Anyone have problems joining friends in Live Arcade?

[norkusa]

I've been trying to join my brother in a online match of Uno for the past couple days but can't connect for some reason. He keeps getting a "session timed-out" error whenever he tries to join one of my games. Same goes for me too and also when we try to chat in the 360 Dashboard.

The funny thing is that we can leave each other voice/text messages fine and we don't have problems playing Halo 2 together. It's just Live Arcade and Dashboard we can't connect in.

Any ideas what the problem could be? Uno is the only Live Arcade game we both have, so we really can't use any others to test. Haven't tried playing/chatting with anyone else from my friends list, so I don't know if the same goes for everyone, or just my brother.

[TurboGenesis]

My friend and I have had problems with Contra. we would be able to connect and start a game together but then it would get "seperated". He would die on my screen and I would die on his and then we would pretty much be playing solo games and still talking. I think Contra anyways is broken on multiplayer.

[Darth Sensei]

I've had that problem on and off with no idea why.

[s1lence]

Here is the answer.

You have to make sure that your connection is OPEN, not moderate or strict.
The problem is that either you or the person on your friends list has either a moderate (most likely) or strict connection. This will not allow you connect to matches if your settings are different.


You have to set the ports on your router for the correct settings and make sure uPnP is turned ON. The ports IIRC are 88 and 3074, but I could be wrong on that. You DO NOT need to set your 360 to be on the DMZ as I previously thought. Some routers are also do not like xbox live at all so that could also be a problem, but once I got my xbox to show as open it worked. Sothy and GrandamChandler are a couple other people that have this problem as well, so if you are not connecting check your connection status.

[norkusa]

Ohhhh, okay. I was wondering if it had something to do with my router & port settings. I'll give that a try and see if it does anything. Thanks for the tip!

[s1lence]

No problem, always will to help.

[norkusa]

BTW, do you know why I can connect with my brother without any problems in Halo 2 but not in the 360 dashbaord or Live Arcade? Does the Live dash use different port settings?

[norkusa]

Finally got this working. I was starting to go nuts because I still couldn't connect with my brother even after opening the required ports. Followed an online tutorial for the same problem + router model I had too. That's when I realized the problem was on my brothers end and told him to open his connection up. Worked great after that. :roll:

Anyway, thanks for all the help. Playing Uno with that Live camera definitely makes the game a lot more interesting.