Manually Forwarding Ports vs. UPnP?

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

So I have a random observation.
I live in Australia and find it hard to find games in most playlists except the cycling / featured playlists. Usually I can get a match on ranked slayer using “expanded”. But it depends on time of day etc… and sometimes I just give up and boot up MCC or another game. MCC appears to just work, and fast. It has been like this for years now.

I have created smurf accounts before and found that finding matches is much more consistent. However as soon as my MMR is up again I can no longer find matches.
I’m not exceptionally good… usually ranking a Diamond 4 - Diamond 6. So I feel population shouldn’t be a massive issue for me.

However, I recently changed my router to use manually forwarded ports, instead of relying on UPnP… lately I’ve been finding matches quite fast and on “Balanced”!! This is revolutionary for me…
Does anyone know if there is any logic in this? Or am I just experiencing a self isolation population spike or potentially just going crazy in isolation.

My theory is that the search phase in matchmaking is faster and my placement in the game is accepted more easily if the ports are permanently open as apposed to opening and closing them. Potentially losing the spot to another player. But I really have no clue.

PS. My menus all show open NAT both before and after the change BTW.

2

From my understanding, when UPNP works, it works well and port forwarding is unnecessary. Sometimes a router does not do UPNP very well in which case you need to manually forward ports. I have come across both (thankfully my current one does UPNP well enough), so I don’t think you are going crazy :slight_smile:

3

It’s entirely on how good your uPNP implementation is. Many people just use the ISP router, and then think the issue is the game or the server. In reality, more often than not, it’s the ISP’s router that is implementing a poor connection using uPNP.

uPNP is intrinsically more secure, as the port is removed after the session has ended, whereas a static forward on a router means that port is always forwarded. Something to be aware of.

PS. Don’t confuse NAT with uPNP. Very different technologies. :slight_smile:

4

Hmm I’m using an Asus rt-AC68U.
You’d think an Asus router should be reliable.

The only reason I turned it on was because they released a firmware update that’s got a special ‘gaming’ port forward section that has halo 5 as an option. (Even though UPnP is still enabled?.. Weird… )

Ah well just go with what works I guess.
But I’d be curious if anyone in a similar situation gets the same result…