Updated FAQ - Connection Issues

[ehann777]

If I party up with one of my friends with a dsl/cable connection I get into matches. The matches run when I am in a party or invited to a game.

[Stroker]

Welp I give up on playing I set all weekend looking for a game I wanted to rank up to a 100 but I never connected to ONE match,nothing,ZERO,so I give up on playing GOW2 online!

[nasty blindfire]

good info thanks

[C12EEPZ]

I been playing gears 2 since the last update I can't play online I need help

[Insanity Pirate]

Okay, so I've got a question:

What is WRONG with my connection to Xbox Live? I just ran a speed test and rank in at 24mbps, with a download speed of 11.90 mbps and an upload speed of .33 mbps. I never have any connection errors with my other computer-based applications, and can stream 1080p videos on YouTube with no problem.

However, when I go to play Gears of War online, my connection is up to an entire second or more late in every game I play. When this game first came out, I used to play it every day and my connection was instantaneous; it was like playing a local game, and it was great. But now, 5+ years later, my connection sucks, and I can't do anything to help myself.

I've fiddled with the QoS on my router (my xbox literally devoured all of our bandwidth to the point that almost no webpages would load on a computer), and it helped for about 45 minutes. Then my connection magically seemed to detect I was having fun, and throttled itself down. I activated port forwarding for ports 80, 85, 3074, and 53 to my xbox's assigned IP address for another 15 minutes before it seemed again that my connection detected acceptable performance, then throttled itself down. I switched out a 18'-long twisted-pair CAT5 ethernet cable with a 2'-long CAT6 cable I clipped and tailored to length myself and tested, and again my connection worked good for about 5-10 minutes, then throttled itself down again. Finally in agitation, I updated my router's (54 mbps) firmware from a January '07 to an October '09 version, and it seemed to work for about 20-30 minutes before my connection once again throttled itself down, and I went from lone-wolfing entire teams by myself, to watching my Grenadier do the "Zero Gravity" upside down rag-doll fall typical with a bad connection, glitch-spawned extra body parts and all in the span of about 15 minutes once more.

On top of that, setting my router's DHCP client table to a maximum of 13 users and assigning my xbox a static address have done little if anything to help. Nobody is stealing my connection, because I manually configured our connection to be accessible only from the 10 nodes in my house through WPA2-PSK security with a hidden SSID, 5 of which tend to be inactive 85% of the time. My xbox is hard-connected to my router, and my modem directly to my router as well. When I attached my wireless card to my xbox, again, beautiful connection for some reason only another 30 minutes, before my connection practically cratered out worse than my wired connection. I've set my router to route at the maximum 54 mbps and my MTU has been set to 1500 manually instead of automatically. WHAT THE ****!?!?!? I've done literally everything I can think of, including power-cycling my crummy router for a minute at a time, and I'm getting very agitated, because GoW1 is the only video game I've ever played for more than a month in my entire life (had it since "E-Day"). I've even gone out and bought another copy from a GameStop in case my old one was all Gear'd out (framed the disk and hung it on my wall, too; I almost failed Highschool with that disk!! >.<) also.

Can anybody tell me what it is my router's doing wrong? The one thing I haven't done (I think) is mess with my router's NAT configuration, because there isn't anywhere for me to do so on my router's settings control panel. I have only once gotten a "Your NAT type is set to moderate" message about a week ago, the first and only so far of its kind. After looking up the "Reset your router for 30 seconds" and doing it, it did away with the message, but I suspect this is still a problem somehow. Is this some kind of known issue with interfacing with Gears of War's servers now, or what? I'll admit, this is my second time on the forum since I made an account like a year ago, so I might've missed the memo. What gives?

* * * EDIT * * *

Whoops, 3 years ago; just checked my "Join Date" profile field, sorry.

* * * EDIT EDIT * * *

I'm not sure if this has to do with my ISP; last I remember, we had their high-speed online package, and I don't recall a switch any time during the last 4 years...

[aBiiG Choppa]

go to speedtest.net or pingtest.net to test your internet maybe your router is to far away

[aBiiG Choppa]

have you checked where your router is did u move your xbox?