port forwarding necessity/unnecessity for online games

thedrama

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PC Gaming Tips: Port Forwarding: Slaying the Mythical Dragon of Online PC Gaming.

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Comments

Heero

I haven't had to forward any ports for gaming or torrenting since I got a router that implements UPnP correctly. Much easier to just let UPnP do it's job.

thedrama

Heero wrote: »

I haven't had to forward any ports for gaming or torrenting since I got a router that implements UPnP correctly. Much easier to just let UPnP do it's job.

Yeah, since UPnP does it automatically, it becomes much easier. But, how about opening a security breach by doing that?

SteveLord

I haven't had to dick around with ports in years either.

Whiteout

I was using the Blizzard downloader the other day to download the Diablo 3 Beta and those of you that have played Blizz games know how touchy their downloader is. I was getting about 100k dl speed, I wanted to play Diablo 3 that night, so that kind of speed wasn't going to cut it.

Did some reading and found out forwarding several ports could possibly speed the dl up. Went to my routers set up page 192.x.x.x and forwarded 2 ports. As soon as I hit "save changes" my dl speed rapidly increased to almost 2mb's.

Still not entirely sure how port forwarding works, but it helped me out here. Fyi this is the only time i've ever had to do this for anything gaming related.