Colt wrote:Not necessarily instant - but within 24 hrs is cool
It would be lovely to be able to solve all high and low priority issues within 24 hours, I agree! But, that is not always realistic for very complicated problems. I understand that we do set a very high bar for ourselves because most concerns here
are handled immediately.
The support request that I saw was from a few hours ago. I fully investigated and resolved it. Here's what I said.
I continued researching this and the problem is due to a combination of a Windows design flaw and a BF4 design flaw.
Specifically, Windows silently creates an invisible and unmodifiable firewall exception when a local application attempts an outbound connection, allowing inbound traffic from the same IP address and port that the application is trying to connect to. Traditionally such connections are used to get around NATs and the technique is called "hole punching"; it seems that Microsoft decided to allow it more generally in the OS, as well, even when there's an explicit firewall rule blocking such traffic. Presumably their thought was that this was a good way to allow users to do stupid things like blocking all inbound traffic without breaking their internet connections, but it makes no sense from a hosting standpoint, and it definitely makes no sense to fail to expose the option of disabling that behavior.
That wouldn't normally matter, but BF4 is designed to punch those holes. The game might be expected to perform hole punching on the client, but DICE apparently built it into the server, as well. This was clearly unnecessary, since servers are not behind deny-all-incoming-traffic firewalls. DICE did not build in a way to override this errant behavior, at least that I can find.
In any case, the workaround that I've found is to create an outbound firewall rule that also blocks traffic *to* the blocked IP address. It seems that Windows respects this one, and it prevents the hole from being punched. I've applied that adjustment to the system and confirmed that it is working.
Also, working around EA's intentional ban/kick limitation for Official servers is a legal gray area. I can't guarantee that you will always be able to do this, as it's possible they'll put a stop to it (I hope not).