In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
A number of games on the market today support online, peer-to-peer
multiplayer gameplay. And with every single one, every time someone has a
firewall or NAT router in the mix, there's trouble getting it set up. A few
gamers are also network-savvy, but most are not.

All recent games take into account the fact there will probably be a NAT
router somewhere along the line because they are so common. *ALL* the
ISPs here recommend a NAT router for their broadband connection, and
when I lived in the US, NAT routers were certainly not the exception on
a broadband connection even a couple of year ago.

It is simply not true that "most Internet game servers are on co-located
boxes". Most Internet game is done peer-to-peer, which means one of the
players is actually the server.

I have not played a single peer-to-peer FPS, undoubtedly one of the more
popular genres of online games since FPS games stopped using IPX.
I have not come across a single public gameserver or clanserver for
games like UT, RTCW, Enemy Territory et al. hosted on a home server.
Game companies will have to *adapt* if they want to listen to a port.

Again, you simply do not understand the number of operating system
components that act as servers, even if the user has not intentionally
decided to be a big-time Internet server.

Yes I do. They should be off by default.

What's more of a problem: someone having to ask in a forum about how to
forward 45835/udp, or the massive problem with spam and trojaned boxes
we're stuck with now? It seems like the OS was far too usable for trojan
writers, too. Again: games are not a huge problem. Especially compared
with the ongoing problems with owned boxes.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"