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Xbox Live NAT Type Technical Understanding

James Bond

James Bond

Diamond Member
I picked up MW2 the other day for Xbox360. We have 2 Xbox's in my house and play online with both.

I noticed when joining a game that it said NAT Type: Moderate. This struck me as odd... Moderate? WTF is that supposed to mean?

I googled around and found about 500 yahooanswer posts with people talking all sorts of crazy shit that had nothing to do with networking at all.

When looking around I read that Xbox Live "works better when you forward certain ports", although I don't understand why you would ever need to have forwarded ports in the first place. Connections always initiated from inside out, right? Right now both Xbox's seem to work fine, even when we are both online at the same time... and if PAT'ing was the issue, we would have major issues on at least one..

Anyone have a decent understanding on this?
 
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Lots of games have this feature. Basically they say it might keep you from getting in to a game. I've never seen it happen. In MW2 on PC mine said strict, Forwarded the ports and it says open now, Only difference I see is I host the games sometimes.
The only thing I can think of is the match making system picks a host, and then the host starts the connection to the other players. Only logical way I can think of that it would matter.

/me's 2 cents
 
NickOlsen8390 said:
Lots of games have this feature. Basically they say it might keep you from getting in to a game. I've never seen it happen. In MW2 on PC mine said strict, Forwarded the ports and it says open now, Only difference I see is I host the games sometimes.
The only thing I can think of is the match making system picks a host, and then the host starts the connection to the other players. Only logical way I can think of that it would matter.

/me's 2 cents
Click to expand...

Other way around I would think. The whole point of opening the ports on the 'host' is so that the rest of the players can initiate the connection to the 'host' thus not needing to forward any ports.
 
If unsolicted inbound communication is restricted, then some traffic will have to flow through a third-party server rather than go directly from PC to PC. UPnP (or manual port forwarding) allows that traffic to take the shortcut route.

XBOX.COM seems to have some good information. Part of it:

http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/xboxlive/getconnected/hcxl/networkingconcepts.aspx

"NAT types

Xbox LIVE defines three categories of NAT: open, moderate, and strict. Devices that perform strict or moderate NAT can limit the ability of gamers to find each other, participate in multiplayer sessions, or hear each other on Xbox LIVE. The classification system boils down to something called a port-assignment policy:

Open NAT means that either the port-assignment policy is minimal or the device has a fully compliant version of UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) enabled by default.

Moderate NAT means that the port-assignment policy is minimal, but the device is filtering addresses or ports.

Strict NAT means that the port-assignment policy is aggressive."
 
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Really, the easiest way is to make sure Plug and play is enabled on your router. Also update the software on it as this fixes most problems that would be PnP related.
 
spidey07 said:
Really, the easiest way is to make sure Plug and play is enabled on your router. Also update the software on it as this fixes most problems that would be PnP related.
Click to expand...

I have enabled UPnP but still seem to be getting Moderate. I did reset router and Xbox.

Running DD-WRT on WRT160N
 
Well the fix for me was port forwarding, You cant forward the same ports to 2 different xboxes, unless you have a higher end router with multiple public IP's. So you might just have to pick which one you want to be "open"
 
We got it fixed.

UPnP was not working at all for some reason UNTIL we set static reservations for each Xbox. Once we set static reservations, it magically started working.

Not sure if that was a bug with UPnP or something else. Makes no sense to me, but whatever works.

(Xbox360 networking is absurd)
 
there are a few nice ways to hijack routers with uPnP... do you have wi-fi enabled, by any chance?
I would suggest to revert to FIXED forwarded ports and get a security policy in place, uPnP is not secure.
 
All you have to do is go to your xbox network setting then test the xbox live connection, once that's done you should be set to open, saves you accessing your hub manager and finding ip addresses and port forwarding and all that.
 
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