Random disconnects from multiple mmos

[SilvanGhost]

My friend and I have been trying to find an mmo to play for the last month, but every mmo we find randomly disconnects him at increasingly shorter intervals. It occurs with games that don't have any obvious similarities.

We tried playing Perfect World yesterday around noon and when he started playing it only disconnected him once an hour. He then left for a few hours and when he came back we started playing again at about 10pm and after an hour, disconnect, but then the time between dcs rapidly shrunk to the point at which it was every 5 minutes around midnight.

We've searched all over the internet for solutions and haven't found any so far that work. He is on a cable internet connection behind two routers (I think), one router in his apartment and the other is the landlord's. His computer is connected to his router through wifi, and then I'm assuming its ethernet from there to the external router.

Games that I know work:
RYL/RYL2/ROW
Anarchy Online
any and all FPS games
LAN games through Hamachi

Games that I know dc:
Perfect World
Cabal
2moons
Battle.net (we're assuming this is a port issue since he can't connect at all)

He has posted his own topic on other forums:
http://pwi-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=2969411

Also, whenever these disconnects happen, his internet connection remains perfectly find, our voice chat sessions on Meebo do not drop at all. This leads me to believe its something out of our hands, which I'm hoping is not the case. My initial guess is that his landlords router, which we don't have access to, is set wrong and somehow dropping packets for only these games.

If anyone has any ideas at all, any help would be appreciated. If no solutions, than is there any way to get more information? Such as logs or tests we could run to troubleshoot this?

I'll get more info if needed, may take a day or two since we sometimes run on different schedules.

Thanks.

[Jason09]

From here, there are different ports for the different Battlenet games. What is the make and model of your modem and router?

[SilvanGhost]

We've pretty much decided that the battle.net port issue is coming from the landlord's router, so that's unsolvable since we don't have access. The main problem we want to solve is the mmo disconnects, or at least try to solve.

Who knows? All of these problems could be due to the (possibly non-existent) router the landlord has the modem connected through, in which case we'll just have to stick with LAN games and Steam.

I'll get his router specs ASAP.

[SilvanGhost]

Time limit to edit posts?

Router is a Linksys wrt54gs "with speed booster".

[Mcninjaguy]

I'm not sure you can solve this without asking the landloard to be able to port forward the ports on his router.

This is your router with all the games that have instruction to portforward.
http://portforward.com/english/route...T54GSindex.htm

[Jason09]

It's possible you may be able to bypass the router by using HTTP Tunneling.

[SilvanGhost]

First off, wow that port forwarding site is great, bookmarked.

We'll try the HTTP Tunelling next, he now thinks he's losing packets through his WiFi connection with the router so we'll have to see how this turns out.

Thanks for the info, I'll let you know how it pans out.

Edit: Scratch that, it seems he's solved the problem. Will try above if it turns out to be a fluke.

From his Perfect World post linked above.

I fixed this. After hours of troubleshooting, it turns out that enabling WEP/WPA security settings on a wireless router, may result in minor packet loss.

Not enough packet loss to mess up a first person shooter, but enough to get you disconnected from a game depending on a secure legitimate connecting like Perfect world or or other mainstream MMORPGS.

I disabled my wep key, and switched to mac filtering, and all of my disconnection issues have gone away.

Thanks.

Knives