Connection Troubles, or: Goasts 'n' Gremblins in my Internet

Title: Extreme inconsistency with online play connections

Summary: Under most circumstances, I cannot connect to other players for online play ever since Team Battle was implemented, in both friend and QM matches. If I try to connect to another player via friend match, it behaves oddly (and inconsistently on both sides), and often prevents one or both of us from connecting to the QM matchmaking server afterward.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Forward UDP ports 9991 and 19900, as instructed on Discord, just to be sure
  2. Try to get into QM or do a friend match
  3. Fail nearly all of the time, sometimes spectacularly

Expected Results: Online play!

Actual Results: Maybe get a snack for this one, because we’ve got a fair bit to unpack here.

First and foremost, friend challenge connection almost always fails, usually silently. When this happens, often it will simply fail silently on both ends, but sometimes it does not, and one player (rarely both) will see the “new challenger!” screen. However, when this happens, often there will be no “Them” arrow on the mode select screen. At this point, there is no way to continue past the mode select, and the only option is to cancel out and “disconnect.”

Often, after a failed friend challenge, one or both of us will suddenly be unable to connect to the QM matchmaking server, requiring a restart of the game. I feel like this is probably also not supposed to happen, and certainly not this consistently!

When trying to do QM, nowadays, a lot of the time I will sit in queue for upwards of an hour with no match, but when I quit the game, I hear just the very first bit of the “new challenger!” sound as the game quits (and this sometimes also happens with friend matches after they fail silently). Sometimes, the “new challenger!” screen will show up at odd times after quitting out of certain modes (I haven’t been able to notice a pattern yet), with a connection to effectively nobody.

My setup is an extremely reliable high-speed internet connection with literally no problems of any other sort, with port forwarding through the modem, and 5 GHz high-speed wi-fi through a current-generation Time Capsule router set to bridge mode. The router’s local IP is 192.168.3.4 and my computer’s local IP is 192.168.3.16; I have no idea if these values will mean anything in figuring this out. I’ve found that restarting my modem and router seems to do nothing consistent in terms of alleviating these issues. This problem also exists on both macOS and Windows 10 running on the same computer, via the same internet connection, suggesting rather strongly that it is not related to local software environment.

Game Version: March 2018 2nd patch

System Information: macOS High Sierra and Windows 10

This was me, too.

At least part of this should now be fixed (in particular, being visually in QM but never getting matches because you’re secretly no longer in queue, and hearing the very first bit of the “new challenger” sound when quitting the game). I’d be interested in knowing how the current build works for you now.

Oh, right. Update! Turned out I’d set up port forwarding months ago on my modem, but never actually set it to “enabled.”

Oops!

So does that mean that you are currently playing online fine, or not?

It does! Except the part with haunted disconnected opponents. That’s happened at least once pretty recently too (but maybe not the new build?). I think it’s probably the new face of the “forgot to leave queue before friend match” bug? Maybe?