Trouble Connecting to BF4 Servers While on the Same Network

@Bedzzz4Less 

You may have to do some manual router setup regarding Port Triggering (rather than port forwarding).

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Can-t-connect-to-Apex-Legends-server-while-on-the-same-ne...

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/faq/opening-tcp-or-udp-ports-for-connection-issues

https://portforward.com/

Hi @Bedzzz4Less ,

BF4 works perfectly fine for more players to play together on the same server, despite you may all log on to play from the same ISP/Modem/Router origin.

Same as well here with your wife on aka PS5 and you on PS4.  We have that setup also in our own household and it works perfectly fine to play together on BF4 servers.  The EA Support does unfortunately often not know the facts or what they are talking about...

From your local set up and the symptoms that you describe, then your trouble may be caused by one or two different root causes:

If you allow either the PS4 and/or the PS5 to connect to your router via WiFi, then the BF4 server will not always see your PlayStation console having a unique IP and will therefore not allow a new console to log on with an additional soldier with what appears to be the same IP.  You should connect to your modem/router from the two PlayStations though a wired ethernet connection all the way.

Also if you have interim connection drops, then most reliable is to use your router to identify the MAC address for your two consoles and then list them as reserved IPs on your local LAN for your consoles.  This way you will obtain a much more stable gaming experience going forward, so absolutely worth that little extra trouble just once and for all.  

Another root cause may be due to the server bug that has been raging the BF4 world since xmas/January, is the fact that the server buffers are often not resetting properly when players leave the server.   Hence next time you may want to join the same server again you get the message "cannot connect to server" or it does actually say "joining server", but it actually never does.  And only way out is to kill the app on your console or reboot it all together...  This is very frequently appearing now unfortunately, as each server is like accumulating the players on its list of blocked players.  Until it totally crashes or is being rebooted... 

So if you cannot get the server rebooted or knows the server owner to get it reset, then only alternative is for you and your wife to move on and find other servers that you have not yet previously played on and in this error state with your soldier profiles.

@Bedzzz4Less you can check on your Router if UPNP is disabled.

If not, disable it and try again. Maybe it helps.

Saw people with similar issues mentioning this. 

Greets,

Travis 

Hi @CyberDyme 

I appreciate your longform response. I should have added in the original post that my wife and I are both on wired internet connections to the routers. 

I think I'm going to have to try to screw around with setting the MAC addresses as reserved IPs on the local LAN that you've described. Just to remove that variable from the equation. Hopefully that will work to resolve any issues, but maybe it won't. I tried doing that before, but maybe I need to dig a little deeper. 

I didn't know about the server bug that was happening. If that's the case, then maybe, yeah, we're going to have to just find different servers to play, because what you described is exactly what hapens. It says "joining server", but just kicks us out. I've restarted the game before, but it doesn't seem to solve the connection issue, so I'm not sure what that means, either.

Appreciate your help with this. I'll look at some of these solutions and come back to the thread if I've found a fix.

Thanks,

Bedz

@Bedzzz4Less hm, ok. Didn't know you've tried this already. But if you want, sure give it another try.

Did you ever try yet if it works when you use the BF4 menu option "Squad Join" to like create a squad together in the menu and then the squad leader chooses the server?

Maybe works. 

Greets,

Travis 

@Bedzzz4Less no worries.

Just sad nobody found a solution for your issue yet, I'm also really curious what it could be that causes this issue.

Greets,

Travis