This problem has been with me for months, through many different routers, and I'm at my wits end. After it BECAME obvious my ISP have no idea what's causing it, I decided to look for outside help so hopefully you guys know what to do.

I like to game A LOT, but on almost all of the games I play, I am getting ping that is higher than it should be. After hours and hours of torture talking to my ISP SUPPORT, I have determined that it's not caused by my internet speed (40mbps), my router or modem (it was high even while being directly connected to my modem), or firewall (I took it down, nothing changed). I spoke to someone from Geek Squad and was told it was the way which Road Runner sends you your connection and it cannot be FIXED, I hope he's wrong What areas are you playing in, if you are in the us and you play in euro servers, there will be problems.The only thing I could THINK off would be this,

You might need to open a port, see here http://portforward.com/ but you don't get the site you can search on google and youtube how to open a port for your router. The port for games can be much confusing, I suggest you go to there forum and look or ask for the right port.

Do a look here http://www.speedtest.net/ to really see how much you get, your ISP can say you should get 40mbps but you might get less then that.

Close all PROGRAM that are using internet like Skype, MSN, Xfire and so on.

And sometimes the internet might be very slow due to your ISP, some days I can't even do a thing online, to open a page takes 10min. So it could be your ISP fault, or it might even be your computer. Try it whit a other computer and see if it works better.

There ain't really a good way to see what's wrong, it could be if you have way to slow internet connection, it could even be a virus that is causing this, but try what I said and see if anything works.