Can’t Host Games? Port Forwarding Help for Warcraft 2

Thank you to Lambchops for producing this guide on Port Forwarding and sharing it with the Warcraft 2 community! This page is still under construction. In the meantime, please download the full guide in PDF format just below.

Port Forwarding for Warcraft II – by Lambchops April 2020

Discord: Lambchops#3843

What does port forwarding do for me?

• It allows people to join games you host on Battle.net or Pvpgn servers.

It does not:

• Improve or help with lag
• Help with joining games
• Do anything else at all

Ok, so what do I do?

All you need to do is this:

Log into your router config page and forward port 6112 UDP traffic to your computers LAN IP address.

Nothing else is required for your port forwarding rules. Anything saying that you should forward 6112-6119 or TCP traffic or anything else is just misinformation that has been getting regurgitated by noobs copying other peoples FAQs for the last 20 years.The only time you would do anything else is if you have changed your game port. It is 6112 by default, so obviously if you have changed it to a different port number then forward whatever port you have changed it to instead of 6112. From here I will just refer to 6112.

BUT…

As long as incoming UDP packets on port 6112 get sent by the router to your computer you can host. The only potential problem is that the router doesn’t actually know what your computer is, it only knows IP addresses.

Back in the bad old days a LAN IP addresses needed to be manually configured on each computer in a network and on the router, which was a bit of a pain, so to do this automatically a protocol called DHCP was developed. DHCP just automatically assigns an IP address to each device that connects to the router.

SO…

If you disconnect your computer from the router then reconnect it (or reboot) then the DHCP could assign you a different IP address, but your router will still have a rule sending the 6112 packets to the old IP address, which will break your port forwarding.

This is why you want to give your computer a static LAN IP address. This just means that every time your computer connects to the router it always gets the same address, so your port forwarding rule is always valid.

Can my router do this?

Yes. Except possibly no. Yes every router can do this. Sending packets to and from various IP addressestaking port numbers into account is literally the description of what a router does. If it can’t do that thenit isn’t a router.

Except… Many routers these days, particularly ISP supplied routers ( the router that the company gives you when you get your internet put on ) have many features deliberately disabled or overly aggressive firewalls rules built in that can not be bypassed. So these routers will not allow you to forward ports simply because of the firmware that they have running.

I have even seen one router that had a complete port forwarding config page but also a mandatory firewall that automatically rejected all unsolicited inbound traffic – which means that the port forwarding will never work anyway.

So. If you have bought any decent router from a computer store then it will probably be able to be correctly configured. If your router has been branded by your internet company, then maybe it will be ok, or possibly the ISP will have gymped it so you can’t do much with it.

But I paid extra for a static IP address when I got my internet put on. What gives?

Sorry, that’s the wrong IP address. That’s your WAN address not your LAN address. Unless you are running a server you will never need a static WAN address, and if you have a properly configured DNSaccount you don’t even need one then.

LAN vs. WAN

These acronyms stand for “Local Area Network” and “Wide Area Network”. The LAN is everything onyour (home) side of your router and the WAN is everything on the other (internet) side of your router.

If you want, you can type “my ip” into an internet search engine you will get lots of pages that will tell you your WAN address. It will look like 11.222.3.44 or something. This is how traffic from the internet goes to your router. Once that traffic arrives, it is your router’s job to send it on to the correct device that is connected to it.

To do this your router creates its own little network, the local network “LAN” and assigns all the connected devices their own individual local IP addresses so it knows where to send data that arrives from the internet.

LAN Address Assignment

It’s actually pretty simple, it just gives each device that connects a number. Turn on your router and switch on your phone’s wifi and your phone connects, The router says, “you are number 1”. Switch on your smart TV and it connects, then the router says, “you are number 2”. Boot up your computer and it connects then your router says, “you are number 3”.

BUT, if you then switch off your phone and reboot your computer, when your computer connects to therouter it will see that address “1” is not being used any more (because your phone has gone) and say to your computer, “you are number 1”… so your LAN address has changed from “3” to “1”.

The easiest way to assign a static IP address is just to tell your computer to ASK for it. So when it bootsup and connects to the router it says to the router, “I am number 50”. As long as no other device is using “50” the router will just say, “Ok then, you are number 50”. So unless you have 49 friends over with their phones all using your wifi and then you reboot your computer this will never be a problem. If you have 49 friends over, go socialize. Don’t play WC2, you total nerd.

You can also get some routers to assign a static LAN IP address by reserving a specific address for a specific MAC which is an id number in your network hardware, but the method varies between different routers and it is harder to set up and harder to describe than just assigning a static address on your computer.

DHCP

The rules covering how addresses are requested and assigned is something called the “Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol” or “DHCP”. It works pretty much exactly like I have described above. There are a few other things that can be configured on your router – like maybe you want the first address to be 20 and count up from there or something, but usually they just start at 1. Your computer and your router both understand DHCP and will talk to each other using this protocol when a connection is first made.

LAN IP Addresses (Really)

Ok so everything I described in the previous couple of paragraphs is correct except of course an IP address is not just a single number like “3”, they are groups of 4 numbers like “192.168.1.3”.

In all likelihood your LAN address is very similar to that address because LAN addresses are restricted to a set range of IP addresses that are reserved for local addresses mostly “192.168.xxx.xxx” or “10.1.xxx.xxx”.

It is very common for the LAN address of a router itself to be 192.168.1.1 and the addresses of the connected devices to be 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.3 … etc.

So it works like this:

When you host a game, your client (the WC2 program) tells the server “I’m hosting a game”. The server looks at your WAN IP address (the big outside internet one) and your game port (almost always 6112) then puts your game name on the list along with that information.

When someone selects your game and tries to join then their client sends packets saying “I want to join” to you at that IP address on that port. The magic of the internet means that these packets arrive at your router. This always happens. The only issue is getting your router to send them to your computer. If you have your port forwarding rule set up your router will look at the packets and say “Oooh, that’s port 6112, I know to send that to 192.168.1.12” …. or whatever your LAN address is, so it sends them to your computer.

Enough nerd talk Lamb, just tell me what to do already.

Kk lol. Fine then, just do this:

PART I – Collecting information