IP addresses are like street names that people and services use to find you.
There are several kinds, but the most known ones are two:
Local and
External.
Local addresses are addresses that only make sense to
you and
your router. A router interprets them as "some device that is connected to me" (for those that begin with
192.168, for example).
External addresses are
actually those that your router interprets as "some device on the internet", and tries to act accordingly. Every device connected to the internet has one attached to them. Any external device that wants to connect to you
needs to have your external address.
Then there's a special kind: These are the
Loopback addresses. When any device attempts to connect to
127.0.0.1 or
localhost, the router will notice it and quckly reroute the connection back to the source. This leads to that device connecting to itself without even
touching the Internet.
By connecting to yourself with your external address, you are unnecesarily connecting to the Internet just to return back to your computer and connect to your server. This will use some (probably imperceptible amounts of) internet resources during gameplay,
can lead to lag if your service is spotty, and even disconnect you from your own game if your internet connection were to suddenly go down.
What you can do instead is connect to yourself using a local or a loopback address. This does not involve the internet and you generally have less latency, if any
. Plus you remain in the game in the case that anything goes wrong with your internet connection.
Hope this makes sense! It's not
super important to know, but can lead to smoother games for you and other players in your server.
You can always just use the same address you give to your friends anyways. If your internet service is decent, it shouldn't matter what you use.
