Really late to this but I just wanted to pop in and say that ping doesn't mean you can't compete. I play in New Zealand which has approximately the same ping as Australia and I PvP just fine, even managing to squeak my way into a gold rating in Feast. I heard that a couple of the top people in Feast on my datacenter also play from Aus/NZ, and one of my friends even plays from the Europe region which has the most horrendous ping coming from there and last I checked he was high up there in the ratings. Yes, there are disadvantages like it's harder to react to a melee LB but there are also advantages like if you quickly turn around corners around a wall it looks like you're going through stuff and it's real confusing, at least, that's what my friends told me. I always wondered why people seemed a bit slow when chasing me down.

500 ms ping to WoW sounds like you need a better ISP. My friends I played with in WoW prior to the Oceanic servers, we averaged about 200-250 ping and we were all over New Zealand and Australia. :x My couple of Australian friends also don't have that bad ping in this game either. We get about 250-300 ping if we don't use a VPN.