I seem to remember predicting these types of problems before Alloy was even released.....hehe

Routers need to be allowed to do their job in order to ensure traffic validity etc.

...my 2 cents.

the Monk

Ugh

how about giving it more time to be sorted out.

The state of Sins online multiplayer is in a very precarious position. A great game that allegedly sold 500,000 copies should peak at much more than 100 people online, even if most of the people who bought the game are single player types. The game's online multiplayer problems are numerous--minidumps, desyncs, hosting problems, ICO down time, alleged problems with getting Impulse to work, and more (perhaps lack of auto-download for custom maps which means that potentially better maps for competition don't get played).

With all of the GOTY publicity we can expect lots of new people to buy the game and check out the online action. I think we'll reach a critical point soon where the online player counts will either increase from an influx of new people or start to decrease. The player counts are already at subsistence levels, so if we have a net loss of online players then the online Sins game is probably done for.

Don't get my post wrong I LOVE ALLOY.  It allows anybody and their mother to host and theoretically increase the MP community.  However, as Monk said, there is a reason routers exist and I suspect MANY of the problems experienced since the release of beta v1.1 (aka v1.09) are attributed to Alloy bypassing standard traffic protocols.

From my v1.05 experience (and even now in v1.12 w/ Entrenchment), there were a ton of people able to host and it never took long for someone to come along that was a stable host.

I'm sure they're aware of the major multiplayer woes since since 1.1.  The reason there hasn't been any major patches for the beta yet is probably due to investigating these problems that were clearly not resolved in 1.12.  If things aren't stable for the majority of users by the release of the expansion, I concur that dumping Alloy until they have more time to test it internally is best.  I would gladly take having trouble hosting over crashing and desyncs.

I find this strange. Up until now I've been able to host games on every other RTS game without incident. From what I understand, most everyone could. Now I come to Sins of a Solar Empire and it's a project to be able to host a game.

As someone said, a game that sold 500,000 copies shouldn't be peaking at 100 players online at one time, once or twice a week.

It's everything. It's Impulse, disconnects, bugs, desyncs, crashes, minidumps, glitches, not verifying, cd keys not working, servers going down...

And I have personally never seen a more complicated game or unreliable setup. You need to go the forums to be able to run multiplayer.

For instance, you click the button that says Multiplayer. Only that's not the real multiplayer. You need to click Ironclad Online. If you haven't updated to the latest version, and try to use Ironclad Online, you need to update to the latest version of Sins. Using Impulse.

Only it doesn't say that. It just says you've disconnected. No other information. Without coming to these forums I wouldn't've known what to do. Based on the number of posts on these forums (barely any) not many people do. This should be unacceptable.

Sorry, but it's a wonder this game won any prizes at all. It's like the game is barely holding together. It's like riding a rickety ship rocking from side to side that always just avoids sinking.

Really, it's just plain sloppy.

It's called a desync error.

Shadow, half of what you say is false!  I've seen twice that amount every day for the last week!

Carriers aren't OP, nor is missle barrage.  1.1 is well balanced.  You just don't like it.

And I rarely get minidumps.  (Desync, and other problems with a BETA are to be expected).

SageWon is right about the number of online players. My geuss is that shadow lives in europe lol and when the number of players peek 150 most of the people here are sleeping(except me) so it quite sucks for those people.

Grtz,
Flipkik