My friend and I can not game together any longer.

He is in S. California, I am in SE Michigan. Up until roughly a year ago, (not really sure exact time line, could be 6 mo) we could play any game together we wanted, I could host or he could host. It wouldn't matter. At some point, it just stopped working. Can't connect through steam, can't host locally. We can interact together through a server. We can even play together on like, 3 games that I know of (specifically: Tiny Tina's Wonderlands he hosts, V rising he hosts, and Runescape: Dragonwilds I host.) When we host any other game we've tried (valheim, 7dtd, northguard etc.) The one not hosting gets booted. When a mutual friend of ours hosts, whoever connects first seems to block the other. What's even stranger, is when last night, we learned that I can host him on no man's sky, but its like we are in separate instances. We could see messages when one of the other would come and go from the star system, we could even see one another's star ships when they are parked on the same planet (intermittently), but we can't see any indication of being in a party. It's super weird.

We seem to have this problem regardless of whether steam is in the middle or not. I think we are both running windows. My internet speed is pretty good (+200mb d/+30mb u) and I am connected through lan to a router.

Please help reunite a couple of long-lost space cadets!

Update! So I got started in Dune: Awakening last night and found that I was unable to sign into the gportal server that one of our friends had put up. We will call him: Jehosephat. After some troubleshooting and cursing my awful misfortunes, I removed my ethernet altogether. Disabled the adapter and unplugged from the router. I found then I was able to log into the server. Game played like ass trying to drill a 5g signal through 4" of drywall but at least I wasn't getting booted anymore. I went snooping deep into windows land to compare the hardware profiles of my wifi adapter and my ethernet adapter. It appeared that there were significantly more specific drivers present on my wifi adapter. The ethernet adapter only had some generic windows driver bullshit printed in the little box. "Fuck you William B. Gates" I exclaimed as I went straight to the internet for a realtek ethernet adapter driver, downloaded version 10.75 or whatever and installed it. I was immediately able to participate in flowing the spice job on planet duneland.

I have yet to try other games or P2P but I am hopeful.

Thanks for all the responses.