Two playstations on one network

Question

In my house I have 2 playstations. My wife and I both play together. On all sort of games but mostly on call of duty. Recently we have been playing Black Ops 3 and have been having problems. We have problems on most games but not as bad as with BO3. The nat type will change from open to strict on hers then on mine from moderate to strict. I'm thinking the problem is 2 playstations trying to use the same ports on the same network so I thought of portforwarding but you can't portforward the same ports to 2 different IP's.

So 1, would it work if I DMZ 1 IP, then portforward the other? And 2, if not can anybody help me solve this issue

Solution

To answer your question - using both port forwarding and DMZ would not help your situation. Placing a host in the DMZ means that any ports that aren't handled by port forwarding are instead routed to your DMZ host. As such, port forwarding would take priority, and still only work with one of your machines.

Is this related to your issue? If so, it looks like there is no way to currently do this properly, but some information from this thread may be useful to you.

As @LMFAO_A_JOKE has pointed out and extracted from this thread, the issue is likely due to having the same public IP address being presented to the game server by two different consoles. This has to be handled by the game server in a way that will allow both machines to co-operate, and has nothing to do with what ports are forwarded or opened correctly on your side. As such, the only current way to rectify this would be to have another public IP address, which is not easily possible when you have only one WAN line available.

Note - it's not impossible as typically you could use VPN tunneling or a proxy to present an IP address from a different location, however, how viable this would be with Playstation hardware and trying to get a low latency gaming experience, I don't know.

Comments

[Ramhound]

Setup a single router, forward the port to that, connect Playstions to it. This allows multiple devices to have traffic forwarded to a single port

[misha256]

@Ramhound Do you mean set up a second, dedicated router (we can call this the "playstation" router), which connects to the main router?

[misha256]

@LMFAO_A_JOKE Oh man, you're completely right, the heart of the problem is the one public IP address. BRING ON IPv6 already!

[kid622]

So your saying there's nothing I can do to help this problem?

[misha256]

@kid622 Unless the Game Server is implemented in a way that allows multiple players per single IP address, then no, there's nothing much you can do about it. I'm surprised that this issue even exists today, considering that 98% folks are behind a NAT and surely there's 1000s of cases of multiple Playstations behind one public IP. So far as I can see (I do a bit of coding myself) creating a game server that works around these issues should be do-able. This is a Sony fail. It's their baby, they should have foreseen this and dealt to it long time ago.

[kid622]

So, what would be the best setting I can do on my router for 2 playstations. Was thinking about DMZ 1 and let the other just ride default

[Jonno]

@LMFAO_A_JOKE - Thank you for pulling out the relevant information from the thread, I should have done this initially. I will update my answer with this.

[misha256]

@kid622 DMZ won't magically give you a second public IP address for the second Playstation. Unless you get a proper second connection from your ISP, you're not going to be able to fully solve this issue.

[kid622]

Now I'm not trying to solve but get the best performance from at least one of them. I figure if I DMZ 1 of them that one would work right and the other would have all the problems, I stead of having problems with both or am I just not right about that.......keep in mind I'm not at all knowledgeable about networking at all, just a tiny bit from some post and vids..... still just a rookie

[kid622]

Anyway, thanks everybody for the help and info, I really appreciate it

[kid622]

Thank you for responding, I have read that article and I do plan on trying it but the poster was specifically talking about GTA5 and I wasn't sure it would work for BO3. And the post was from 2014 and I didn't know if a better solution had been posted yet

[Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style]

@Jonno No worries man!! Just a system admin helping with what I can when I get free time around here...