IMHO - they aren't morons. They just want to buy a game and have it work. It is tricky when you build a game on top of a p2p protocol like bittorrent. Some routers don't support UPnP, some don't support it well and some won't work quite right if you mistakenly try to configure port forwarding ranges and leave UPnP turned on, too.
I do this for a living, and have for about 20 years now, so I "get it", but I can certainly see how the average 13 year old who walks into Gamestop or EB and plunks down their cash might not have the skills, or desire or patience, to work through a solution with so many moving, and to many, very complicated steps.
Frankly, and I appreciate how hard Stardock/GPG is working on this, informative, constuctive error reports to the end-user are critical. And we simply don't have them now.
Its almost trial and error for many of these frustrated customers, which isn't really fair.
I don't want this to sound like b*tching, but I do hope that someone from Stardock reads this and sees there is an immediate "easy" win by inserting some traps in the code that can provide appropriate error reports.
Frankly, a stand-alone test appliation that will "poke" through firewalls/routers and just check to see what is what and then report that status to the customer would be a tremendous help. Is UPnP turned on? Seems so... No? Can you do port forwarding? He are the ports that Demigod will be expecting to use, please see http://portforwarding.com, then return to this test utility when you have configured your router.... etc. etc.
