Question Port forwarding problem

[gamer101010011]

Hello, im trying to forward ports for games, but when i check them on portchecker.com, they are still closed. I have a dynamic public IP.

 

[bill001g]

First check that the wan IP on your router really is what you see on a site like whatsmyip.

Next what games and where did you get the list of ports. There is a massive amount of idiots on gaming forums that blindly repost things they have no understanding of. They don't understand the diffrence between a port being "allowed" and being forwarded. Allowed ports just mean you do not block them with a firewall.

You really only need to port forward if you are running a server of some kind. Something like say a minecraft server.

Port scanners attempt to talk to the server and if you are not running a actual server on the port your are testing you will get no response and it will say it is closed.

 

[gamer101010011]

Thanks for your reply. So i looked at the resource monitor to find ports used while playing, then i checked those ports on portchecker.com and they were closed despite me being connected to the game server, is that good?

 

[kanewolf]

Thanks for your reply. So i looked at the resource monitor to find ports used while playing, then i checked those ports on portchecker.com and they were closed despite me being connected to the game server, is that good?

Portchecker is looking for software listening on a port. Game server software does this, but game client may not. Does the game software say that port forwarding is required to play? Normally it is not required to be a client.

 

[gamer101010011]

Portchecker is looking for software listening on a port. Game server software does this, but game client may not. Does the game software say that port forwarding is required to play? Normally it is not required to be a client.

No, but I've read that it's good to forward ports or use upnp for gaming. And when i use upnp, the portmap table is empty...

 

[bill001g]

Again you are reading stuff written by people who just "play" games in most cases. This includes many so called gaming sites. Many of those people if they have degrees have them in something like journalism they have little actual understanding about the technical details. If they had the knowledge they would make far more money programming.

Just like your post your read something and then repost it to other forums..I guess in this case you are asking why and not stating it as some fact.

Again you only need to port forward when you are running the SERVER. This is where understanding what a server and a client actual are makes a difference. Pretty much if you turn your machine off and nobody else can then play the game you are the server. If you turning your machine off makes no difference to other players then you are only a client.

UPnP is a special case mostly for game consoles. There are some very small games where you for example only play with 1 friend or maybe a few more. In these cases one of the game consoles acts as a server dynamically. It uses the UPnP feature to make it work without having to setup port forwarding. UPnP has been exploited by hackers so it is best to not have the feature enabled unless you know your are really going to use it.

The discussion of UPnP just distracts from the real question since it is a special niche case.

Most these shooter games say like counter strike use central servers run by the game company. All the players are "clients" and need no port forwarding.

Mostly you see the port forwarding crap posted on so called "competitive" shooter games. Large number of players think they are losing because of some technical issue with not enough frames per second or some networks setting rather than just admit they are bad at the game.

Even worse you see them try to claim port forwarding can affect latency or ping times or even increase their frames per second. This is all garbage written by people who have no clue what they are talking about. Pretty much port forwarding stuff either works or it completely fails....ie none of your friends can connect to your server just like the port scanner can not see your server when you do not actually have a server.

 

[gamer101010011]

Okay, but I experience issues that are impossible to explain. After playing for 10-15 minutes of playing I'm extremely delayed, the gameplay gets sluggish and unstable, enemies don't load on my screen properly (they are kinda sped up), my teammates see them before i see, I can't get peekers advantage vs anyone, my shots register as if there is 200m distance between me and them. I have to take a break so it stops. This issue happens both on my pc and ps5, so it has to be something with the internet.

 

[bill001g]

Hard to say what it is. It is not port forwarding. A port is either open or closed there is no inbetween. It always works or it always fails.

There are many things that can cause this. A lot of times it is the game itself. Can be many different setting in the game.

Hopefully you are not playing on wifi that by itself can cause this. Also a internet connection that comes in via any kind of wireless including mobile broadband causes issue in games.

In theory you could be also using all your internet bandwidth. Check that no downloads are running or other unkown devices are using internet. This most is a issue on smaller internet connection....say 25mbps. It is very hard to overload a large internet connection an not know it.

 

[gamer101010011]

Hard to say what it is. It is not port forwarding. A port is either open or closed there is no inbetween. It always works or it always fails.

There are many things that can cause this. A lot of times it is the game itself. Can be many different setting in the game.

Hopefully you are not playing on wifi that by itself can cause this. Also a internet connection that comes in via any kind of wireless including mobile broadband causes issue in games.

In theory you could be also using all your internet bandwidth. Check that no downloads are running or other unkown devices are using internet. This most is a issue on smaller internet connection....say 25mbps. It is very hard to overload a large internet connection an not know it.

I play on ethernet and my download speed is 600 mbs. I honestly dont have any idea whats going on...

 

[bill001g]

Do some simple testing let a constant ping run to say 8.8.8.8 in the background. See if you get data loss or large ping spikes to that IP when the game is having a issue
Depending what you find you then test other IP addresses.

