I am having problems with my internet connection, using both my current ISP and also my previous one. These problems manifest themselves in occasional cutting off of my access for a couple of seconds (5-15), where occasional means anywhere from once per week to every 30 minutes. I have therefore successfully played a (small) number of games online, some of them hours long, but I'm very vulnerable to these small breaches of continuity when playing Sins.

The effect in my game is that the network displays everyone as doing fine (IE no lag or disconnection for anyone), yet it never manages to re-establish contact with the other players. After about a minute or two I get a message saying I've been disconnected from ICO.

So, why am I posting this here instead of bugging my ISP? I've bugged them about it too, but haven't seen any marked improvement. It would be very good for me if the good folks at Ironclad could fit into some patch a feature that allowed the game to try to re-establish contact with the players in the current game, and I believe it could also help some others. For all I know it's already there, the "migrating" message that sometimes occurs when the host drops suggests there is some feature concerning it. But it doesn't appear to work for my problem.

I would suggest to attempt contact with all peers every couple of seconds until a given timeout has passed. I don't know if the disconnection from ICO may be the problem here. I can see problems with this given the firewalls around everywhere, but as long as at least one peer has the port open it should be possible to reach it and "let the other players know" through that one. The way to test it should be simple, start a multiplayer game and turn off the hub/switch for one of the players for a couple of seconds during it.

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To everyone who I've suddenly dropped out from, my deep apology, when I'm in a good position too but most of all when I'm losing. Most people seem to disconnect when their game client dies (or out of spite when they're losing), but I assure you that I would always surrender rather than disconnect if my network didn't make that decision for me. The inability to send a message saying what happened after the fact is grating me.