Objective: help you identify real problems, avoid bad technical decisions and choose a solution adapted to your server or infrastructure.
Physical distance matters
The further the traffic travels, the greater the latency. For games, voice and interactive applications, a few tens of milliseconds can change the feeling.
Routing and network quality
Two servers in the same country can have different latencies depending on the operators, BGP paths and interconnections. A good network is not just about location.
Mitigation and network detour
Some protections pass traffic through remote scrubbing centers. This may protect, but add ping. We must therefore seek a balance between mitigation capacity and network proximity.
In-game impact
A stable latency is often more important than a very low but unstable ping. Packet losses, jitter, and changing routes can cause freezes or disconnections.
What to check
Test from player regions, monitor jitter, compare before/after mitigation and choose protection with routing consistent with your community.
Conclusion
The best approach is to start from the real symptom, check the technical causes, then choose protection adapted to the protocol and the community. An effective solution must protect without degrading the user experience.