o2's thomson router and online gaming

TigerUK · 26 Jul 2011 at 01:03

I'm trying to use the said router to connect to age of empires 3 multipayer, and it's next to impossible to connect to games, i've set up port forwarding, and disabled windows firwall and still i have no luck connecting.

Is this a known issue with thomson routers, or is it doesn to the ISP itself? [o2].

Pulling may hair out, I haven't played online games in ages, bought this game again becasue I used to play it 2 years before, and I'm still having a lot of difficulty with it.

steven_belfast · 26 Jul 2011 at 01:37

Greetings,

Have to say i do not play age of empires,
However i do play many other games and never had a issue connecting to servers,

If you set the pc you are using as an DMZ server this will rule out the router being the case.

Cold_And_Miserable · 26 Jul 2011 at 03:33

I had this problem myself : "Failed to join game"

It has nothing to do with ports. It's caused by timeout settings. Most of whats left of the AOE3 community believe the network code is bugged.

The only reliable solution is to set the router to "bridge mode" but you lose wireless and routing.

You can change the timeout settings, which is a tedious, but it seems to make the Bebox crash after a few hours everytime without fail.

TigerUK · 27 Jul 2011 at 20:03

i suppose thats what happens when a game maker offers free online multiplayer mode, and because after a certain point game sales dies, there's no budget to keep the online play going.

Quite annoying actually, maybe some third party group will take over and introdude a paid server for $3 a month or something, that can handle this

Cold_And_Miserable · 29 Jul 2011 at 02:45

TigerUK said:
Quite annoying actually, maybe some third party group will take over and introdude a paid server for $3 a month or something, that can handle this

Ensemble Studios was broken up quite a while back.
The AOE3 network code was said years back to be too "deep" in the engine to be changed.

Robot Entertainment, formed out of former ES employees, took over running of the AOE3 servers and did a good job.
AOE3 servers are now run by 1 Microsoft employee at minimal cost. New patches or even changing the multiplayer homepage is beyond him.