Me and my friends have issues when playing P2P games

[crackfield777]

Hi. Me and my friends have a party with three players. Everytime, when I am a host, one of my friends (let's call him Player A) has ping issues. Each 15-20 minutes (or more often, depends on game) his ping goes that high that he can't play comfortable. On the opposite, the other friend (player B) has no issues when I am host (all three of us are in the same party).
When player A goes as host, me and player B have the same issues: ping goes high.

Afaik, all of us have same ISP. We live in the same city, so distance isn't our problem. And when we play on dedicated servers, we don't have such issues, so it's definetely P2P connection trouble (we tried games such as Overcooked 2, Project Zomboid and Deep Rock Galactic).

Player A tried reinstalling Windows a few times; we removed all programs like Hamachi that we ever have been using in our past. Also, me and player B didn't have any port rules in our router settings, so we asked player A to delete all rules that he had. It also didn't help. We really don't know what else we can do.

Anyone knows what could trigger such behavior? I would appreciate any answer.

[Elucidator]

hm, if you port forward, a tunnel program such as radmin vpn shouldn't be nessecary anymore.
If you run such program anyway, it will likely try to traffic stuff through the client anyway even if you connect to your real ip instead. I do not know if the client is causing the slowdown though.

Ursprungligen skrivet av Iceira W10:

one ís used braodcast and other is connections and data confirm.

TCP/IP is as it say it is and im sure you get UDP now spam other end with no confimation.

(I am just elaborating on this basically)

Generally UDP should be faster, but UDP can be blocked by firewalls or other programs. Games generally use UDP, since TCP just asks for latency issues in a game (if it requires a complex amount of information, which it usually does).

The reason is because TCP checks the connection and always asks for confirmation of whether or not a packet has arrived (not corrupted). If it didn't get this confirmation in time, it will resend it. And yes, TCP will do things 'in order', so it will retry that one thing before moving on to the next. It can make a server very busy with processes it shouldn't nessecarily need to do as well. TCP is used in most cases though. (regular web communication for example.). UDP is just 'send' and basically expects it to arrive and it also expect the server to be ready to receive it.

Meh- anyway, it is extremely odd that latency happens when a different protocol is used, unless something in their settings is actively blocking UDP packets, but then you'd expect whole disconnects (usually everything is blocked on the same protocol then). not just lag.

Considering when he hosts, the other two get lag, pretty much confirms the problem is on his end somewhere.
Recommend checking firewall settings as well as the settings of the router.
And I also recommend not using wi-fi when hosting a server. Though in theory it should be stable, idk if the antennas suddenly turn off for a moment for some reason.

Is his PC slowing down maybe as well when the latency issues happen? In that case it maybe on his pc. Still, you may want to monitor their router.

[crackfield777]

As I said, we tried playing without Radmin VPN, and lag still was there. Anyway, Radmin helped us to find something like pattern? idk, lag really causes only when protocol between me and player A (and between player A && player B as well) is UDP one.

Long time ago, we tried to disable firewalls at all. Also didn't solve our problem. Me and player B also always have wired connection, but when player A connected directly (no using router), problem also didn't solve. So, it comes that it's his PC problem then? I don't even know where to search now.

His PC also kinda faster than mine, I think. Maybe not much, but still. It's not because his PC doesn't have enough resources to process the game or anything.

We are wondering, if maybe we could pin exact protocol type for one program? Maybe, if player A could pin TCP for one game (cuz TCP really solves the problem somehow??) for all the time and protocol won't change during the time.

UPD: Player B assumed that protocol changing isn't the REASON of lag, but a consequence of it. It kinda makes sense, but there is still a lot of questions and no answers. What can be a reason of this then, if it's true?

[Muppet among Puppets]

Are you sure your games connect with tcp?
I would see that as an exception, and udp normal.

[Elucidator]

Player A may need to test some things, like 'pinging' their router while the lag happens.
a ping is always on the tcp protocol and if lag happens in game, you'd epect other things not to lag, but it could give an overview on what is happening on the router.
if it does lag on the tcp line, something makes the router very busy and its likely it then cannot process udp packets properly for some reason.
(that could be due to the way it changes the packets in order to send them to the proper computer)

If the protocol change happens due to lag, then something causes that lag in the first place. It would be an odd reaction of a program to change protocol when it detects lag somehow.
UDP is usually used in games, for showing where other entities are in a world in a game for example. TCP only for the chat box or something, rarely basically.


edit: (just imagining the latency issues it would cause to everyone if it was using TCP, omg. Zombie walks somewhere, packet gets lost, retry, players see the zombie still somewhere, their entire client freezes, they can't react (on the server they're already dead) etc.)

You don't want to force translate each udp to a tcp packet. You'll have a bad time in every game, or almost every game at least. You rather want people to skip their walk animation due to a packet loss or a small teleport due to a packet loss, than to force them to watch the entire thing happen, long after the server already went through all of that. Unless your goal is a smooth animation display (despite the occasional whole freeze thing).
They'll click on their mouse, and need to wait seconds before they see their character attack. (just because of a few packets lost) No, I don't recommend TCP in games.

[crackfield777]

Small update on this problem.
From the first message, I was kinda wrong: player A had another ISP.
Player A tried to play with other PC on his ISP, and it didn't solve the problem. Then, he went to someone with other ISP and we tried to play again.

...

No lags. At all.
Player A is going to try hard-reseting router. If it won't help, he will contact with ISP. If so, I hope ISP will make situation clear and will tell him what's wrong/how to solve the problem. If any solution work, I'll make update here, because all this time we were searching for similar problems and there always was no solution.
I hope one day this thread will help someone.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in trying to solve this!