NAT Negotiation Error : Relic fail for Company of Heroes players!
A damp fog of death spreads throughout the forest. You wonder why you chose to come here. In a small hut on the side of the mountain an old man with a massive book writes the never ending tale. The story about : NAT! Few who hear it of its treasures live to tell the tale. It has consumed the souls of Gods, Kings, and Men! (No Gods or Kings. Only Man - Ed)
You speak of NAT in hushed tones. “NAT Lore! Old man, Speak! What do you know of this?” You ask. The old crooked man, eons old, looks up from his scibbles and says…
- “What…is your favourite colour?”
For ages myself and fellow CoH gamers have had constant NAT negotiation errors when trying to connect to each other. Sometimes we couldn’t get a game at all. In about ten tries we might connect once or twice.
According to one of the many forum threads, it’s a worldwide error, Relic DON’T know how to fix it, and when you post anything about it on the Relic forum it gets deleted!! Well I thought I’d add some of the solutions here that might help anyone else suffering the NAT plague!
1)) I fixed the problem by setting my DSL modem to a “PPPoE Bridged” mode. And then setting my router to connect via PPPoE, rather than “Automatic configuration - DHCP” (had to give it the username and password that the DSL modem used to use to connect)
2)) If you are on a DSL connection, you may need to ask your ISP to forward ports for you. You may be behind a NAT inside your ISP. That is, a router that needs it’s ports forwarded as well, but one you can’t control.
Another poster opened the following ports 6112,9100,30260,30261,6113 and 9101. But I think all you need is 6112 UDP and 30260 UDP.
What I did:
I opened up those two ports via Control Panel > Windows Firewall > Add port tab
Then I updated my fireware on the router (Linksys WRT54G)
In the router setup I have also forwarded those two ports.
I can connect to gamers locally now, but for some reason I’m having problems connecting to hosts in Sweden or Germany for example. If in the games list in CoH you see a red X where the ping should be, that indicates that you won’t connect to it. Like your computer can’t see that dude’s computer.
www.portforward.com has all the solutions and router fixes for most if not all makes and sizes of routers and games. It’s a work in progress for me, but at last I can get some games in!
Updates to follow.
- “Blue…no yellow!!”
