Private lobby works for friend not for me

[Mark-VR]

I am testing this program to use in the future. The private lobby rules work for my friend 100 percent of the time as long as we follow each step in the instructions. But for me we have only had one successful test with me as the host after several tests. We aren't sure what we did differently for the hosting to work once for me. What can be done to determine the issue of me not being able to host private lobbies?

[alcore250]

when they made the loading for gta faster they broke the program

[yuri0r]

how and why would that update break things? assuming firewall rules just blocks other IP addresses on the ports of the game, in a peer to peer service this should pretty consistently allow for "public" friend only lobbies.

[Speyedr]

how and why would that update break things? assuming firewall rules just blocks other IP addresses on the ports of the game, in a peer to peer service this should pretty consistently allow for "public" friend only lobbies.

The new netcode for faster load times came alongside an update that added session tunneling through R* owned IPs.

In short, if a player attempting to join cannot connect to the host directly, R* tunnels the connection through their own resources. This makes the game more accessible to people with strict firewall policies, but also makes firewalls based only on source / destination IPs impossible. In order to play Online with others, you must keep at least one R*-owned connection open that also happens to be on the Game Port (usually 6672). Eventually, session tunneling will discover that players can be tunneled through this IP and your session is now ruined.

This isn't to say that Private Public lobbies are dead, but no publicly accessible program has been able to solve this issue yet.