First I think it's great how Monk and others are trying so hard to help others. But, I have to say, this has been, by far, the morst difficult game I've ever had to get to work MP. I can host and join, about half the time now, but a majority of the time, people try to join my games and get kicked when they do, or, I try to join a game and get kicked. Seriously, my roommmate, who does Lans/computers systems/hubs for a LIVING almost charged me for the ammount of work he did to get this game going MP. Like NameLips said, I would have thrown up my hands otherwise.I played a game last night, and my oppoenet turned out to be a kid (not sure how old, 15 I"m guessing). Anyway, we chated a lot during the game, and he plays on his father's server it seems; he said the farther knows all about routers/Lans, but that his dad had been tearing his hair out trying to get the game to work for his son. Only via the kid's begging is his dad going to continue to try.It should not be this way, period. I can play every other MP game I have just fine; not this one. And I'm more than willing to learn a bit, and go into my system and tweak a thing or two to get things going, but this is almost rediculous. And if this is the way it's going to be, they should put "Technical Knowlege of Lans/Routers" under the "Minimum Requirements" on the box. . .
How do you know it is YOU that is having the hosting problem? Maybe the other users are having their own set of issues! Low ping and latency are murder on p2p games. Ever have your avatar run in place for 10 minutes in your favorite MMO or get the blinking RJ-45 icon indicating a connection issue? There's SO much involved, it's hard to blame just one thing!
I had a LAN game going with three of us. One player and myself are connected via Gigabit Ethernet and the third player was going over wireless (dot11g)...ummm...bad idea. I figured it would have been OK since he was getting excellent signal strength, but holy crap, talk about synching issues! I ran a cable to his laptop and even though it was only 100Mbps, the synching issues significantly decreased and we were able to play for 5 hours straight!
I don't blame the game though...I would have, only if we were all running identical machines all connected the same way (no networking problems, etc...) and having serious lagging issues, as that would indicate the networking code was buggy to me, but it's apples to oranges in 99% of the cases! Was it a rotten apple or a moldy orange causing the problem??? hehe