Online Play Thread: Tips, FAQ, & Common Misconceptions

• If your WAP (Wireless Access Point) is far from your Wii, use a USB LAN adapter or move the two devices closer together.
• Avoid using a hub/switch to communicate to your router if you use LAN. Use a direct port on the router
• Use a static IP address on your Wii for testing and enabling QoS. Please note, there is no throughput difference from using an automatically optained IP and using a static IP, but it will prove useful if you want to do ping tests and enable advanced features on your router.
• Use DSL, Cable or Fiber Optics for an internet connection. Avoid dial-up, ISDN and satellite.
• Do a 2 minute ping test on your wireless connection and ethernet connection. Check for any latency spikes and make sure the lag is low. For reference, my ethernet is <1ms to 2ms and when I use wireless, from <1ms to 5ms. Check to make sure you get 0% packet loss.
• Disable the SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) Firewall in your router, if applicable.
• Upgrade your router firmware to the lastest version. If you have a Linksys WRT54G, consider Tomato or DD-WRT firmware.
• If you use a Datel USB LAN converter, you might have received a network cable with an unorthodox wiring. I haven't fully investigated this wiring but if you can, use another ethernet cable.
• Avoid high traffic network usage while playing (P2P networks such as Bittorrent, Limewire, etc)
• Enable QoS and assign your Wii to the highest priority possible (Either the statically assigned IP, MAC address or ethernet jack on the router)
• If you are using a WAP, make sure the channel your using isn't being used by any neighbors. Use an application such as Network Stumbler to check.
• Make sure you enable on your router's firewall TCP Outgoing on the following ports: 80, 443, 28910, 29900, 29901, 29920 and UDP Outgoing on all ports. There is no need to configure incoming TCP or UDP ports. If you use the Nintendo USB Wi-Fi Connector on your PC, make sure those outgoing ports are allowed on your system firewall.
• If your WAP is not your router, consider upgrading to a wireless router or moving to a LAN connection for you Wii.

• Using a LAN adapter makes no difference: False
  Using a Lan adapter can make a big difference. The internally WLAN antenna in the Wii is very weak. If your WAP (wireless access point) is a room away or obstructed by a wall, it can cause some latency. Also, if your WAP isn't configured correctly, there may be conflict with another WAP sharing the same channel. This causes latency. LAN is always superior to Wi-Fi, for techincal reasons It's just a matter of how much better. If your Wi-Fi is 5 feet from your WAP then it probably won't make any noticeable difference.
• Using a Wireless Repeater or Wireless Bridge will affect your lag: True
  By using a wireless repeater/bridge, latency will incrase. It is 100% fact. Move your router and Wii closer to each other or use LAN.
• Faster internet guarantees less lag: False
  Note I put the word guarantee. I've done some throughput checking and the Wii sends and receives about 2 KB/sec during gameplay. This means, in terms of speed, if you have a 20KB/sec, technically, there's no difference if you have a 5mbit connection. Of course, you have to take into account background tasks. If your using BitTorrent while playing, there can be some lag. A dedicated 50KB connection just to your Wii can be better than a shared 10mbit connection. The point is latency. DSL and Cable give less latency than say 56k, but upgrading from a 1.5mbit DSL to 5mbit Cable may not give you better latency. Remember, that just means the maximum speed at which you can download. Including network overhead, the Wii uses about, on average, 2 KB / sec. Pick your ISP by lowest latency rather than maximum throughput speed.
• You have to forward/map points on your router to play online: False
  Nintendo WFC (Wi-Fi Connection) uses no incoming ports. They are all outgoing TCP and outgoing UDP ports. There are a couple of predefined outgoing TCP ports and the outgoing UDP port is selected at random. Mapping or port forwarding is only used for INCOMING ports which, again, WFC does not use.
• You have to disable your firewall to play online: Depends
  The Outgoing TCP ports WFC uses are: 28910, 29900, 29901, 29920, 80, and 443. The Outgoing UDP ports are selected at random. You have to make sure your firewall doesn't block outgoing TCP on those ports and all (unfortunately) outgoing UDP ports. Incoming doesn't matter. This is on your router/gateway. If you use a physical router, disabling the firewall on your PC does nothing. Unless your PC is your router via ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) you really shouldn't have to disable your firewall on your PC.
• If Nintendo's servers are slow/congested, your game will lag more. False
  This is how it works. Nintendo does not host their own servers. They use GameSpy/IGN servers. The Wii connects to the Gamespy server(s). The server responds with you the IP of the person(s) you want to play. After that, the game creates a DIRECT connection to your opponent(s) by means of random Outgoing UDP connections. There is no proxying from the Gamespy servers. If there's lag, that is the latency between you and your opponent(s). It has nothing to do with Gamespy (or Nintendo) servers.

