I've been looking forward to playing this game all week. I've been reading up on every review I could find to glean more information about it, and I pre-ordered to ensure I'd get to play it straight away upon release.
The first disappointment came when the Steam release was an hour late.
The forums gave an error message when I tried to load them, and the Defcon website looked unchanged, so no explanation was forthcoming. Finally, the game was released, and off I went to play it. I found it lived up to my expectations in terms of gameplay - I've played 3 games so far and enjoyed them all.
The problem is, I feel as though I've spent as much time trying to join games as I have playing the game. At first, just after release, it seemed readily possible to host or join a game successfully... however, the situation rapidly deteriorated. It was harder to join my 2nd game, and by the 3rd game, it took many attempts to find a game I could join successfully. On the few times I'd manage to join successfully, often I'd find that no slot had been reserved for me, and I was lumped in with two other spectators who found themselves in the same situation.
On other occasions, I'd join a game that wasn't full, and I'd find that I'd entered a game that had already begun as a spectator. Most times I simply had no success joining at all, and I'd have to go back into the list of games and try my luck elsewhere.
This afternoon, I've tried around 20 times to join a game - on most occasions I failed. I succeeded a few times, only to find that I essentially 'wasn't there' - I was in the game lobby, but my player name didn't appear under the list of spectators or players. On my final successful attempt, where I actually managed to join the game proper and get into the list of players, the host kicked me immediately. My patience ended there.
In essence, though I'm impressed with the game itself, I'm not at all impressed with the state of the Metaserver, and the sheer difficulty in actually getting a game going against human players. I would have thought that five months of beta testing would have sorted these issues out, and however good the game is, I just can't motivate myself to waste any more time on it until more light has been shed on the cause/solution of these problems.
(For the record, I've tried different network settings. I've played with and without port forwarding enabled on my router, with no perceivable difference in performance. Given that I had much more success hosting and joining games early on after release, before the Metaserver became completely crowded, I'm inclined to think that the problem is on their end rather than mine.)
End rant.
I'm sure they'll be a patch out soon cleaning that aspect of the game up.
