Last week I was peer pressured into trying out Helldivers 2 (yes, this is relevant, trust me), so I downloaded it, installed it, and fired it up with no issues. Set up my preferred control schema with no issues. Played the torturial with no issues.

Then came time for joining my friends in multiplayer. Issues! No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to join them. Nor could they join me.

I verified the installed files, I tried to connect via my phone to rule out ISP issues, and I tried all of the different versions of proton, but the result remained the same. I simply couldn't join my friends.

I don't remember what caused me to go down the right path of troubleshooting, but I've always dosabled IPv6 on my linux installs. So I re-enabled it. The problem remained. Then I realized that I had it disabled in the kernel via grub command line flags, so I cuanged that and gave my PC a reboot. Success!

So, despite networking being a large (maybe even the largest) part of my vocation for the past two decades, last week was the first time ever I actually NEEDED IPv6.