The world of video games is constantly affected by revolutionary changes and new ideas of ambitious developers. One of the biggest transitions that shook the world of gaming was the introduction of online games and competitive events. Today, we have hundreds of polished, constantly updated products that offer the platform for digital competition and display of skill, with some players and teams transforming the activity into a successful career.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have gamers with entertaining personalities that create content or stream their experience on Twitch, YouTube, and other popular platforms. Showing a window into their lives and playing games for interested viewers, they receive sponsorships and donations from fans that feel engaged and interested in their product. In this way, the world of gaming and video game streaming becomes a competitor to traditional forms of media and entertainment.
The approaches discussed above can be merged and have one technical aspect that binds them together – dependency on internet connection. For streamers and competitive players, ensuring stability and internet speed minimizes the latency between the server that hosts the gaming event and the personal computer, while streamers need a stable connection to maintain contact with the streaming platform and viewers. The disruption of competitive play can mean the difference between victory and defeat, and inconsistent streaming fails to capture the attention of new potential viewers.
In this article, we will go over the threats to the player’s internet connection and how to identify, prevent and stop them. Continue reading to learn how proxies can improve your playing experience. With safe, legitimate providers near you, the connection will use a different IP address, and potential criminals will have no way of knowing your real identity, let alone threaten it with DDoS attacks.
Proxies are a lightweight solution, and the market full of ambitious providers will help you find the most stable, reliable option for gaming. To learn more about the setup, types of proxies, and their functionality, check out Smartproxy — an industry veteran with affordable deals and learn about effective solutions to internet privacy problems in their blog articles.
The danger of IP address exposure
While most of us do it every single day, there is a lot of moving parts when a device enters the internet. As the delivered information leaves the router, your internet service provider assigns a public IP address that is rarely changed and acts as your passport for traversing the Wide Area Network (WAN).
Gamers and streamers use the same address to connect to video game hosts and streaming platform servers. If it gets into the wrong hands, the situation can turn into a serious threat to not only your internet connection but the devices in your Local Area Network (LAN).
The worst part is you don’t need to be a hacker or experienced cybercriminal to sabotage the internet connection of another user if you know their IP address. Anyone can launch a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), bombarding the player or streamer with a connection request. Imagine it like this: could you leave your house if someone was banging at your door and blocking it? While there is no danger for your personal property inside the house, there’s no way to access the outside world. We hope this analogy is helpful and shows how anyone can disrupt your internet connection if they have your IP address.
Hide your address with a proxy server
Proxy servers are a good solution to the problem for players that want to maintain a stable connection with minimal latency without exposing their IP address. For this type of protection, you have two options: residential or datacenter proxies.
Residential addresses are the expensive option with increased security. By sharing IPs with other devices serviced by internet service providers, you get an authentic address but a less stable connection. Residential proxies are mostly used by businesses performing data-sensitive tasks, where anonymity has a higher priority than internet speed.
Datacenter IPs are cheaper, come in bulk, and reside in a strategic location that helps internet users maintain respectable internet speed. However, if one address gets banned from accessing the web servers, others can face the same fate. Still, for gaming and streaming sites, these addresses rarely make the blacklists which are why they are the superior option for such activities.
Before you get your first proxy server, we strongly advise staying away from free proxies. Without law-abiding guarantees from legitimate providers, you can never know the individuals operating these servers. More often than not, they have cybercriminals behind the scenes, using public proxies as traps to spy on data. Exposing your address to a free proxy can do more harm than gaming or streaming on the main one. Do yourself a favor and stick to legitimate providers that care about the performance of proxy servers and you won’t be able to tell the difference between connections for a very affordable price!
