Opening ports necessary for online play?

[Maasawa]

I've been looking at Dieter Bauch's BF2 tweak guide in an effort to improve the stability and FPS of playing BF2 online. One of the things he recommends is opening a variety of ports. He recommends especially opening ports 16567 and 16569 (though he doesn't specifiy whether these are UDP or TCP; maybe both?).

I've gone to my McAfee firewall and opened these ports and some other recommended ones as well. What I'm not sure of is if opening these will improve my (client-side) play or only if I'm acting as a host.

I really don't want to be opening ports unless there's a good reason to. Thoughts?

Thanks.


Playing BF2 1.3 at 1600x1200x32@85Hz
Special Forces, Armored Fury, Euro Force

Intel Pentium 4 640 HT 3.20 GHz
Windows XP Pro SP2
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz (2x512M)
256MB PCI Express x16 ATI Radeon X850 XT PE
Catalyst 6.3 drivers for Windows XP
DirectX 9.0c
ViewSonic P95f+ 19 inch Ultrabrite CRT Monitor
Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS
Creative I-Trigue 2.1 3300 Speakers
Logitech MX 518 Optical Mouse
Saitek Gamers Keyboard USB
Thrustmaster Top Gun Fox 2 Pro USB joystick

[GunHappyBob]

Re: Opening ports necessary for online play?

check out tweakguides.com. They have a guide for BF2 that will go into detail on how to improve some things. Also Look in to port forwarding and all that stuff.

[ZackAttack2005]

Re: Opening ports necessary for online play?

do you have a wireless router? its always good to turn off your firewalls while you play bf2, they tend to interfer and cause lag. and you might want to consider updating your catalyst drivers to 6.6 or whatever, but you also might want to try using the omega drivers, they improve performance and the looks of the game www.omegadrivers.net

[Eden]

Re: Opening ports necessary for online play?

You don't need to open any ports unless your running a server, however you should make sure they your firewall allows BF2 to access the net.

[Cigar_Man]

Re: Opening ports necessary for online play?

do you have a wireless router? its always good to turn off your firewalls while you play bf2, they tend to interfer and cause lag.

I agree with turning of software firewalls but only if you are behind a nat router. Never disable the nat though. With todays routers, you should not have nat related errors with games and if there are problems, they will show up with so many programs that the hardware vendor will issue a firmware update.

This does bring up another point, also update the firmware for your nat router.

Do not turn off software firewalls if you play in the DMZ of your router since the DMZ opens all ports to your machine.

[AlphaNut]

Re: Opening ports necessary for online play?

If you are behind a router/NAT you might have to forward ports to your PC. I've red this on many occasions. I don't recommend settin up any PC with valuable information in a DMZ. Not even with a software fw.

Why would you need a desktopfirewall? Do you have any idea of how fast those resource hogging pos are compromized?

For anyone who has an old spare PC standing around - you can build your own hardware firewall quiet easy. Replaces very expensive HW firewalls on the market by open source solution.
http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/