Any gamers in here?

Everything Else
1

I am just throwing this against the wall to see what sticks…

I have played video games all my life. I consider myself just a tad bit higher than average at most games, but my internet connection has always been a huge disadvantage ever since online gaming became a thing.

I imagine if there are any gamers amongst us, we probably face the same challenges, and while Peplink doesn’t advertise any “gaming” features, I believe that they have given us all the tools to optimize gaming traffic. I am getting older and I need any advantage I can get.

I am currently playing Apex Legends on PC. For the most part it works alright, but this game does some goofy stuff to the PC and network. I have run several packet captures and I am still scratching my head. At the end of every match, you leave the game and return to the lobby. Whenever I am returning to the lobby, party chat on XBox has issues. I don’t think that it is congestion based on the traffic graphs - but it is very consistent. When using discord for voice, it doesn’t crap out. Another issue is that the matchmaking bounces me around onto sub-optimal game servers.

I have tried to use packet capture software to help diagnose the issue, but I am still struggling. I can’t track the workflow, nor the “conflict”. It is almost like the game is trying to switch to a udp port that is in use by the party chat. They both seem to use ephemeral ports.

For the matchmaking, it is getting the list of available game servers through some mechanism other than DNS, I haven’t been able to match a DNS response address to the game server address. It seems to do a latency check at some time after the game and before you join a new one. It seems that “something” is causing latency to spike - and then the game just picks one at random. I don’t know how it is calculating this latency, so I don’t know what QOS settings that will make it better.

Any help is appreciated. I mainly just want to get a discussion going if anyone else is interested in such things.

One thing that has helped with the game play was changing the WAN buffer size to a smaller value. I chose 512, then lowered it to 256, then I tried 128, but I started getting a bit of packet loss, so I left it at 256.

Another tweak that has helped was to route all tcp out the wan with higher capacity, and only routing UDP down the tiny DSL link. My DSL link is much more consistent with latency, although it has higher latency. My other WAN is a WISP and the jitter is so bad, that I prefer a consistent high latency over a sporadic latency. Since both the voice chat and the game data are using UDP - I am sending them both down the same WAN, ideally I will find a way to identify what ports or port ranges each is using and then routing them separately. Unfortunately, they both appear to be so dynamic that I can’t find any static ports.

I thought UDP was supposed to be easier to deal with than TCP, but I am finding that it is harder to diagnose and troubleshoot.

3

i use fastest response alogorithm and also toggle video streaming QoS for low, and online gaming as high. my ATT is around 27ms, vs my sprint which is 45-50ms and usually ATT wins. throughput isn’t as good though, so large downloads suffer some.

4

I have, and I set one up on AWS for testing this exact use case. It just didn’t work out for me for some reason. However, I recently started dorking around with the WAN buffer size, and I have seen major improvements to performance; so maybe that would have made the difference. All of my trial licenses are up, so maybe when I replace my Balance One in a couple of months – I will get another evaluation license to try again. In theory, it should do exactly what I am wanting. But, one pipe is too small for full duplication, and the other has too much jitter. I guess you just can’t make one great connection out of three crap connections.

Division 2 was really fun, and then I tried to go into the PVP areas of the map. It got less fun at an astounding rate. :slight_smile: I classify that type of game as the “Grinding” genre. Always grinding for loot – more grinding, more/better loot, tougher enemies/challenges, repeat.

Overwatch is a very lively looking game, but since it has been around forever – it has a very steep learning curve – that meta is so deep. I imagine I would spend the whole game going “WTF just hit me?” and “which one of ya’ll just kicked me?”. I do like the team-based meta and the pace of the action seems really fun.

5

My problem is that my “fastest response” will always be my WISP link, but the jitter is awful. It will go from 30-40ms to 210 and back every 20-30 seconds or so. They have an oversubscription model and heavily shape the traffic going through their transmitters. It basically halts some traffic and lets others through to make the average throughput match their configured profiles.

Now, if there was every an option for “least hops”, that would be kind of cool – maybe.

Another option that I was thinking about is a DNS query response “massager”. For example, if I say - “matchmaking.gameserver.com” should only ever return two servers to my PC. A normal response would contain all 8 possible IP addresses. I want the router to measure the latency to each server in that list and pick the two fastest and strip the other 6 out. The problem that I am running into is that Apex Legends in particular doesn’t seem to get the list of game server IPs through DNS – I think it is using some encrypted data transfer to pass that data to the client. And then it uses some seemingly random port number (not really, they are all in the 30,000-40,000 range - usually ending in 10 – 30710, 31510, etc.) The best I have been able to do to isolate that traffic is route the entire range for UDP.

