Question Problems connecting to specific friends game, and pinging his router.

[Rskilner]

So I have been having this problem for a long time and I haven't been able to find any solutions online that have helped me fix it. Basically what happens is with a specific friend in certain games, I cannot play with him and it disconnects me from the game, or other weird problems happen such as packet loss if we manage to get into a match. We have had issues in games such as Risk of Rain 2, Minecraft (using LogMeIn hamachi), and the latest Call of Duty Warzone. The strange part is in other games, such as Apex Legends, Battlefield 5, and Fortnite, I haven't had any issues at all. An example of an issue is in Call of Duty warzone, I will try and join my friend's game and it either won't let me join his party, or it will and then when he starts looking for a match it will kick me from the party. Sometimes it works if someone else is the party leader but not always.
I don't know a lot about networking stuff but I am pretty sure it has something to do with his and my network as I have had similar problems in the past connecting to a different computer on the same router, and I am also unable to ping his IP address where I can for all my other friends. Not sure if anything knows anything about this but if they do any help or advice would be much appreciated.

 

[anotherdrew]

@Rskilner
This is a tough one. In the name of security and convenience, some device makers and providers intentionally "break" the internet and I think that is what is going on.

1. You can't ping your friend ... This is actually pretty normal. Most router makers set "drop incoming ICMP echo requests" as the default. ICMP echo requests are ping. The claim is this is for security as it makes your network sort of invisible to the internet. If hackers can't see you, they are less likely to try and hack you.

2. I did some reading about Risk of Rain and CoD ... I don't play the games, so this only based on what I read ... It seems that these games require port forwarding to play online with your friends, although, it seems that if you use steam multiplayer you can get around that. I don't know how much you know about port forwarding, but we figured out a while ago that we don't have enough IPv4 address for everyone. A work around was a system called NAT that allows multiple devices to share one public IP address. This works great for outgoing IP traffic ... it does not work so well with incoming. AFAIK, Hamachi is also a service that tries to get around the NAT issue by creating a VPN.

So, the only issues with my thoughts is that why is this only an issue with 1 friend? Maybe your other friends did the port forwarding? Maybe your friend's ISP is blocking some traffic? Is there a firewall setting on your or your friend's computer that is stopping some traffic? It's really hard to know without more information/testing.