The significant thing about "script kiddy DDOS" level attacks, is that they significantly raise the effort and expense for the smallest projects. This is exactly where the most important innovations happen:

http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

Finally we moved over to OVH and placed a few really powerful servers in-front of the game server and applied some ipfilter rules to reduce common attacks. That ended up being the cheapest option out of all the options

The cheaper attacks seem to be at the level, where machine learning could be able to counter them. Raising the bar for inexpensive attacks would be a huge boon to the internet and human progress. It wouldn't be that expensive to fund, either.

We used to run a game server for a small community of around 400-500 people and DDos attacks were something we had to face almost every week, whenever someone got upset with the admin team, the go to solution was was to DDos, you get scammed by another player? DDos. Got banned for saying racist things ingame? DDos. You figured out a new way to cheat in game and the admins fixed it? DDos.

I wonder if this sort of thing could be honeypotted? Give perpetrators a way to figure out and target a fake "edge server" of a particular user? (Which only affects about 5% of your user base, let's say.) However, that "edge server" is actually a honeypot that gathers data on the attack, and correlates that to support emails to the admin team, or flame wars in the game's forums.

This is the kind of suckage that holds back the entire network, but which can ultimately be defeated:

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html