I have a friend who started playing call of duty. He is seeing a lot of latency and slow pings. I had him connect direct to his modem and is cut the slowness in half. He wants to get the same performance out of the mikrotik. I told him it would not be safe to leave those ports open all the time. For anyone who has opened ports for gaming, is there a way so that while he is playing the ports can be open, and when he is done the ports are closed? The only thing I could think of would be to assign a dhcp reservation that is totally open (not sure how to make an IP address totally open to all ports and no firewall) and have him manually assign his pc this IP address when he plays, and when he does not play go back to dhcp which would be protected.
I think that any game should be able to run without having to open ports. Only if you run a game server, ports need to be opened (which makes sense).
Especially on game consoles some games require open ports and therefor rely on solutions like UPnP. It stinks.
Back to the problem…could it be that your friend has double NAT: that the modem is also doing NAT? In that case you might want to reconsider using a MikroTik as router. What model is he using?
The ports in question would be on the forward chain, not the input chain, so they wouldn’t expose the router itself to anything. They would only expose the gaming device, but no more than it is already exposed by attaching directly to the modem. If you’re not worried about the latter case, you shouldn’t worry about the former case.
Absolutely no ports are needed for call of duty, when using steam or other game sites.
If you are trying to run your own gaming server, good luck with that.