Well im in NSW and i am not seeing this. I connect to US all the time with a 280-305 ping using NAT and on the odd occasion we have had to use proxies it has only jumped to about 330-340 ping.

Not sure why your seeing 600, thats sucky, but i can for certain confirm that proxies are usable from AU, and for me at least are perfectly playable.

Not sure what proxy it is that we connect through, i guess a US one since i read somewhere Istari said nothign in AU yet, but nevertheless, we (Clan Tyranny) can play with them and they work fine.

Nielo what he is saying is he is connected to other Australian players via the proxy which is in the US. That is his message needs to go to the US, back to the other Australia player, back to the US and finally back to him. Connecting to US players from Australia will only produce a small increase as the messges just need to make a minor detour. But yeah Stacked_Actr said what the op was looking for.

I'm in teh same boat, forced to connect to an Australian via proxy (I'm in New Zealand) and it raised my latency from 100 with them to 550

I played a game the other night against australians, some of whom were on proxies.

In the lobby they had pretty high pings, however in game their ping dropped back to a pretty reasonable level.  

We certainly didn't notice any substantial network lag until about 10 minutes in when one of the players on the winning team was disconnected.  

Then we were again fine in terms of playability until 5 minutes later when one of us on the losing team disconnected.  Then we were pretty much fine in terms of network speed until the end of the game.

Stacked I believe you were in that game as well, how'd you find it? (apart from pwning me with your boulder toss )