Dear Brad/Blair/Craig

I am seeing a large number of threads being created or hijacked by people who cannot connect to ICO. The claims I am seeing range from ICO being offline to Sins being junk and still only worthy of Beta status to a total boycott of ICO and to Hamachi instead.

Now I am sure most of the issues are not yours, they are on the clients end. However look at the following links

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/337545/

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/337527/

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/337495/

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/337362/get;2033522

This suggests people are not able to resolve their networking issues etc... What I would like to propse to you is this:

1) Add a status page to this website that actually states the status of the ICO server. This way people can see if it is up or down without posting to the forums asking every 5 minutes

2) Upgrade the multiplayer networking information in the FAQ. The link to The Monks guide has not worked for a few months now at least, and there is no information about ICO requiring port 7000 to be opened. Not knowing this took me 3 days to work out why I could not connect to ICO when I upgraded from 1.05 (which worked fine for me, and I regularly hosted) to 1.11. When I turned off my firewall, I was able to connect so I knew it was my end. But I understand networking a little better then the average users, so they might not realise that looking up the Sins process ID in task manager and then doing a netstat -a -o etc... would let me see the ports that Sins was trying to use to connect to ICO when I upgraded.... So put simply - I was able to fix it, others it seems cannot

3) Rather then just saying "Disconnected from Icronclad Online" in the error, which is not very informative, is it possible to put some information in - e.g. "Disconnected from Ironclad Online. Unable to connect to ICO on Port XXX - check if it is open in your firewall".

4) The best option would be to have a diagnose connection issue option in Sins - similar to how MSN and IE have them - they run through some tests and tell you what issue(s) they are having.

Please do this as the forums being filled with unneeded posts about ICO makes the worthwhile ones harder to find, and you end up with people bad mouthing Sins because they don't understand how firewalls and P2P networking works.

Regards

Hack