PORT FORWARDING

[Raist]

I've never had to forward ports for either FFXI or XIV--and I don't use PnP either. That's going back to around late 2005, with different brand name routers--Blitzz, Ativa (rebranded Belkin), and my current Netgear. May daughter facetimes on her ipod touch, while playing Elsword on her laptop, and I play XI or XIV on either my PC or my laptop. Never had issues with any of them because of my local network setup. These aren't high-end models either... I've never paid more than $40 for my routers at local retailers (not an ebay or amazon deal, I got them from brick and mortar stores). NAT has come a long way, and so long as your client is maintaining the session properly, it shouldn't be a problem. SE just puts that out there as a CYA sort of thing, as it does resolve issues with certain security models (like when stricter firewall rules are in place). The only time I've forwarded a port is for Torrent use or when I needed to RDP to my desktop from the outside--but never for XI/XIV. It's just one of those things for you to try to rule it out as a problem.

So, the port forwarding may or may not be needed--it depends on your particular situation.

[KisaiTenshi]

May daughter facetimes on her ipod touch

Facetime, Skype and various other remote access software (including google drive, dropbox, etc) actually keep their processes running and connected to a server outside your network, that's how you're able to access your cloud files, or files physically on your machine without having to leave ports open on your system. In general you shouldn't -have- to open ports if everything worked properly. Traditionally you had to open ports because the software firewall or router was changed from default "allow everything out" to "allow only what I say out" since that's also how botnets communicate. The reverse, allowing traffic in is usually a "block unless initiated from the inside", like games.

As I mentioned in another thread, the "crashing the network" thing I've been able to do with the WRT54G when it was put behind my then-ISP 's Television over IP service, the multicast traffic overwhelmed it after several minutes and then rebooted itself. I suspect something similar to be the case for those who experience this.

That said, I've been peering over at the netstat list every time I see the game stutter and the highest I've seen FFXIV at is 12% CPU, 8KB/sec recieve and 2KB/sec transmit. Without analyzing the packets themselves I can't really dig in further, though it may have something to do with congestion control. Or as pointed out the TOE/LSO may be bad on the network card or router. If you have matched gear (eg realtek+realtek, Atheros+Atheros, Broadcom+Broadcom, it may enable vendor-specific features that don't work properly) I know atheros gear does this.