Sounds like a great solution! It's really too bad that the P2P system discriminates against people who can't change their port settings (like students at Universities or people in large apartment or condo complexes).

I for one vote for usability. Period. Security is gravy. It's no use for me to have a "solid secure" game code when I can't play.

You say that the game would have to be completely rewritten for Ironclad to keep a compliment of accessible, hosted games available? I could buy 10 copies of the game myself, and host 10 games of Sins without rewriting a thing. That would triple the activity of Ironclad Online alone. Hosting is the weak link in the chain of this game, why can't Ironclad set up some dedicated peers that host the games? If I can do it, so can they, and the cost wouldn't be prohibitive.

It seems to me that the only thing that would have to be written into the game, is an interface that let's people modify/administer the game settings of one of those pre-hosted games remotely. And if it's necessary for making the multiplayer aspect of the game available to the mainstream, then coding that up is time well spent.

I am listening, I understand that it's a peer to peer multiplayer system. And that it's not working because the people hosting the game, because despite still being a "regular player", they have additional port requirements.

You ignored my point, that Ironclad could set up some peers (exactly the term I used), that have port forwarding set up correctly to host the games. That's not changing a thing about the network coding. That's just acting like the players are expected to.

They could configure and initiate the games manually, start them on a timer based schedule, or create a way for players to configure/initiate them remotely. Even a small effort would multiply the number of people able to play online greatly.

So how many of those people that you wrote a guide for have been creating online games? Last time I checked there were 6 games running and a total of 280 people sitting around. Now I'm not begrudging you for trying to help people, that's great and I'm glad that people like you are stepping up; but no matter how eloquently you write a port forwarding guide, the vast majority of gamers will either never read it or still not understand it. I'm also sure you don't intend to defend a status quo, where the player-to-server ratio is 46-1.

I'm just saying, that the situation as it stands is so poor that it will take some immediate action on Ironclad's part. To say that it would take one IC employee to man every game is a bit far fetched, and I think it's much more realistic to say that one person could organize and set up dozens of games. But that would be a worst case scenario, secondary to a timer/user administered system. As for teams being off balance because of it, I'm sure Ironclad, being the creator of the game, could figure out a way to make it so the hosting machine isn't actually player in the game. But heck, even if they did let it play as an idle player, that would still be better than no game at all!

These are not perfect solutions, but they do ease the problem of lacking game servers without dramatically changing the game.

Edit: Never mind. Love this game.

But the fact is, Sins isn't any harder than any other RTS out there.  There are always some % of players who have trouble setting up port forwarding for one reason or another.

Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Rise of Legends, Rise of Nations, etc. have all gone through this. 

Like Monk said, the # of games listed as available are game sthat haven't started yet. There are typically hundreds (and at times thousands) of players actively in games at a given time.  According to the logs, there are tens of thousands of games being played daily on ICO.  It does work.

It's a bummer that it doesn't work for everyone and all we can do is try to see what are the causes (usually it's eitehr someone with a university connection that is filtering stuff or someone who doesn't know how to port forward on their home router) and see what we can do to simplify it further.

I can assure you that Ironclad is working very hard to make it as seamless as possible.  But it would be extremely unfair to characterize that it's a major problem in general because it's not that widespread.  We're talking about a game that's sold 100,000+ copies and the ICO logs show us that a lot of people are successfully playing online.  I woudl venture that it's about 1% to 2% of the userbase that is having trouble -- which is still thousands of people to be sure.

Personally, over Hamachi, the game rocks. We've had one drop in about 200 games (ie only one player in 200 games has been dropped).

It definitely is a "lowest common denominator" game. 99% of us (a bunch of guys from my tech forum) have 2GB RAM and at least a 2Ghz A64/PentiumD/Core2 and most of those are dual-core cpu owners. When it's just us, the game is flawless (with me or anyone else as a host via NAT router through Hamachi), even a 4-on-4 and 5-on-5 game.

The weak link is my best buddy who lives in California who's main rig (dual core X2 3800+ / 2GB RAM / 7950GT SLI) is down, and he's on an older NF3 but with only 1GB RAM...after about 1-2 hours, it starts taking 1-10 seconds for the game to update for everyone. I'm sure this is his low RAM because when the rest of us are playing with 2GB RAM without him, we have gone 6 hours on a 4-on-4 map without much if any lag at all. Consider we are all on crappy cable uploads (512k for the most part) and you begin to see that the game's mp code is definitely strong (unlike say...Battlefield2 which requires HUGE amounts of bandwidth per client).

I'm sympathetic with those who are at uni's and corps where they can't open ports in the firewall. Try a VPN solution in that case as many of our group plays through university networks via Hamachi and it's almost problem free.

If Stardock is making the mp code even better in an upcoming patch, then that's a bonus.

PS If you really want some help, read Monk's guide. I read it just to see if it was proper and helpful (network tech myself) and it's about as clear and concise as you can get, and it is very short and to the point. HIGHLY recommended (instead of complaining about having to read something, just read it or read my post or any post in this thread that we try to give you help within).

hamachi Visit http://steamcommunity.com/groups/sinsolarempire