In a number of threads such as this, I often see remarks from players that they 'can see others but not as many as they should be able to see.' Whenever I see remarks like that, I always wonder: how can you tell?
You can't, at least not with a high degree of confidence on a per encounter basis.
What you can do is pay attention to patterns. If you are in Open in a high traffic system that only has a few likely CMDR destinations and few people seem to be around, despite system chat being populated, something could well be interfering with instancing. Likewise, if you play for a while, then quit to main menu, you can look at your networking stats. In general, about half or more of your connection attempts should be successful, and the number of connections via TURN should be low. If you are seeing well under half of connection attempts succeed, or a number of connections via TURN that approaches standard connections, something is probably wrong. Only seeing TURN connections, or no connections, when there obviously should be, is also possible if there is a major issue.
Ok, sot how am I supposed to know if I'm seeing everyone that's there?
This would be even more of an approximation, unless you know the people involved and have good reason to expect them to be in your instance, or there are other oddities, like people who can see your CMDR, but you cannot see theirs, etc.
@Morbad , if I have UPNP enabled but it still shows port restricted router type, will I still be able to host in an instance? If I decide to forward the port instead of using UPNP and it is still port restricted, will I be able to host?
I want to say yes, but I don't know enough about how the matchmaking sever pairs peers to be confident in that answer. I expect that the game being able to check for this means it can compensate for it, but I'm not 100% on that.
As mentioned earlier, less than "full cone" requires your network to initiate connection with a given IP/port before being able to receive packets from that IP/port. This may potentially cause issues with hosting other "port restricted" peers.
I've been trying to get a "full cone" NAT type and I'm running into difficulties. I thought I was doing fine just forwarding the port, but I guess "full cone" is the best? Does it matter if my internal IP is set by DHCP?
Full cone should be the most connectable. It should not matter if your internal IP is set by DHCP or not, as long as ports are being forwarded to the correct IP.
I believe I have some underlying security where I'm not able to easily enable full_cone.
Many routers have NAT security settings that control this. What router are you using?
I suggest using manual port forwarding, enabling the netlog and use a UDP port test tool to verify, one of these:
If it works, you should find this entry (or similar) in your log:
{17:17:57GMT 41.038s} packet of just 0 bits from IP4:<Test server IP>:<Test server port>,0
{17:17:57GMT 41.038s} ShortPacket
Interestingly, I cannot get any web based port scanners to say my open ports are actually open, but the game client does correctly report connection attempts in the netlog when doing this.
