Running a competitive FPS tournament – how are you guys shielding the dedicated servers from DDoS without wrecking ping?

[Nathan Brooks]

I’m putting together a small 12-team invitational for a competitive FPS and the biggest thing on my mind right now is DDoS protection. Last season my regular dedicated servers got hit mid-series by a UDP reflection flood and everything turned into a slideshow – players were pulling 200+ ms spikes and the admins had to just blackhole the server IP, which killed the match entirely. We’re running on UDP because we can’t afford the overhead of TCP retransmits during a live game, but that also means the usual port-based filtering doesn’t really help.

My question is how people are actually mitigating big floods without adding latency to the actual players. I’ve read that old-school scrubbing centers and upstream blackholing push your traffic through a backhaul and add like 20-50 ms, which is death for a shooter. Has anyone deployed anything at the server level – things like anycast routing, hardware offload on the NIC, or filtering rules that actually keep legit game traffic flowing while eating the flood? Curious what’s proven itself in a real match scenario versus just looking good on paper.

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