I've been playing with my friend for a while with a couple others. When connecting, we type his IP in manually. But we wondered why others weren't joining from public.
We later noticed that we couldn't connect to him through the server browser.
The server browser shows that his server exists but doesn't display the correct IP Address to go along with it, resulting in no public players to play with :(

Has anyone else encountered or know of this issue? Any sort of help or insight would be greatly appreciated!

did you actually try to join with server browser to make sure it does not work or you just looked at ip?

Good question! I did try to actually join to see what would happen. The game tried to connect for ~20 seconds or so before telling me that it failed.