EA servers and IP address

[#1]

Me and my husband play Battlefield 3 online together. Therefore we have 2 xbox 360 consoles connected via Wi-Fi at the same time. We signed up with Plusnet in June 2017 and have been playing Battlefield 3 together since then.

This is where it gets complicated. Before signing up with Plusnet we were with TalkTalk. It was at this time that we first attempted to play Battlefield 3 together. My husband could play the game alone with no problems but as soon as I would load my game it would come up with an in game error stating it could not connect to the EA servers. This would happen everytime. We tried fiddling around with our router and consoles and realised that whoever put their console on first could always get on to the battlefield servers but the 2nd console would never be able to.

With this information we took to the internet and found that this was due to EA. They set up a restriction meaning that 2 consoles within a household using the same internet connection could not both connect to the EA servers. Apparently this is because people were fraudulently boosting their 'coins' in the Fifa games (also EA servers) using 2 consoles/pc's on one connection. This means anyone trying to play together but on seperate consoles/pc's, like siblings, will never be able to without messing about with routers. Basically a few people had this issue but EA didn't care and are not going to change it. The solutions given were a bit convoluted for me to be honest and I didn't want to start changing router/connection settings when I didn't know what I was doing.

Anyway upon changing provider to Plusnet we set up our new plusnet router and then discovered we were able to connect to the EA servers simultaneously. We have played together online since with no further issues.... until yesterday. We tried to start playing as normal but it was just not connecting and was doing the same thing it would do when we were with Talktalk.

I have no idea why it has suddenly changed and is no longer working. My only understanding of it is that each console has to have a different IP address. With Talktalk they must have had the same IP address, so one console would always be blocked by EA's settings. Plusnet's router must have assigned different IP addresses to the consoles. Somehow this has now changed. Is there anyway I can get it back to how it was before?

[#2]

The EA servers look at your WAN (public) IP address which is most likely what they restrict connections from. Your consoles will both have an individual but LAN (local) IP address which is most likely 192.168.[Something]. EA do not see your 192.168 address due to NAT so effectively they only see the source IP from the public address.

EA may have relaxed this rule or potentially by some miracle you may have inadvertently loopholed their security which has now been closed again.

You could potentially do what you are trying to by using a business service and a routed block of IP's and giving the consoles their own individual public IP address.

[#3]

Thanks for the advice. We managed to get around the problem by changing the IP address. Hopefully this will carry on working.