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I have a trial of lowerping going atm. It feels better, but quantified testing is harder to nail down.
The very sluggish nature of the WoW ingame ping readout (it updates its average at quite large intervals) makes it difficult to assess meaningful correlation between what it says and current ingame performance. I don't use quartz and don't know enough about it to comment on how useful it is for quantifying real performance. People are saying that it is reporting improvements, but is that comparing pre-2.3 numbers with post? Because I have a suspicion that the fastcasting changes in 2.3 could have effected the way the castbar is transacted compared to what it was before the patch.
My test scenario was to run two clients on my machine and set one character to follow the other. The distance that the follower trails the leader by from the leader's perspective gives an indication of real latency. You need to find a nice flat area with no obstructions or annoyances (I chose shimmering flats) then zoom out to max, go to a perfect top down view, then compare how close the follower is to the edge of your screen etc. Every time you start moving you are subject to spikes and imperfections in the follow logic in setting up the actual server side follow distance - for this reason I would start moving observe the stabilised following distance, stop, and repeat over and over to get an average. The test isn't foolproof of course, but its the best I could come up with for quantifying something so difficult to measure as relative position according to clients and servers when you can only observe the client(s).
I use Telstra cable in Brisbane. I tried running both WoW clients without lower ping, then with, then without etc and so on for sessions of about 5 minutes each, running back and forth over the same bit of flat ground... and compared the follow distance. After an hour or so of total sampling I determined that there was negligable difference on average and if anything follow distance was more consistent without connecting through lowerping. The ping reported by the game averaged ~400ms when running as normal, and ~225 when running using lowerping.
My conclusion, lowerping's real impact on gameplay (if any) does not match its apparent impact on the ping readout.
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