Years ago, I used to port forward as it was supposed to help - didn't notice any difference. However, the issues we (my regular wingmate and myself) had was 100% down to his (at the time) poor connection. We both had decent enough PC's, I had slow (2mpbs down, 1mbps up) ADSL broadband 1.6km from the box, but it was responsive. He, conversely had a much faster connection, but it was (temporarily) over wireless. Once he was wired, issues went away, despite my connection still looking like it was the weak point - maybe it would be if there were lots of players in an instance.
Fast forward to more recently, I have full (FTTP) fibre - both fast and very responsive - while he has a decent FTTC fibre. Geographically, we're about 200 miles apart, but any instance with just the two of us is near flawless. In a busy HazRes, both in big ships our SLF's deployed as well as many (material-gathering) limpets game runs great. We tend to stick to our (small membership) Private Group if wanting to team up as we've often had instances scuppered when another Player arrives in the area. I do wonder if making yourself an exclusive Private Group would help things when you want to play together?
Note: While I go into Mobius (large PvE Private Group) for general play when not winging up, I now avoid Open due to some very poor interactions. The last time I played in open regularly, I thought I was still in Mobius (my bad), so was taken off-guard when interdicted (not allowed in Mobius). The interdiction its self was fine - albeit a player in a fully-equipped PvP ship vs. me in a trade ship on the way to outfitting sigh - but the instance was basically broken due to what I can only assume are network issues. His ship was teleporting around, damage wasn't being counted, then I suddenly took massive insta-damage and the UI locked up - I could not look right to check the status of the ship's modules. Basically, I was out of the game but the game was still running. I had to exit to menu as nothing worked, logging back in to a load of abuse from the other guy, accusing me of "Combat logging" (wrong!) and that I should stick to SOLO. Of course, the coward blocked me while I was attempting to explain the issue and how things went screwy only when we instanced together.
Previously, when in Mobius or Open with a few other players around, I'd generally had an ok experience when it comes to network performance. However, leading up to that incident in Open, it felt like things had gotten worse with more players about. Not unplayable bad by any means, but certainly more rubber-banding type behaviour when another player showed up. Also saw weird things like kills not being counted, even though (from my perspective) I'd clearly landed the kill shot on a target that another player had joined in on (having previously ignored my wing invites when I saw he'd come to bounty-hunt to). Irksome stuff, but not game-breaking like that later event. Still, as I of course don't know what PC specs and connection the other players had, I can only speculate.
I'm sure there are perhaps other factors involved here, but when I've been instanced with other people who I both know have good PC's and good connections, gameplay is great. Conversely, we've each had occasions where another random commander joins a Res or CZ instance we're already in, and performance has instantly gone to carp. We avoid these potential issues now by using a small PG I set up.
Note 2: Living out in the sticks a bit, we'd always had a poor internet connection here, relative to the rest of the country. We were still on dial up, when everyone else I knew had long since switched to ADSL. We got half megabit ADSL at a time when the "norm" among my friends was 40mbps. It progressed like this for years until, out of the blue, suddenly there were a load of BT contractors laying fibre outside the house. I actively avoided Open for years as I was worried my poor internet wouldn't be able to handle it, affecting the experience for all I might be instanced with. Now it can, but others can't it seems. I wish the game could somehow assess both the PC and connection speeds and not instance those on the lower end with those on the higher. I'd have felt more confident going into open on my old, poor connection if that'd been the case.
Anyway, long ramble I know, but now me and my buddy are both using good PC's with good internet connections we simply don't get issues while playing in our small Private Group. We do get them, from time to time, in Open with certain commanders. We did even dabble with Multi-crew a few times and it worked, but wasn't particularly entertaining. Will try that again, to see if anything has changed since update 14.