Games are affected by so many things and people automatically blame the network. Then again the game companies never want to admit they wrote their code badly and that was the problem.

It will take some research to find the problem but I can be sure in game performance is not a port forwarding issue.

 

[gamer101010011]

Is it possible to run a longer speedtest?

 

[kanewolf]

Is it possible to run a longer speedtest?

You don't want speedtest. That attempts to use all your WAN bandwidth. You want ping.exe in a cmd.exe window on your PC.

 

[gamer101010011]

You don't want speedtest. That attempts to use all your WAN bandwidth. You want ping.exe in a cmd.exe window on your PC.

Could ddns be the solution?

 

[bill001g]

Could ddns be the solution?

What are you asking about now.....still port forwarding. Again you are not running a server.

DDNS again is related to running a server in your house. It is used to solve the problem that the ISP might change your IP from time to time. We are talking over many days or weeks in most cases.

If you got a IP change you would get kicked from the game and have to relog in.

 

[gamer101010011]

What are you asking about now.....still port forwarding. Again you are not running a server.

DDNS again is related to running a server in your house. It is used to solve the problem that the ISP might change your IP from time to time. We are talking over many days or weeks in most cases.

If you got a IP change you would get kicked from the game and have to relog in.

Ok but when i forceopened ports with portlistener, the gameplay improved...

 

[bill001g]

Ok but when i forceopened ports with portlistener, the gameplay improved...

This would take forever to explain why what you did can never do what you say. Running some random program on your machine will not change the way the game on your machine talks to the game server.

Again you need to test things like your internet connection. Also be 100% sure you actually have problems on both your pc and your console. The symptom you talk about is extremely common and is caused by settings in the game or maybe video driver issues.

 

[gamer101010011]

This would take forever to explain why what you did can never do what you say. Running some random program on your machine will not change the way the game on your machine talks to the game server.

Again you need to test things like your internet connection. Also be 100% sure you actually have problems on both your pc and your console. The symptom you talk about is extremely common and is caused by settings in the game or maybe video driver issues.

Ok, but the overall feeling is that something is blocking me, opponents ignore my shots, walk in my prefires and kinda override my shots and kill me, when i peek they see me first, the gameplay is not "free", I don't know how to describe it other than I'm behind the action, other players have the priority over me.

 

[gamer101010011]

One more thing, around 5-6am the gameplay gets better, so it could be just isp routing, but hard to believe its that bad in afternoons...

 

[bill001g]

One more thing, around 5-6am the gameplay gets better, so it could be just isp routing, but hard to believe its that bad in afternoons...

You seem to just be finding words you read someplace and have no clue what mean and assuming that is your problem. Routing in the internet is something that is negotiated between ISP mostly based on who owns different fibers etc and agreements to trade usage. It is not something that will change even in days. Maybe a circuit fails and it goes to a backup but it will not change based on the time of day.

Doesn't matter you do not pay enough money to be able to control the path your data takes. Even very large companies can not always lease space on the fibers that would take the most direct path.

Did you even replace your router based on your other thread. Although not common it would be more like that is the problem than something you can't do anything about anyway. Since you have been messing with the router config have you tried a factory reset and then just configure the admin and wifi passwords. Maybe you messed something up that is causing the router to be slow.

 

[gamer101010011]

You seem to just be finding words you read someplace and have no clue what mean and assuming that is your problem. Routing in the internet is something that is negotiated between ISP mostly based on who owns different fibers etc and agreements to trade usage. It is not something that will change even in days. Maybe a circuit fails and it goes to a backup but it will not change based on the time of day.

Doesn't matter you do not pay enough money to be able to control the path your data takes. Even very large companies can not always lease space on the fibers that would take the most direct path.

Did you even replace your router based on your other thread. Although not common it would be more like that is the problem than something you can't do anything about anyway. Since you have been messing with the router config have you tried a factory reset and then just configure the admin and wifi passwords. Maybe you messed something up that is causing the router to be slow.

OK, I will try vpn then, do I have to do anything to run it (forward ports etc) or not?

 

[bill001g]

Almost all modern VPN are designed to run with no port forwarding requirement. Again port forwarding is only a client/server thing.

In theory VPN should always make things worse. There is the added CPU processing needed to encrypt/decrypt the data which can take some small amount of time. You data also has to go all the way to the vpn companies data center before it goes to the final destination. This extra distance should add latency. So both these should always increase your in game ping times.

Now in some cases vpn can improve the performance. This is mostly in asia for example where not all ISP pay to have access to the most direct unsea fibers. So in those cases sometimes you can connect to a VPN data center locally that has paid for a better connection.

In the USA and the EU the performance gain if any is much less.

This is all going to be trial and error. You must first find a vpn service that you can connect to their data center with good latency and no issues. Then that VPN service must have a better connection to the game company data center location than you do directly. This can get costly to try since many of these services do not have free trials.

Note if the problem is actually some setting in your machine or you are for example having cpu issue the vpn client software is going to make things worse since it also uses cpu.