I am not sure i am in the right place but we are all out of options here since we couldn't get any help from the game or steam support.
Since around the 13/03, there is a major systemic problem in every game that uses Steam Networking for P2P games.
For example, in the game Street Fighter 6, when playing with one Israeli or another with PC to PC the ping between players is ~120ms.
when playing with European players the ping is around 60-80ms which means it works well, it currently affects only Israeli players when playing PC to PC.
Since Street Fighter 6 supports cross-play we have tried playing PC to PS5 and the ping is a flawless 5-10ms.
It currently affects all players in Israel, we have a few dozens in our community with several ISPs, we have of course attempted speaking to our ISPs and port forwarding and we have found no network issues on their part. in other P2P games that don't use steam networking the issue is not existent(for example, Tekken 8).
We are currently don't know what we can do with this issue since nothing we have done have helped and 120ms is too high for it to be playable in any P2P game.
While I can't confirm but heard reports from players in other middle eastern countries like Egypt that they also report on this issue so it could be region-wide.
Chinese players have also encountered a similar issue. While playing Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Steam Networking fails to establish a P2P connection for players (even when both the host and other players have enabled "Share IP Address" in their settings, a direct P2P connection still cannot be established).
Previously, we could easily establish a UDP connection via P2P, which gave us very low latency. But now, all player data is being relayed through Steam's SDR relay service, causing network latency to spike — which is a disaster for players of an action game like this.
I suspect this may be caused by Steam's recent update to the new 'Steam Networking APIs'. Although connections routed through Steam relays offer better privacy and security, this has also led to a significant increase in network latency.
Thanks @boazazulay and @Kagamine-Rinrin for the info on specific circumstances where you're experiencing issues. We can use this to coordinate with partners using SDR to investigate why e.g. "Share IP Address" isn't being honored.
Thank you @bgilmore looking forward for your reply.
it genuinely made so many P2P games unplayable here because of it.
I'd like to add that if you try to block traffic to SDR servers in order to force true P2P connection it seems that the online match will fail to start like it doesn't try to use P2P for online.
Thanks @boazazulay and @Kagamine-Rinrin for the info on specific circumstances where you're experiencing issues. We can use this to coordinate with partners using SDR to investigate why e.g. "Share IP Address" isn't being honored.
Thank you @bgilmore. I appreciate getting a direct reply from developer.
Based on my recent conversations with other players, it's not just the online multiplayer in Warhammer: Vermintide 2 that has been affected. P2P connections in games that rely on Steam SDR for multiplayer, such as Deep Rock Galactic, have also been restricted. Some of those players have reported the issue to Steam support as well., and I hope this issue can be fixed soon.
Oh wow, only now got to this issue. I reported this problem both to Capcom and Steam support around a month ago and only now I learnt that it's not a Capcom failure (or maybe they didn't use SDR before the March patch, I don't know). SF6 players that are far from SDR servers suffer a lot from this problem. Recently we got a mod for P2P fix, but it requires both players to use it: https://www.nexusmods.com/streetfighter6/mods/3410
I hope this gets fixed quickly (and I also hope that Capcom temporarily switch to Azure even in PC to PC case until it gets fixed).
Btw, the p2p doc says
Also, on Steam we always relay traffic and do not share IP addresses between untrusted peers, so that malicious players cannot DoS attack.
Can it be something related to why the "Share IP address" option for is not honored at all? E.g. maybe all or most clients are considered untrusted.
I'm guessing, of course, but this part of the documentation rang a bell for me.
@hwo411
I can confirm to you that the issue happened before Alex's update since we had those issues a few days before that.
also i play a lot of fighting games and every game that has this issue got it around the same time
@boazazulay thanks for letting know! I didn't catch the exact moment when the issues started, so I used to think that Alex patch was the reason. Wish I had found this topic earlier, I wouldn't have expected every SF6 patch to fix it :)
Thanks @boazazulay and @Kagamine-Rinrin for the info on specific circumstances where you're experiencing issues. We can use this to coordinate with partners using SDR to investigate why e.g. "Share IP Address" isn't being honored.
A player in China recently discovered a workaround that restores proper P2P connectivity. The steps are as follows:
Copy steamwebrtc64.dllfrom the Steam installation directory into the target game’s folder under one of these paths:
Binaries
Binaries/Win64
Binaries_dx12
This must be done by both parties. Once completed, Steam Networking will display the peer’s IP address along with the message “NAT traversal successful, IP shared,”indicating a successful P2P connection.
Important: Performing this step on only one side does not work. Although the “3999” error code may disappear, the connection will still route through SDR (Steam Datagram Relay) and show that the peer has not shared their IP. Only when both users copy the file does true P2P connectivity resume.
This method has been confirmed working in:
Deep Rock Galactic
Warhammer: Vermintide 2
Far Far West
Since this behavior is consistent across multiple games, it suggests the issue is unlikely to be caused by individual SDR service providers. Instead, it may have been introduced in a SteamNetworking update—possibly around early March.
We would greatly appreciate it if the team could investigate this issue and provide an official fix at the earliest opportunity.
@compami
Thank you for this workaround! I tried this with friends on SF6 and Melty blood.
they didnt have the binaries folder so from what I saw we put it in the same folder the steam_api64 dll file was.
in melty blood specifically we need to use the steamwebrtc.dll and not the 64 one sine that game uses the steam_api.dll and not steam_api64.dll.
at least it works great now for us until an official fix comes
We tried the solution with dll , it works, but with a huge caveat: if you don't get direct p2p or if you play vs player without this solution (in both cases you get relay connection), SF6 starts lagging and freezes after the match. I don't know if it's the case for other games.
Update: it always freezes around 3-5 minutes after the first game starts regardless of the opponent or connection type.
I have some news.
We tried older steam client (from January), taken from here: https://archive.org/details/steam-clients
With both players using it, SF6 tries to establish direct connection between PC players using STUN. Unfortunately, it seems that STUN is being blocked in Russia (or maybe there was a different reason) and we didn't manage to have direct connection in the end (but we'll try exploring this further).
If any of you could verify this too, would be great.
In order for Steam Client not to update, you need to have steam.cfg in its folder with the following content:
BootStrapperInhibitAll=Enable
BootStrapperForceSelfUpdate=False
Update: it wasn't a blocking issue, the other guy had some other problems with setup
But we can confirm that this works.
Replying to #398 (comment)
The old client works just fine ty.
Do we know why the old client fixes the issue ? I'm afraid it might run out of support and would need to update
Replying to #398 (comment)
Yes, I have successfully restored P2P capability to the game using this method. (As for other games, perhaps you can refer to this method.)
I don't know what caused this, but I hope the developers of Valve can improve some processing methods for the Steam SDR service based on this temporary solution @bgilmore
Replying to #398 (comment) The old client works just fine ty. Do we know why the old client fixes the issue ? I'm afraid it might run out of support and would need to update
Old client uses STUN to establish direct p2p, newer clients for some reason don't even try to.
I don't know what was the exact change.
Please fix this valve. when i play sf6, i get 90ms stable against finnish players but when i play against people in my country i get 120ms with rollback and delay frames
