Forwarding Ports for World of Warcraft on Your Router.

World of Warcraft is Blizzard Entertainment's Action, Adventure, Role-Playing, and MMO game released in 2004.

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight artwork featuring Alexstrasza the Life-Binder in the Dragon Isles

World of Warcraft has the following styles of play.

Action games are fast paced and tend to put the player in the middle of the action, requiring you to jump over obstacles, climb ladders, and shoot things.
Adventure games are very heavily story driven. You are usually the main character and are the one who discovers the true plot as the game progresses.
Role-Playing Games give you hours on end of game play where you can explore a new world through the eyes of your own character. They tend to be the longest style of game with the most immersive story lines. Popular RPG titles include Skyrim, World of Warcraft, and Fallout.
An MMO game is a Massively Multiplayer Online game where 1000's of players play in the same game world at the same time. They are frequently fantasy based like World of Warcraft, but they can also be sci-fi like Star Citizen. MMO's have a strong focus on character development and loot collection.

How to Port Forward World of Warcraft

When you are playing World of Warcraft you might need to forward some ports in your router. Forwarding ports is a useful trick in gaming because it can really help to make your network connection most stable and frequently even faster. Routers were not designed to allow incoming network requests and some games can play tremendously better if an incoming connection is forwarded through the router to the game.

Use a VPN Instead

Have you considered using a VPN instead of forwarding a port? For most users, a VPN is a much simpler and more secure choice than forwarding a port.

We use and recommend NordVPN because not only is it the fastest VPN, it includes a new feature called Meshnet that makes forwarding a port no longer necessary for most applications. With NordVPN Meshnet, you can connect to your devices from anywhere in the world, completely secure, over a highly encrypted VPN tunnel.

When shopping for a VPN, make sure that they meet the following criteria:

Your VPN provider should have a no-logs policy. This means that they do not keep any logs of any kind.
Make sure that your VPN provider has lots of exit nodes all around the world.
Check that your VPN will not affect your speed.
Verify that your VPN provider uses WireGuard as the underlying protocol.
Many people prefer a VPN provider that is not based in the United States.

This is the list of requirements that we used when we were shopping around for a VPN provider. There are lots of free, shady VPN providers out there that we looked at and dismissed.

Based in Panama, using diskless servers, and with over 6,100 servers in 61 countries, we can safely say that NordVPN satisfies all of these requirements.

Once you've set up your NordVPN account on multiple computers and enabled Meshnet, you can seamlessly access all of your devices as if they were on the same network. You don't even have to log in to your router. It's very simple.

Every time you click on one of our affiliate links, such as NordVPN, we get a little kickback for introducing you to the service. Think of us as your VPN wingman.

Before You Forward a Port

Before you can forward a port you need to know the following things:

The IP address of your network router.
Your gaming machine's IP address.
The TCP and UDP ports to forward.

How to find your router's IP Address

The easiest way to locate your router's IP address is to run our free Router Detector utility. It's a part of the Network Utilities suite of tools and it's completely free to use.

How To Forward Ports

To easily and quickly get your ports forwarded use the Network Utilities software. Network Utilities allows you to forward ports only when you need them, and then close them again when you are done. This makes keeping your network more secure much easier. You can also do it by hand.

The usual process for forwarding a port is:

Start by logging in to your router.
Locate your routers port forwarding section.
Put the IP address of your computer or gaming console in the applicable box in your router.
Put the TCP and UDP ports for your game in the matching boxes in your router.
Intermittently you have to reboot your router for the changes to take effect.
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