Windows Firewall or Router Port Forwarding?

[Val155]

Hi all you pros,

Quick question. My kids play World of Warcraft and have been experiencing a lot of latency lately. I wanted to setup port fowarding to see if it would assist in their connection to the game's servers.

I obtained the three ports for the World of Warcraft game. I went into my router (Sagemcom F@st5260) and went to the Port Forwarding tab. I added a rule for all three ports for the game. I typed "World of Warcraft Port 1" for the "Service Name". For the "External Host" field I left it blank. For the "Internal Host" field I listed their computer's IP Address. For the "External Port" and "Internal Port" I listed the same port. For example, the first port was 1234, so I listed it in both the External and Internal fields. I repeated this process for the last two ports for the game.

I then went to the Windows 10 Defender Firewall and added the three port rules to that application as well.

Did I do this correctly? Will this help reduce latency? Do I need to port forward in both the Router and in the Windows 10 Defender Firewall?

Also, should I "reserve" the PC's IP address for the port forward in the Router's settings?

I understand not to list the computer in the "DMZ" tab of the router as that would make the entire PC available to anyone to inflitrate. So I only placed their PS4 in that DMZ list.

Any guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[bill001g]

It will make no difference. You only need port forwarding when traffic is INITIATED from the internet. For WoW all sessions are established by the internal machine sending the first packet on the ports to the wow server. The router allows traffic to return on these ports. Firewall policy also by default allow traffic to return.

None of the above is related to latency.

Most latency is caused by distance. It can also be caused by congestion. If you are overloading your internet connection traffic will be delayed. You would need to take some action to make sure you do not exceed your bandwidth. There can also be congestion in the internet between you and the server but that you can do little about. Some people for example see higher ping times from 5pm to 10pm when everyone is home from work.

High latency actually does not cause huge problems for games. They adjust based on the latency. The main issue comes if the latency jumps all over the place. The software can not then adjust the time difference between the server and client pc.

 

[Val155]

Interesting. So then I just wasted my time. lol. I wonder why their tech support recommends port forwarding as a solution. Usually the game will become very laggy for the kids and will get latency spikes causing the game to stutter and delay. The specs of their machine are good for the games recommended specs. How about for playstation and adding it to the DMZ in the router settings? Still a waste of time?

 

[failboat]

"dmz host" and upnp are very bad implementations security wise.
it's common to port forward consoles so that you can be the "server" in player served games like CoD. games like WoW are hosted on blizzard servers. The best way is to forward the ports for the specific games you want on the ps4 and not all of them.

latency can come from many places. one way for sure is from swamping your down/up. check your router's bandwidth usuage when latency happens. it's going to be from a download or upload using everything.

 

[Val155]

how would i check the bandwith usage when that occurs?

 

[bill001g]

Some routers have a menu that shows it. You may have to turn off the hardware assist to get it to work. Turning off the hardware nat assist will not affect most internet connections but connections more than 200mbps can not reach full speed with this off.

Your other option is to just manually look at all the machines in your house. The resource monitor screen should show the network usage rates and what is being talked to. A somewhat simpler test would be to turn off all but the game machine and see if the problem goes away.