• Why can't I find anybody online when I try to play with anyone?
  Basically, With Anyone works by looking for people who are looking for also looking for somebody to play at the same time you are looking. There is also a limit to how much latency there can be between players, so you're not exactly playing in slow-motion. The reason is this: There isn't anybody with a low enough latency looking at the same time you are. Also, if your latency is too high, you will not find anybody, so look into what's eating your connection (if anything).
• I'm getting error message 85010. How do I fix this?
  You don't. It means that Nintendo's (GameSpy's) servers are overloaded. The most you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wait or keep trying.
• Why does sometimes when I press a button or move the analog stick in a Wi-Fi match it doesn't register or comes out really late? / Why do I freeze in Wi-Fi matches?
  In a nutshell, UDP packets are lost.
  Here's the explanation:
  The way the network works is that it sends UDP packets. UDP connection aren't like regular connections (TCP connections, like webpages and stuff)
  computer A sends a request to computer B
  computer B sends an acknowledgement (ACK) of the request and some data
  computer A receives some and sends another ACK and asks for more
  and that's how it works, to make sure no information is lost.
  
  "okay go"
  "k, here"
  "got it, now send me this"
  "okay, sending"
  
  like that, but that's TCP. there's latency in having to wait to see if they got the information and pausing between transmissions. UDP is different. UDP just sends stuff saying
  "okay, send me the whole thing"
  "here..................................................................................sent"
  
  So you have two UDP connections:
  Player A is sending his data to Player A and Player B is sending his data to Player A.
  Now, since there's no acknowledgement of what's being sent, things that get lost don't get repeated. As to why things get lost in transmission, I'll get to it in a minute. What can get lost are things like:
  "I am holding down A"
  "I held down left"
  "I no longer am holding down left"
  
  Things like that can get lost and there's no verification of getting the packets like in TCP. It may take the next packet for the game to realize that you are no longer pressing the analog stick that way, or you held the analog stick before press A and you want a tilt instead of a smash.
  
  Why do packets get lost? This is actually not that uncommon with Wi-Fi. If there is interference or you're far from the router, it's common to lose packets. In TCP connections, if a packet gets lost, it's resent. The problem is the Wii isn't prioritizing that packets get sent successfully for the sake of less lag.
  So if player A is on a somewhat poor wifi connection or a wifi connection with interference he might not send OR receive all the packets successfully. And that's why you don't get movement sometimes. Of course this is an unproven theory of mine.
  

Sir Bedevere said:

Awesome thread, very informative. It's ironic, because I was just trying to connect my Wii to my computer for the uptillionth time using only the USB connector, and then I saw this thread, I'll be sure to look into buying a LAN adapter now. Heh, maybe I'll get one when I go buy Brawl later today....

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ShortFuse said:

Straight and to the point, here's the list

[*]If Nintendo's servers are slow/congested, your game will lag more. False
This is how it works. Nintendo does not host their own servers. They use GameSpy/IGN servers. The Wii connects to the Gamespy server(s). The server responds with you the IP of the person(s) you want to play. After that, the game creates a DIRECT connection to your opponent(s) by means of random Outgoing UDP connections. There is no proxying from the Gamespy servers. If there's lag, that is the latency between you and your opponent(s). It has nothing to do with Gamespy (or Nintendo) servers.

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One night I was curious about this so I installed tcpdump on my dd-wrt router and dumped all the packets coming from the Wii to a Samba share on my desktop. After looking at it for a while it seemed that most of the data that was being transmitted was going to either a server in the 50.x.x.x subnet (which is Japan) or a whole range of servers that turned out to be located in either Dana Point, CA or the general LA area. This seems to give off the idea that the traffic was all passing through these servers in CA at the moment (or they were possibly rerouting traffic to Japan). In order to get a more "real time" look at who I was connecting to I SSHd into the router while the match was active and I did a "cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack | awk '{print $5}'" and it displayed all of my active connections. Odd enough, I was connected directly to my opponents sometimes, but it didn't seem like there was much traffic traveling over that connection. Sometimes I would be connected to 5-10 servers in CA at once.

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LeeHarris said:

I have played someone 10 min away from me with two business cables lines with 2mbit upload and gotten horrible lag but I played someone in LA today and it was practically perfect.

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LeeHarris said:

I'm curious as to how you got your information. I'm not trying to call you out, I'm just looking for more information on it.

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Surgo said:

How is every port considered outgoing when there's a direct connection from one Wii to the other, without going through servers? Wouldn't somebody need to be incoming in that case?

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# If Nintendo's servers are slow/congested, your game will lag more. False
This is how it works. Nintendo does not host their own servers. They use GameSpy/IGN servers. The Wii connects to the Gamespy server(s). The server responds with you the IP of the person(s) you want to play. After that, the game creates a DIRECT connection to your opponent(s) by means of random Outgoing UDP connections. There is no proxying from the Gamespy servers. If there's lag, that is the latency between you and your opponent(s). It has nothing to do with Gamespy (or Nintendo) servers.

