Alright so I've been playing halo 4 just fine until today. I go to join my friend, not joinable. Friend sends me an invite and all of a sudden moderate nat may affect connections or whatever the hell it said.

So I go searching around the internet and did all the things I found.

Forwarded ports 53, 80, 88 and 3074.

UPnP has always been enabled so I never touched it.

I enabled DMZ for my xbox's static IP.

Still nothing is working and I have no idea why it all of a sudden decided to break and it's really pissing me off. If anyone has any more suggestions I'd love to hear them.

I don't know what any of this means, I rarely change my router setting because I think it's too complicated.

Halo often tells me to open my NAT, I am pretty sure it is though.

Is it only when joining your friend? Maybe it's something on his end.

@Ravenlight: I don't think so because I've never had joining problems until today or this Moderate NAT message when trying to join his games before. Plus he can join my other friends just fine while I can't join anyone and vice versa. I can matchmake but it takes way longer then it used to.

Me and my friends have run into this problem lately on Halo 4 and to a lesser extent Black Ops 2. One of my friends can't join my games and I can't join his, so we both join a third person and then we can play just fine. Weird stuff.

Contact Your ISP. Sometimes a New firmware is necessary.

I've had the same problems through the years with LIVE and have done all your steps as well. From what I've read LIVE is quite particular and certain routers work better than others. It seems I finally get my NAT type open and then 4 months go by and i'm back to the bullshit again of trying to remember what worked. Halo games have been far and away the most picky with NAT types. Honestly at this point I am thinking of finally junking this verizon POS router.

LEMME SEE YOUR NAT GURL.

Well I figured it out. I never assigned a manual IP address and I forgot to put in my PPPoE settings again when I did a factory reset because it's on a separate tab.

It seems the big thing is to not let the Xbox choose it's own IP address. Just assign it one high in your range, for instance my range is .10 to .254 and if you assign it too low it mightbe overwritten when someone tries to connect a new device.

But it's all better now!

@Hef said:

Well I figured it out. I never assigned a manual IP address and I forgot to put in my PPPoE settings again when I did a factory reset because it's on a separate tab.

It seems the big thing is to not let the Xbox choose it's own IP address. Just assign it one high in your range, for instance my range is .10 to .254 and if you assign it too low it mightbe overwritten when someone tries to connect a new device.

But it's all better now!

Yay I was about to write a response saying do just that but you dun it. What kinda router do you have, btw? I'm just curious. I had to set static IP's on all my devices on a Belkin router because it would do DHCP renewals every 30 minutes regardless of what I set the renewal rate to. Kept getting booted off my work VPN.. I do not recommend Belkins heh

@murisan I have Bell (canadian) and they only use belkin hehe

I hope they get rid of this NAT shit next gen, I've never been able to go online for multiplayer with any of my consoles, yet my PC has never had even the slightest issue.

My nat is set to open but for whatever reason Halo 4 and BLOPS 2 say it's moderate. A year ago in the Live update beta the Live service fucked up a lot of the beta participant's nat type. A subsequent update fixed it but I noticed with the newest Live update that my nat type will say moderate in some games but open in others. Not sure if Live has anything to do with it again but I wouldn't waste your time reconfiguring your router.

My Xbox has never not had a Moderate NAT and I haven't had any problems.

@Hef said:

@murisan I have Bell (canadian) and they only use belkin hehe

Must be a Belkin thing. Oh well

@Hef: I had a strict NAT playing halo 4, so I went to the dashboard and did the "test internet connection". Went back to halo 4 and my NAT was open again. No playing with the modem or any of that crap.

Do the ports you forwarded match the IP of your Xbox? That's the problem I had, my Xbox's IP address changed so I had to change the IP of the ports to match the Xbox.

If one of you or your friend has open NAT then it shouldn't matter what the other has. See if your friend changed something.

what's your network setup like? Do you have multiple routers? How are you connecting to your xbox to the router (wired or wireless) Is there a router built into your modem you got from your ISP and if yes do you have a 2nd piece of network equipment that you are using as well?