Partial solution for playing games behind one IP address/router

[blstriker]

Many of you had the same problem as I, which was not being able to play multiplayer games on the Internet with more than 1 user. For example, I could play starcraft on the battle.net without any problems, but if somebody else on my LAN also tried to access battle.net using starcraft, this would not work. I believe the reason is because these games require open ports and you can't have duplicate ports on the same IP address. When you have multiple people play the same game which require the same ports, the problem arises.

I found a partial solution that works quite well. Not all of you can use this solution though. My university supplies a VPN client which allows any computer to create a virtual private network to the school's network. This is so that we can get access to university materials and accounts. I found that each VPN connection gets it's own IP address, even behind a dsl/cable router. So what I did was create a VPN for each computer that I want to play online and each one can play starcraft with no problem. This is because each computer has it's own unique IP address and doesn't try to share ports on my single DSL IP address.

I say this is a partial solution because not all of you have access to a source to create a VPN with. For those of you who have trouble with online games and access to a VPN, try making a VPN with each computer on your LAN and the game should work fine.

 

[bex0rs]

Nice post. Might I also add that this effectively causes all of your packets to be routed through the remote VPN server before reaching the 'net, so if you are playing a ping sensitive game, you may be adversely affected, but for Starcraft-ish games, this is a great solution.

~bex0rs

 

[blstriker]

That's right, it does at latency to your game, so for Quake or UT, this might not be that great, but it's better than not being able to play at all right?