Can't rejoin friend's custom games unless you restart WC3

My friends and I decided to play some Custom Games together and we couldn’t find our friend’s game when searching in the custom games menu. We were able to join our friend’s game from the friends list. Once the first game was complete our friend would host the game again, but on the second time hosting, none of us could see our friend hosting the game and the option to join the game wouldn’t show up, despite him having hosted the game. Our friend could also not invite us to play his game. In order to see his game again, all of us had to quit the game completely, and then restart the game in order to join the custom game again. This wasn’t an isolated incident. A few of us attempted to replicate the issue and we were able to do so using the following steps below. We also attempted to use port forwarding, which was the only solution somebody put forward a year or so ago and it didn’t fix the issue.

Steps to Replicate:

  1. Have a friend from your friends list host a custom game on a different network than you.
  2. Join the custom game and play.
  3. Quit the custom game and go back out to the menu.
  4. Have the friend host the same Custom Game again
  5. You will be unable to join your friends game and they will not be able to invite you.
  6. Shut down the game and then restart it. You will be able to see your friends game again.

This is a very frustrating issue and fixing it would go a long way to making this a much more enjoyable experience for my friends and I. We’ve been playing this game for almost 20 years since Reign of Chaos was first released. Reforged is probably the worst state this game has ever been in. I understand things have improved marginally, but there’s still obvious issues like this one which are frustrating to deal with. I hope you can at least fix this issue.

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I reported this a while ago, this is something they broke. If you want to avoid restarting the game, I believe hosting a game of your own will update the friends list.

TBH it’s easier just Alt+F4’ing at the end of each game until this dumb nonsense is fixed.

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i cant believe this has been an issue for so long. its a really frustrating one.

And that’s still a problem …