Hikari On The Subject

Fix For XBox Live Connection Problems

XBox Live, Microsoft's online service for the XBox and XBox 360, is awesome when it works. When it doesn't work, weird things happen, such as people not being able to join games, or having weird connection issues, such as with Dead or Alive 4's 3 Black Bars, where 2 people can't connect and are unable to see or hear each other in lobbies. A friend of mine, fed up with the problem, found and a fix and posted the following solution on the XBox 360 forums:

In DOA4, I was occasionally running into people who showed up in the lobby as having 3 black bars with a F rating, etc. and I couldn't see or hear them in the lobby. People have said this has to do with using a router to connect, as it doesn't do this with a direct connection to a DSL or Cable modem. You can tell if you're affected by this by running the TEST XBOX LIVE test under network settings, where it will show Moderate or Strict beside the NAT test. The problem is this: If I have Strict and you have Strict, we can't connect on Live. If we're both Moderate, then we can connect... but not to anyone on Strict. If you're on Open, then you should be able to connect to anyone even if they're on Strict or Moderate.
Here's how to fix the problem, and this should apply to most routers affected:1) Set your 360's IP address to a static IP outside of your router's DHCP range. My Linksys router ranges from 192.168.1.100 through .109, so I set my 360 to 192.168.1.112, subnet mask 255.255.255.0 with the gateway being the IP of the router itself (mine is 192.168.1.1). DNS settings will auto-detect.2) Once you've done this, your router's control panel should have a PORT FORWARDING section. Under this section, you need to forward two ports to 192.168.1.112 (or whatever IP address you selected for your 360). Forward ports 88 and 3074 - the ports that Xbox Live uses to connect. If it requires you to input a port range, use 88 through 88 and then 3074 through 3074 so only those two ports are opened; you don't need to open all ports between 88 and 3074.3) If your router lets you turn off UPnP, turn it off if you don't have any UPnP devices connected. This won't affect any of your DHCP-enabled network connections.
After you've done this, run the TEST XBOX LIVE test again and if the above has worked, you should see OPEN next to the NAT test instead of Moderate or Strict. At this point, you should be able to see and hear anyone regardless of whether they're behind a router.

posted by Teksuo Hikari @ 12:12 PM