Before they didn't give you a choice. They would just change their networking and people with problematic connections would just be unable to play WoW.

Now if you have problems with the new networking you can just disable it.

They forced the "Optimize network for speed" change on everyone a while back and they said that it improved performance for the vast majority of players, but they rolled the change back specifically because of the small number of users (e.g. you) who were negatively affected by the change. The default may be worse for you, but it will be the better option for the vast majority of players, so that's why it's the default.

I guess my question is: Can you make the changes without logging in? If internet is bad enough one could foresee in theory log on-crash-log on-crash in a futile cycle to make the change.

@Amaxe

These settings are in a text file that is easy to edit (change a "1" to a "0"). Also you can change most settings in the launcher, and I would assume Blizzard would add this network option there.

Thanks for the insight.

@Amaxe
Yes, u can make the network changes prior to logging in. You may have to launch wow using wow.exe as opposed to launcher.exe in order to access this, as with network problems the launcher may not work.

http://i52.tinypic.com/hv3yg8.jpg

I love my non-capped 100 Mbps fibre connection.