Recently my gaming group have been having issues connecting to a Space Exploration multiplayer game.

This happens with multiple players in all different countries, but the higher the latency the worse the problem is

The symptoms are a player will start connecting but then get instantly dropped ...

Twinsen; those download issues reminds me of the old Sip packet of death . Aka buggy network controller firmware.

Sometimes just encrypting everything to stop network gear in the middle from "helping" may be your best bet. Alternatively padding a UDP packet so it is always some minimum size may ...

At least for XenForo (another forum software) Tapatalk is a security nightmare*, and generally doesn't play well with any customizations in any way.

*They will silently release security updates for their server side code and not tell people! Nor is there an automatic update process.