UO and Port Forwarding (firewall settings)

[drinkbeerallday]

Obviously UO works behind a hardware firewall/router and it's simple to allow traffic through Windows Firewall and other software firewalls.

ea.custhelp link

The NAT on a home router does most of this work for us. I'm posting because I want to know if there's a reason / benefit to manually opening the ports to incoming traffic. Will I lag less if I open those ports or is lag mostly unrelated to a NAT router that is functioning properly?

 

[Bomb Bloke]

Port forwarding is used to allow other systems to open a connection to yours. This is a good thing in, say, BitTorrent (where the more connections with other people you have the better), and a requirement if you wish to host a gaming server of your own (or else no one can join you and play).

In cases where you're connecting to another system, the port forward doesn't do much at all.