Black Ops 3 NAT Type Strict & PS4 NAT Type 3 with pfSense Fixed!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything even remotely related to gaming, so I suppose this is a nice distraction!  Since Sony gave us COD blops 3 in the PS+ I’ve been enjoying the fun of running around shooting people and reliving the MW2 days.  However matchmaking has always been a problem with my PS4 reporting NAT Type 3 and blops 3 itself report NAT Type Strict.  I use pfSense at home and have spent weeks trying to fix this, and in the end once I knew what to do it was easily fixed!

I found multiple guides out there all detailing how to setup port forwarding.  But in my case I knew that UPNP was enabled for my PS4 and was working as expected.  Even though my UPNP diagnostic on pfSense was reporting the ports were open correctly blops was reporting the port was closed.  To be truthful I’ve not noticed any other issues with any other games, but it could just be CODs reliance on the peer to peer gaming servers.

But being a good geek I followed all the tutorials I could find, port forwarded every port I read mentioned and still the same issue with NAT Type Strict.  I then tried forwarding ALL inbound ports to my PS4, still NAT Type Strict.  I even included other protocols (AH, ESP, etc), and still NAT Type Strict.

Notice how upset she looks with NAT Type Stict.

My salvation came from a post here by CEOS3C which detailed setting up a specific outbound NAT rule.  That fixed it wonderfully.  The trick here is to use Static port outbound as opposed to the default Dynamic.  Theres a great YouTube of him explaining how to fix this.  Thank CEOS3C 🙂

Look how happy she looks with NAT Type Open!

On pfSense have your Outbound NAT looking like the following:

What it looks like is that the PS4 and BLOPS especially is not happy with pfSense randomising its port.

However, rewriting the source port breaks some applications which require the source port to remain unmodified. Notably, there are a handful of protocols, including IPsec and some games, which suffer from this limitation. – https://www.netgate.com/docs/pfsense/nat/static-port.html

If it still isn’t working for you, make sure you have UDP:9308 and UDP:3074 forwarded to your PS4, this is the UPNP status on pfSense.

Or make sure you have UPNP enabled.

IPv6 can’t come quick enough in my humble opinion.