you can tell, and my ping to the Seattle servers is around 200ms with this TCP Ack Frequency fix in Vista64. Before, it was around 280ms-300ms. However, my ping to the Dallas servers and sometimes the Boston servers is 40-55ms. I use Quartz for a cast bar as it has the lag built into the casting display (great feature!) and have easily hit 450-500 ms in instances on the Seattle servers, but rarely see it over 100 on the Dallas servers. Quite a difference!!

Check each data center and choose a server based on those results if you're really looking to improve your ping.
QFE

If you're looking to reduce your latency, THIS is the biggest factor. I live on the west coast, chose a mountain time server, and years later found out it was located in Boston. FAIL. My latency had always been around 300ms, after I disabled Naggling, I saw a huge improvement (by about 50%), but that change was nothing compared to playing on a local server.

Now I play on a server located within 70 miles of my home, and regularly enjoy sub-20ms pings =P (but server time is Central...)