Need ports

What are the ports to open for this game? I don't know if it's going to help with some rubberbanding issue, but I would like to know the IP to port forward. Thanks!

SE's troubleshooting suggestions... ports are listed at the end:

http://support.na.square-enix.com/fa...la=1&kid=67505

But really, you shouldn't need to forward ports with the routers released in the last 5 years or so. Your router may already be trying to forward ports via the UPnP feature--which is sometimes a source of problems because it doesn't behave properly. If so, you may want to try disabling it and let it's native NAT manage things--it should work just fine if you have a fairly recent router. The only time I've HAD to forward a port was to set up remote desktop from work--but I also had a local firewall on that desktop that would only allow specific IP's to connect to the service. And I've been gaming on line for nearly 20 years, all manner of devices, and more than one device at once as well.

Port forwarding can expose your system directly to the internet via the ports you assign. That's basically what it is used for--bypassing the security features that would otherwise prevent unsolicited traffic into your network. When using NAT, the router can identify which system is supposed to receive a packet based on the information in the headers related to the session you opened. With ports forwarded, you loose some of that functionality (and protection). So it should really only be used more as a test or a temporary fix until you can find a better solution--there may be different levels of security on your router that you can toggle (like Secure NAT and such) that will resolve issues, but still retain the basic security of the stateful inspection protections.

Thanks Raist for your post

Sometimes Windows Firewall can be annoying so make sure you open them up there if your still having problems

Sorry, but you don't need to open any ports on your computer. The ports listed in the SE FAQ are OUTGOING ports (what your computer will try to connect to) not incoming ports. As long as you're router/firewall allows you to connect to those ports then you don't have to do anything else (by default all home routers will allow outgoing traffic).

You only need to open ports on your firewall when something from the Internet needs to connect to your computer (i.e. you're hosting a server such as a multiplayer game etc).

With FFXIV we are all clients connecting to their server. Once our client connects to their server data can (and does) flow in both directions.

This is also why multiple people can play FFXIV at the same time from the same Internet connection because they're all making outgoing connections to SE, not SE to us.

Opening ports is just going to weaken your network security as it's not needed by the game (and it might expose other things actually running on those ports).

Unfortunately your rubberbanding problem is likely caused by packetloss. Possibly in your own network by faulty cables, but most likely they're being dropped somewhere on the Internet on route to the SE servers.

Easiest way to check this is to do a traceroute. Apparently Excaliburs IP address is 199.91.189.38 (may/may not be correct, but it'll be in same data centre so good enough). Then if you open a command prompt up (from start menu) you can type:

tracert 199.91.189.38

It'll show a list as it goes through each node on the Internet to get to the server with three sets of times in milliseconds of how long that step took. If you get any steps that are just starred out completely that's not bad, it just means that node is blocking the ICMP traffic the traceroute is using. As you go further down the list the numbers will get higher, if you see them drastically jump, that might be your problem. And if one or two of the numbers has a star for the time, but there is still a time for the others then that's likely the problem node as it lost the packet there.

Unfortunately if you do spot a potential problem there isn't much you as an end user can do except ask your ISP if it's possible for them to route around that node to get to the final destination (they may/may not be willing to try and help since ultimately it's probably not their network that's causing the problem either).

Oh and if you want to be really accurate about which IP the server is using, while the game is running (and you have logged in/actually in the world), from the command prompt again run:

netstat -n

and look for an IP address starting 199.91. because that's your data centre so that'll be the Excalibur server.

Hope this has been of some help!

I guess that would be true for the ideal situation but for me I had connection problems until I added the ports into Windows Firewall. The message that says Windows Firewall needs access to blah blah program will you allow or deny never came up for me.