Ping, ICMP, and Connection quality (important, please reply)

I play several games, all of which tell me that my ping is bad, i connected to the closest servers to me (EU) from Egypt, and the best pings i got (according to speedtest.net) were over 380ms.

I tried turning off the firewall completely and it significantly improved my ping (in terms of observable numbers).

I was then advised to just allow all traffic to and from game related software as opposed to turning off the firewall completely, however, the day after, i found my ping spiking again everywhere, not just Tribes, even on speedtest.net i got extremely high pings from servers in my own country, and not fluctuating ping, stable HIGH ping.

I did some searching and i found out that by allowing all ICMP traffic to go in and out, my computer will be able to send and receive pinging requests to/from other servers as opposed to blocking them completely, and when i did that, my pings everywhere seemed to have decreased by a big margin again.

so here is my question, by allowing all ICMP traffic to go in and out freely, am i getting legitimate ping improvements (better connection quality to servers), or have i only allowed the correct pings to be shown (ping numbers lowered, but connection quality still the same)?

 

Are you using the Windows firewall, or a separate firewall? Some firewalls screw things up like traffic shaping.

 

i use Norton 360, latest version.

 

Ok. Ping is simply a response time. It means nothing else. It has nothing to do with connection quality (though lower pings usually mean better connections).

Ping is one of the few tools that relies on ICMP. You are simply reducing your ping without any real gains otherwise. If you want to really increase your gains, you should see if you can enable TCP/UDP traffic. Most bandwidth heavy traffic goes through those protocols.

 

there are several UDP and TCP related traffic rules on my firewall, they don't completely block all TCP/UDP traffic, but only apply specific rules.

what type of TCP/UDP traffic should i allow in and what should i not?

**here's a list of blocked TCP/UDP traffic on my firewall, all of which block specific ports:
Blocked inbound NETBios UDP traffic.
Blocked inbound NETBios Name UDP traffic.
Block Windows File Sharing TCP and UDP.
Block Windows 2000 SMB TCP and UDP.
Block EPMAP Tcp and UDP.
Block UPnp Discovery UDP.
Block Web Services on Devices TCP and UDP.
Block LLMNR UDP.
Block Web Services Discovery UDP.
Block SSDP TCP.

i don't know if these mean anything, but i just wanted to show you the list of blocked traffic on my firewall.

there's also this one "Block Inbound and Outbound ICMPV6", i'm not sure if i should turn that rule off!!!

 

for gaming, ping means everything.
i just want to know, if my ping is high, does that necessarily mean that my response time is bad??