To Frogboy, Cari and all you good guys at Stardock and GPG :

Once upon a time, quite a few years ago, I used to play a small fun game called Moonbase Commander.

It never acquired a large community - actually, it won "best game nobody plays" 2 years in a row. We were some 10 hardcore fans, down to about 5 the 2nd year. Huge fun for many many hours.

Anyway, why am I telling this here : We played completely p2p.

After suffering frustrations with GameSpy Arcade the game was supposed to be played on, one of the players ( "Mycroft" was his nik ) wrote a small matchmaking program. Another ( "SpacemanSpiff", who was also the best player ) wrote a map randomizer, and together they put up a program they called Console ( 156KB - I still have it ). We would hook up on Messengers like ICQ, one of us would host, the Console generated a code, the host player copy-pasted it to us by messenger, the others would copy-paste it into their Console, and here we go. Worked great, few fails.

Granted, the game was turn-based small game. Nevertheless, the connection worked quite well, 1v1 or teams.

So I'm thinking, if one fan can write a decent matchmaking program in a few days' work, maybe you guys are going at it too complicated, with RAKNET and whatever ?

Just a thought

Cheers !