First of all, great game. Hats off to GPG and Stardock for an incredibly addictive and fun to play game.
Personally I haven't experienced a lot of connection issues in Multiplayer because I know how to forward ports, however, the design of the game does create some issues that wouldn't be there on Battle.net, because it doesn't allow us to host servers.
I understand that Stardock wanted to design the multiplayer component so that it didn't require users to forward ports at all, since most users have no knowledge of how to do this. This is acceptable, but what bothers me is the following scenario:
Problem Statement:
You queue for a Pantheon game, and 3 out of 4 players are all connected to each other, but the 4th player can't connect to anyone and everyone else is stuck because player #4 doesn't have a good internet connection, or has a bad gateway or router. The only solution to this is for everyone to exit out of the game and queue again, unless the 4th player leaves and you get another person.
Solution:
Let us host servers. For those of us that are knowledgeable about how to forward ports and have enough internet bandwidth, let us host games and everyone else can connect to us. It doesn't matter if they have NAT or don't know how to forward ports, because they can connect to us and everything will work just fine. You could have the Stardock servers do a quick port connectivity check to make sure they are able to connect to a player before that player is allowed to host a game.
This way, it works like Battle.net and everyone is happy. Your software doesn't have to figure out how to generate a connectivity matrix between 10 different end-points who may or may not be NATed and may or may not have ports forwarded. Everyone just connects to a single player that is hosting and away they go.
I know not everyone has 2 megabits of upstream bandwidth like I do, but I'm more than happy to host 10 player games if you give me a chance to.
If you agree with this suggestion please reply in this thread. I'm also interested in your thoughts and opinions, but please try to keep it civil. This thread is looking for constructive ways to solve the multiplayer connectivity issues, and not for flames.
