Stuck on acquiring file list screen

[inkrhed]

Hi!

I've been running my campaign for the last two years through FG and everything worked fine until December last year. Recently one of my players (other players connect with no problem) faced this problem where she can't connect to my lobby as usual and gets stuck on the "Acquiring file list" screen. We tried what feels like everything - resetting network settings in Windows, trying different DPIs, proxies and VPNs, even running logs through various AI bots (as a last resort lol), nothing seems to be working. From time to time she doesn't even reach the "Acquiring file list" screen and gets stuck on "Attempting resolved connection" when trying different things. She tried to create a campaign so I can join her to check if it worked that way, but I got stuck on the "Attempting resolved connection" too. I read some of the forum posts here with that same issue but it was caused by some other connectivity issues and the solutions there didn't help us.

The situation is even worse considering me and my players live in Russia so some Amazon servers, Cloudflare servers, etc are blocked by our Internet providers, so we use the zapret DPI and VPN to connect to Discord, watch Youtube, etc. We tried turning zapret off, tried to connect to the same VPN server, it doesn't work.

So I am in desperate need of help from tech gurus out there who know how FG servers and connection overall work, maybe we can conjure up some other solution :(
I do know that maybe this is all caused by the bans in the country but what if there is something that can help?

Thank you in advance.

[Moon Wizard]

The thing is that for FG, the GM application is the server, and the player applications connect to the GM server. So, other than the initial lobby to help make connections, there are no other servers/machines involved in the process.

Given the complexities in your networking scenario, you need to make sure that you are running the right setup for your networking bypasses.
If you are running a VPN for example, you would want to run in LAN mode (not Cloud mode, which uses the central server); and provide the IP address of your VPN connection to your users. This assumes that you are running on the VPN to "share" a network with your players.
Everything else is a bit outside of our expertise in navigating the complexities of the Internet connections in your country.

For LAN connections, you provide the external IP address and port to your users; and the GM needs to make sure port forwarding is set up to route from external IP (usually going to your router) to your machine on your local network.
For Cloud connections, the libraries we have attempt to use NAT punchthrough and other methods to automate that approach.

Also, if stuck on Acquiring File List, it seems like the connection is being blocked or dropped somewhere between GM and user after forming the initial connection. You'd need to see if you Internet provider is performing any blocking by IP, applying any "advanced security" settings that could block content/connections, or whether they might be throttling/dropping packets in the connection.

Regards,
JPG

[inkrhed]

Thank you so much for providing this info. We seem to have found a solution for the time being (we've been trying to find one for a whole month lol). The solution being to use Cloudflare WARP app, inserting CF server names in the zapret general-list file and having it on while connecting. Sucks to use so much just to run a DND session but what can you do :) Thanks again!