FFXI / ISP Incompatibility Shuts Users Out

falcon5768 writes "Since Tuesday 9/28, an incompatibility between how Final Fantasy XI addresses a network connection with it's Playonline Viewer and Optimum Online's broadband service has blocked well over 1000 players out of the game. The only thing both companies do agree on is that the problem is a minor one. Numerous players have been told by Optimum Online that it is not a priority. Likewise Square Enix has no notice of the problem on their website, but an option on their call menu tells players they are aware of the problem and it is being worked on before hanging up.

Comments

At least it's only a minor problem . . .

[Goobermunch]

I mean, it's not like these folks are actually paying to use a service or anything like that. Besides, it's only 1000 people. Given that they've sold several hundred thousand units, with nice monthly subscriptions attached, they don't have to worry about a few hundred people.

After all, it's not like it'll affect anything important. You know, like the bottom line.

--AC

They've always had a buggy networking layer

[Danny Rathjens]

Here was my post on 2003-11-03 to my local LUG on how to fix ffxi's buggy networking problems when playing behind a linux firewall:

I started playing Final Fantasy XI online for PC this weekend.
(Yep, had to boot into windows for first time in long time
and had a couple crashes to remind me why I stopped using it)

Anyway, I have a linux box as my firewall doing NAT and the game
would not work with the error:
FFXI:3100 Could not connect to lobby server

Tech support just told me it's my fault for using a linux firewall
and implied their system has no bugs and claimed it works with NAT.

After some packet sniffing, I discovered that some bug in the game's
network code was causing it to send packets to the external ip of
my firewall(port 54001) instead of to square enix's lobby server.
A web search of port 54001 came up with a japanese language page
which had some iptables rules to use to let FF online work from
a playstation through a firewall. Those did not work, but the page
also had a list of Square's servers and which ports they use so
I made some quick rules to forward any misdirected packets to those
listed servers and voila it all worked.

So, in case anyone happens to have problems with this bug in
PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI not working through NAT on
an adsl connection, here is the solution.

Here are the relevant parts of my firewall script:

extint="eth0"
extip=`ifconfig eth0|grep 'inet addr'|cut -f2 -d:|cut -f1 -d" "`
intint="eth1"
intnet="192.168.1.0/24"
iptabl es -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51220 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.234:51220
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51240 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.236:51240
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51300 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.238:51300
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51301 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.239:51301
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54000 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.239:54000
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54001 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.209:54001
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54002 -j DNAT --to 61.195.62.141:54002
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p udp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54120 -j DNAT --to 61.195.62.144:54120
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p udp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54246 -j DNAT --to 61.195.62.158:54246