Game connects 50% of the time, the other half it fails to load other players and data

Everything would point to a network problem but I've been running at my network's full capabilities almost every time I fail to connect.
Furthermore, the game will be running at 100% fine, I can afk overnight, come back and play more without problems. Then as soon as I either switch servers or disconnect at all, I have to try numerous times, often over hours to get past my character loading into there being no other players around.

In addition:
Occasionally horses will load but not the people, nor chat,
Other times players will load in unmoving and chat is working,
It's a bit of a mixed bag.



I have:

• Restarted my computer oh so many times
• Rebooted my router even more times
• Changed DNS back and forth
• Flushed DNS
• Disabled Geforce Experience
• Turned all settings to low
• Tried 'rescue' (just sends me to Olivia with the same problem)
• Tried the Steam downgrade version and the Launcher torrented version
• Been running the game in administrator mode
• Made sure the launcher and the .bin are allowed through my firewall
• Disabled said firewall in attempt to connect but experienced same symptoms

I'm wondering: Could this be something to do with port forwarding?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers mates.