high firewall settings with Portforwarding not letting me play online pc games

[bredpildsoibi]

in the fios quantum g110 router firewall settings there is 3 options. High, medium and low. i did have it on medium before with out port forwards and seemed fine with all games i played online. i don't remember what it originally was set on at default but why does port forwarding do nothing on high settings? i am trying to play apex legends PC. Is there any way you can and do you really need firewall set on high? is low ok? how much more security does high give you compared to others? i would like to put it on high for better security. What do most people set theres as?

[lasagna · Accepted solution]

For typical residential use, Medium is the correct setting.

In short ...

Low -- bad idea, pretty much allows anything in and anything out.

Medium -- allows anything outbound, rejects anything inbound unless there's a port forward

High - rejects anything outbound, rejects anything inbound unless there's a port forward

For most residential usage, you don't want to block your outbound initiated access to sites and locations typically thus Medium is appropriate.   High settings are really for environments where you have a very specific application (single use or very limited special use) the needs to get in and out.

In all likelihood, your issue with High settings is not just the port forward (which may indeed be correct), but the fact that you also need rules for your system to place connections outbound to the gaming server and other network services in order to establish the connectivity.   In fact, many gaming systems will switch to outbound initiated connectivity only to overcome the need for port forwards since UPnP is pretty much disabled by anyone who has any sense of security around their network and establishing the proper port forwards can be confusing for most.