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Dogenzaka said:

Not true. The Brawl servers are very congested right now, various error codes are popping up, and Nintendo set up a support area for these problems. I'm having terrible lag problems with Brawl, yet I have a N-Linksys wireless router, Comcast high-speed internet, I'm not that far from the router, and my Xbox LIVE and PSN work just fine.

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ShortFuse said:

• You have to forward/map points on your router to play online: False
  Nintendo WFC (Wi-Fi Connection) uses no incoming ports. They are all outgoing TCP and outgoing UDP ports. There are a couple of predefined outgoing TCP ports and the outgoing UDP port is selected at random. Mapping or port forwarding is only used for INCOMING ports which, again, WFC does not use.
• If Nintendo's servers are slow/congested, your game will lag more. False
  This is how it works. Nintendo does not host their own servers. They use GameSpy/IGN servers. The Wii connects to the Gamespy server(s). The server responds with you the IP of the person(s) you want to play. After that, the game creates a DIRECT connection to your opponent(s) by means of random Outgoing UDP connections. There is no proxying from the Gamespy servers. If there's lag, that is the latency between you and your opponent(s). It has nothing to do with Gamespy (or Nintendo) servers.

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Morac said:

The two above statements conflict with each other. The first paragraph says that port forwarding isn't required because all connections are outbound, but the second paragraph says that a direct UDP connection is made to your opponent's Wii. In order to make a direct connection that would mean that at least one router must be set up to allow incoming UDP connections. If both routers are set up to block incoming UDP connections (which is the default on most routers), then the direct connection will fail.

Looking at my router logs I can see outgoing UDP connections to other players when I try to brawl. If I put my Wii in my DMZ, I can see an incoming UDP connection on a random port from the GameSpy servers when I connect to Nintendo WFC. I'm pretty sure this is used to test to see if my Wii can accept inbound connections and therefore allow other users to connect to my Wii. If it fails I'm assuming GameSpy won't let my Wii host the game and will only allow my Wii to connect to other Wiis. Theoretically this would limit me to only be able to play against people who don't block incoming ports.


Also about using a wireless connection increasing lag. This is true, but the difference is negligible. Directly connecting my Wii to my router results in latency between my router and my Wii being < 1ms. Using a wireless connection results in latency of about 5 ms. This small difference won't be noticeable online. You can determine the latency by pinging your Wii's IP address when the Wii is connected to the Nintendo WFC service.

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ShortFuse said:

You don't have to map/forward the ports. Mapping incoming ports is done for listening ports. UDP works differently. You're thinking TCP. There's a reason why they're using UDP not TCP.
And most routers do not block unrequested incoming UDP packets unless a firewall does. You just don't have to map ports. If you don't understand how UDP works is another thing.
There's no conflict in the two.

The incoming UDP is not necessary. Since it's on a random port, you're not really going to forward all your UDP ports. The incoming UDP port is to see if you have a direct connection to the Wii, in which case it routes differently, but not at all necessary. That incoming UDP port gets lost in routers and Gamespy does that first but since it's random you'd have to map all your UDP ports or DMZ. You don't need to because the alternate is two outgoing UDP ports.

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reno96teg said:

so after a wii finds a match and connects, that wii is now directly connected to the 3 other wii's and they then all constantly communicate to every other wii, instead of all through one server?

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bobber205 said:

Is there some kind of visual indicator in brawl that tell me my signal strength from my Wii to my router?

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bobber205 said:

There's a wall and a door between the Wii in my room and the router. Maybe that's the problem?

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ShortFuse said:

You have yet to say what your problem is.

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milind4 said:

but dmz is guaranteed to work, right?

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ShortFuse said:

If you don't know what DMZ is, it means you open your entire internet connection to one machine which will break anything else that uses the internet. I doubt you got internet just for your Wii.

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milind4 said:

oh.. so basically gets rid of nat and everything else the router does and forwards everything to one machine?

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milind4 said:

this is what it says in my router page for dmz:

"The DMZ feature allows you to specify one computer on your network to be placed outside of the NAT firewall. This may be necessary if the NAT feature is causing problems with an application such as a game or video conferencing application. Use this feature on a temporary basis. The computer in the DMZ is not protected from hacker attacks."

is this basically the same meaning as that the one comp. i specify will have all ports forwarded to it and all the other compouters on the network will not have access to internet?

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milind4 said:

ok, but i could still use dmz and do basic internet things such as browsing, checking my online mail, etc. right? i have a belkin F5D7231-4 2000 router.

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ShortFuse said:

Basically. The point is, let's say you want your PC to be the router/nat/firewall. You would DMZ to that computer and all the other machines that want internet go through the PC.

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