The other issue is that the way the games are determining which server is “closest” is actually causing latency spikes. Sending ping packets to 100 IPs concurrently on a 1Mbps DSL uplink causes all kinds of wacky results.

I also found that XBox Party Chat is difficult to “identify”. It seems to go based on the source port of the initiating socket. And it uses an ephemeral port. I haven’t found a way to limit it to a range or specific port number.

7

These are great suggestions! I am glad that I am not the only one that is using these devices to help support gaming as well as basic connectivity.

Have you guys changed your WAN buffer sizes at all? If so, what techniques did you use to determine the proper size? Windows 10 default buffer sizes are 256 on the receive and 512 on the send. I don’t know if Windows adjust these sizes based on performance metrics or not - these are just the values that I can see in the network adapter driver.

One thing that is becoming clear is that UDP is tougher to analyze than TCP. For whatever reason, source and destination seem to get blurry. I get that it is connection-less, but someone sent the first packet – so, they should be the “source”, right? When doing a windows packet capture – windows is unable to tie UDP traffic back to a process name – it is always under the “unknown” or “not available” category. Basically, trying to find characteristics of the underlying connections for the purposes of routing is difficult. Some game titles are consistent – call of duty always uses UDP port 3074-3076 is an example. But, Apex Legends uses a different strategy - and trial and error seems to be the only way to reliably come up with routing rules.

My end goal is to try to limit the traffic on my DSL link to ONLY the game traffic and the audio chat traffic (discord, xbox game chat, in game chat, etc.). Splitting traffic based on UDP or TCP works pretty well, but there is a lot of UDP traffic that isn’t part of the game data or chat data streams – so, I would like to get a bit more granular with my routing rules. So, I start up a packet capture, launch the game, load into a lobby - play for a minute or so – quit the game, and then start to look at the data. I am finding that the game seems to be broken up into separate audio/video streams. They seem to have some kind of identification/specialization that my packet capture parsers are able to evaluate. Is there a way to leverage these identifiers for the purposes of traffic routing? Are these values what the DPI is using to determine whether traffic is part of the “All supported video streaming”?

9

Thanks for the tips and I am coming to similar conclusions.

I “think” I discovered a bit of a pattern - the port chosen seems to be the ephemeral port (source port) of some other https connection. So, in a way - my PC is actually picking the port at runtime. I say “think” because I haven’t really found a “great” packet analysis tool. I need something that helps me identify traffic patterns with some kind of layer7 knowledge as well. The active session window is great, but it only shows you active sessions - quick connect/disconnect stuff is lost quickly.

I originally was hoping to use some combination of Network Monitor 3.4, the active sessions window, the firewall logs (from both routers - I have a weird setup), and the activity monitor (pretty netstat -aon). But, I am still struggling. Partly because it is more fun to play the game then it is to do packet analysis.

I need to find a way to reverse engineer the applications network related workflows, and then maybe set up some kind of uPnP - I think the TCP connections source port is going out Wan1, then Wan2 tries to send UDP data, and the game/chat server gets confused. It seems to be using an established TCP session to “unblock” firewalls and allow the UDP data through. I imagine there is some kind of property that would tie all these data streams together. Maybe sequence ID? Maybe just srcIP and port? Trying to decipher it and then coming up with a way to make the router understand what I need it to do seems impossible with the tools I currently have.

I was hoping to find something like DNS request yields list of IPs, one of those IP addresses should be the destination for some UDP traffic for the game. I was going to create some local DNS entries to only include the game servers with a latency of less than 100 ms. That would have been to easy - I am not having any luck. It looks like the actual game server IP addresses are exchanged by some method other than DNS.

I will look into the DNS Name routing again - maybe it has been changed since I tried it last. It only worked for names that were returned with a reverse DNS response - and that doesn’t work with many cloud providers.

For now, I just manually enable/disable rules that involve port ranges. I am starting to look for ways to restrict windows to user defined port ranges for applications. It would be so much easier if developers would document their games networking, but they seem to guard it very closely.

10

I use “Lowest Latency” on SpeedFusion for most UDP traffic (which games tend to be), I might change that to WAN Smoothing though once I swap one of the VDSL’s for Starlink, at the moment the DSL has lower latency than Starlink although apparently Starlink are aiming for 16-19ms so might actually end up being lower latency than my DSL.

