I downloaded the most recent Beta patch and anxiously jumped online hoping to see some kind of improvement. Brad mentioned that it wouldn't do anything if you didn't have the right ports forwarded. I've had them correctly forwarded for a while, so I downloaded away.

Straight away I checked the custom games and saw several games up with titles like "Testing". 'Perfect' I thought. However, when attempting to connect ... the game just sits, happily telling me in the connection information window that it's "Waiting for Connection data". I left it run for well over 20 minutes and nothing happened. No list of names like normal, and not even a list of names that I couldn't connect to - it just sat. Same with Skirmish and Pantheon.

I travelled back over to Portforward.com, and re-did everything their guides said. I used their Port Checker program to test my ports, and it confirms that my required ports are nice and open as they have been since launch. I made sure that Impulse was also using the right ports and that my firewalls are disabled. Nothing.

I'll wait till Thursday (Friday for us Australians) and hope that the inclusion of Proxy servers in the release update helps. Just wanted to let people know. Fingers crossed that I'm not asking for a refund on Monday...

edit:
I checked my ports while Demigod was attempting to connect, trying to find which one it was locked on. Port 6073 is the one it's using - the Port Checker from Portforward.com says it's open. Can anyone provide any other reliable sources that can check this (I'm not terribly network minded) Port is open? I'd like to double check.