Latest Update: For whatever reason, fowarding ports 6000-6200 gives Demigod problems.  Using strong security I hosted and connected to a 3v3 game just fine, and the connections happened lightning fast.  There was an issue with lag in-game, but I'm pretty sure that was due to one player.

Now, if I port foward the game will consistently spit out the 'Can't connect to NAT facilitator' message.  I'm going to try again in a bit with more relaxed settings and see what I get.

Since the last 2 patches I cant connect in mutliplayer anymore, Custom & Pantheon.

Several friends of mine in the UK and Germany have got the same problems.

"Matchmaking failed" or "NAT Fac." error.

No Hardware Firewall / No Software Firewall in our Demigod playtest environments.

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I guess the above poster has downloaded 1 patch "as latest", which actually includes the 2 patches I downloaded seperately within the last 24 hours.

So basically we are talking of the same problem introduced by the same data - The 2 patches Im talking of probably include the same data as the 1 patch paket download mentioned by the above poster.

i really wonder why it's working for some people and then again not for others. ... It's really quite frustrating, as I was able to play with the Beta version...

Unfortunatley it's no better for me.

I was one of those who couldn't connect anymore since the first thursday patch, and now it's finally working flawlessly (only in Custom Game mode).

The favor is okay too.

Gratz guys !

Edit : Okay, after a few more games, it's not working flawlessly but it's much much better ; there's still issues, notably the fucking Desync window which fuck the game reappearing every 5sec, some lag even with great pings, and the 30sec delay window which block everything (even chat...) when a ragequitter leaves the game. And Pantheon is still sucking (impossible to join a game, the matchmaking engine can't find shit).

MUCH BETTER.  The beta patches and Monday/Tuesday updates were already beginning to kick the system into gear for me but this update pretty much sealed the deal.  Before, connecting was doable but relatively long and arduous- took ~20-25 minutes just to get a game started because of how long the connections took to establish and how long it took to determine that someone was not connected properly.

Thursday night/Friday morning, the connections have been just about instant and what took 25 minutes before now takes... 3?  Much better.

And the fact that I can host (which despite port forwarding and everything else just flat-out does not work in ANY Blizzard game anymore... used to, but not anymore and I've no bleeping idea why) and with the connections really working now puts Demigod in a much better position compared to other strategy games as well.

From really bad to awful now.

Took an hour to get a pantheon game and then it was a 2v1.

No idea about custom games... never played one.

As of yesterday it is unplayable for me.  I was one of the people who was able to connect to matches prior to the patches in any mode (skirmish, custom, pantheon). 

Yesterday's patch has med it nearly impossible for me to connect.  I don't play custom games very often so I didn't try that out last night.  I did try both Pantheon and Skirmishes last night.  I got into 2 games last night in the hours I spent trying to play.  The rest of the time was all matchmaking service failed, some other errors (can't remember the text), and a bunch of crashes.  The connection process does seem like it is handling everything faster though.  The rate at which users in the connection view was shifting through it's waiting, connected, not connected, etc. much faster.  However, with that it definitely increased the rate at which errors were being thrown in my face.  Errors that were not happening to me prior to the patches. 

Prior to the patch it would take a few tries (1-3 on avg) to connect to a game (pantheon), but I was playing games consistantly.  Now I don't even remember how many tries it took to finally get the 2 games I got last night.  And as for those 2 games, well the first was a total of 5 people, the connection process eventually kicked one of them and the game started.  Unfortunately, for the me the player that didn't get in was on my team and I ended up having to play against 3 people.  The 2nd game was 3v3; 5 players made it into the game.  Shortly into the game one of the players got booted, then shortly after another got booted, then the worst happened, one of the player desync'd causing the stupid desync dialog box to come up as someone previously mentioned. 

Now I understand that you are just looking for feedback on the connection process which is why I understand that the desync is possibly something that needs to be looked at by another team.  My concern though about the players being booted out while in the game (and even the desync) is that possibly the connection process failed in determining if the players could even connect to each other properly.  Like a race condition maybe.  Because if you look at the connection process happening live you see people shifting status as connected, not connected, waiting, etc.  I think that it is possible that now that the process is sped up some false positives may be happening and if the timing is right the game thinks people have then connected to each other but really haven't resolved their NAT connection to each other.  Then once in the game people start getting booted because their connections are not communicating and then eventually leading to a possible desync as well.

In reading this thread it is interesting to note that people that were having problems prior are having more luck but people that weren't having trouble before are now hosed (there were a few posts in between that spectrum).  I work for a software company in the video game industry myself and we have a p2p system.  I can sympathize with you on the difficulty of getting it to work properly.  It is by no means an easy task so I thank you guys for all your hard work on this and look forward to a resolution.  I'll likely try my luck again later tonight or tomorrow and hope that maybe I was just running into an unlucky run of people.

Thanks again for the hard work and late nights.  Great game.

RC

The update yesterday broke connecvitity for me, whereas previously it had been fine. I cannot join a single pantheon game any more, because either NAT drops me, matchmaking service fails. For custom games I can join them, but joining them takes at least 5 minutes, and half the time I get dropped due to the fact that "Cannot connect to NAT bla".

Custom games:

100 percent better. My friends and I set up a cooperative game and were instantly connected.

Pantheon games are HORRIBLE;

I have gotten couldnt connect to NAT facilitator. Multiple drops before the game starts. Starting games when it looks like 1 of the people queued is only connected to 2 of the 4 people or 2 of the 6 people. Game drop screen comes up for other people that are being dropped and sometimes wont go away. Have to use task manager to kill the game.

Ok I have two environments I play in - at work and at home.

At work -

Very touch and go. I can probably connect to about 50% of the people online. There are just certain people I can't connect with so anytime I join a game, I'm probably the one responsible for 80% of the people that eventually have to drop out.

   I work at at a game development studio so the network we have here is fairly secure. Opening ports/setting up port forwarding is not an option. I couldn't describe exactly what network security measures we have in place, but I do know that when we play CoD & CoH, DoWII etc have no issues (I assume because these are not p2p). This patch has not helped/hurt, except that I definitely join custom games lobby much faster now.

At home -

    I just have a vanilla router with no port forwarding setup. I have no issues connecting to anyone and haven't really since the beginning. I played one quick game last night and the speed seems to be improving. I still have yet to play against any real players in Pantheon though - it usually shows 4 people connecting for a 2v2 game but ends up being 2vAI by the time we get in game.

   The problem I'm running into at home is that I'll join a 3v3 or 4v4 custom game and the game just hangs at the level loading screen. It doesn't lock up, it just never makes any progress, nor does it boot me out. I've let it sit for up to 15 minutes before with nothing happening and I have to end process on Demigod.

   This was happening to probably 50% of my games pre-thursday's patch. I will know more this weekend if this is still an issue.

I have to say though, GREAT communication with the community by you guys at Stardock. It is much appreciated. Can't wait for future updates.

Cheers

-D

You know, I'm pretty pissed right now, since I couldn't play online at all, then I could for a short while before this recent patch put me back to about where I started.  No offense meant but I think you guys should do more testing before releasing a patch.  This game of constantly releasing patches and then releasing more patches to fix something in the previous patch is just frustrating.  There's no point in rushing out a patch if it only makes things worse for people and doesn't really fix the issue at hand.  I've been pretty patient so I'm willing to wait, much better than facing the false hope of being able to play with every patch released.