Friend can't connect to my hosted games when my other friend has already joined?
1 replies, posted
Hi guys,
I'll make this brief and to the point. My two best friends are currently away at college: one at Liberty, they other at York. It's fun to play games online with each other every once in a while, but I've found that it is impossible to get both of them together in the same game lobby: as in, if one has connected to me, as the host, the other cannot join until the other has disconnected from me. In all situations, I'm the host, and I have all necessary ports forwarded to my router, with no firewall blocking me from the internet.
We've tried Age of Empires II to no avail, and it was only very recently when trying to get together to play Rise of Nations that one or the other could join, not both. As soon as one left, the other could connect. Since they are both attending separate colleges, I believe the problem is one has a moderate NAT, and the other a strict NAT. But this is just a guess, and I'm sort of confused at how something like this can happen. In any case, neither of them can host because of said restrictions on their respective networks, leaving me as the middleman for game-hosting.
So I ask you: does anyone know a workaround for this problem? I have asked them to call their IT departments and see if they could have ports open to their specific school IPs, but they're not allowed. They don't have any firewalls running, it's only their colleges' network that is stopping them.
An optional solution that just popped into my head is I could rent out a dedicated server for use with any games we wish to play together. Is this viable? Will it work if I say, want to play Rise of Nations with them? I don't fully understand dedicated servers, so any advice on the matter would be helpful.
You might try Hamachi and set up a virtual lan, then host like you would a LAN game.
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