I did actually try a game over SL by changing the priorities around so that it was preferred (put it on a sub tunnel where the wan priorities were set in that way) and it worked fine but SpeedFusion did have to move the traffic back onto the DSL a few times where it lost the tunnel to the fusionhub over SL (Might be loss of sats), I have faster set for heartbeat time and all I noticed was a brief stutter (which if WAN smoothing was on wouldn’t have even happened).

If you have the speedfusion license on your peplink it will be worth dropping a fusion hub somewhere on a cloud provider with a nearby Datacenter.

Also a “nearby” Datacenter in physical terms might not be all that nearby in internet terms, people trip up with this one quite a bit, having a server physically close is actually going to hurt rather than help if the nearest POP/IXP where your ISP interconnects to that provider is still several hundred miles away, as the traffic has to goto the POP/IXP and back.

Edit:

Forgot to say the “Lowest Latency” profile in speedfusion I believe is based off the healthcheck packets, unlike fastest response it can and will switch traffic onto a different WAN within the SF tunnel if the latency situation changes and that WAN becomes a better option.

11

Well, I tried some “out of the box” type of approaches, but it didn’t work. I tried using an exe called ForceBindToIP. It is supposed to hook into winsock api calls and force a bind to the specified IP address. My logic was “If I can get all the games connectivity tied to a unique IP – routing should be easy”. Unfortunately, the way Apex launches causes the ForceBindToIP to be ineffective. From what I can tell, the game creates a copy of itself in memory and then launches that in-memory version using its own command line. Some of the initial game launcher connectivity DOES actually use the IP I specify, but as soon as the game is started - it goes back to the default IP of the machine.

But, since some of the servers have connections established with this forced IP – I tried to use the “Persistence by destination” rule to try to “sticky” those endpoints to the WAN I wanted. Same destination IP, different source IP. It didn’t work, and after reading up on the Persistence algorithm - it was never going to. Persistence always uses the source IP in its decision making – even when destination is chosen as the “persistence key”.

However, I did find a way that seems to work for the games I am currently playing. Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Call of Duty are the games I am currently playing. I have created an outbound policy for each game title and put them at the top of the list.

Policy 1 - Apex_UDP - Any, Any, UDP 37000-38000 - DSL
Policy 2 - Fortnite_UDP - Any, Any, UDP 9000-9100 - DSL
Policy 3 - COD_UDP - Any, Any, UDP 3074-3078 - DSL
Policy 4 - TCP_443_WISP - Any, Any, TCP 443 - WISP
Policy 5 - TCP_80_WISP - Any, Any, TCP 80 - WISP
Default Policy - Least Used (which is usually the DSL link)

Using these outbound policies - I am able to play my games with steady latency (~65ms) on my 1.4Mbps/750kbps DSL link. My audio chats go out the WISP connection as most of the ones I use (Discord, XBox party chat, In game chat) seem to use UDP ports above 50,000. I really don’t care if the chat gets a bit garbled due to latency jitter, but good gracious – dying in a game because of jitter really drives me nuts. I am getting older and slower and I don’t need any technological handicaps!

2 Likes
12

Hey Jason,

Your post was super helpful. Did you happen to create a rule for Battle.Net to download over your Starlink and not your DSL? I THINK I’ve got it, but it’s like 5 rules right now.

I also had to create 4 rules for Valorant.

13

Battle.net uses ssl for their downloads if memory serves correctly. I typically will just build a rule if I am downloading something From them. Though since COD is on Steam, I haven’t used battle.net in a while.

I just do a temporary rule at the top for the IP of my PC downloading the content as the source and ANY as the destination, and port 443 as the destination. set up a 1:1 load balance, and the default “2 concurrent connections to an individual IP" will usually end up with them being split across my two high bandwidth connections. I just either disable that rule or delete it. I really don’t understand what about a licensed game binary would require SSL, but that is just what battle.net does.

Add your Valorant rules for the next fella. In time, this should become a pretty useful cheat sheet for gamers trying to gain an edge - or make something out of nothing.

1 Like
17

(post deleted by author)

18

I don’t mess much with load-balancing rules like that, but I get where you’re coming from when trying to streamline downloads or gameplay setup. For me, gaming tweaks are more about maximizing performance and avoiding frustrating issues like long loading screens or lag, especially in games where every second matters.