I thought I would mention the difficulty I've been having finding games to play with ICO, and suggesting a possible solution.

Last night I hung out in "Lobby 5" for about an hour or so, looking for a game I could join that featured a scenario I liked. I don't really like Kronac's Cross or Gateway, or Huge Random Map games (the latter because we'll all disconnect randomly before the game is over, lol). Or really anything with pirates. Eventually, I joined a Medium Random Map FFA, that wasn't really a FFA, but I digress.

Over the course of an hour, I'd say there were about a dozen people, like me, pleasantly chatting, asking for people to host one kind of game or another--since none of us could host for various reasons (some had variable IPs, some just plain didn't know how to work the router, and then those of us behind a hardware institutional firewall-ahem). Ironically, because most people could host (or just liked the maps that were on) there were hardly anyone in the chat room chatting, most were playing.

Anyway, while I understand that peer-to-peer network code is a legit way of getting games going, it's really becoming a problem for the community. It simply should not take that long to find a game when there's a message saying 394 players online at the top. The ICO service seems half-way done. It's just too unfriendly and its missing features like ranked play, and stat tracking. I heard that some of those features are coming, but the major problem is hosting for those of us who have hardware firewalls or can't figure out routers, etc.

Now maybe it's just my schedule (I have to take night classes, so I might be on outside of peak hours) because it's hard to find games in a timely manner, there's little incentive to venture online. Furthermore with games like SupCom, Sword of the Stars, Age of Empires III, C&C 3 etc will outshine Sins in MP, not just because of ranking and all that, but because it's easy-to-use for 90% of the computer user public out there. There's little reason for a MP dedicated, if computer illiterate person (like myself) to buy the game when half the online service is missing (i.e. hosting) for this technical reason or that. I can't even reccommend the game to my friends, because I can't be sure we can play over my apartment's LAN network--we all might not be able to host, and so forth.

So my suggestion is to normalize ICO with other services like GPGNet, ESO, EA Online, etc. that don't require peer-to-peer. This is something for an eventuality, because it would require a significant overhaul of netcode--but if this game is going to last long it's got to offer the same kind of ease-of-use and features other services have.

Finally, as kind of a stop-gap measure, is there a program like maybe Xfire or Hamachi (sp?) that might be a work around for this? Those of us with problems hosting might be able to organize games over a third party direct IP program via the forum here--that would be awesome!