Connectivity is now completely broken for me.

Prior to the latest patch, I enjoyed both Custom matches and pantheon games. Now, Pantheon tries to match me indefinately, and if I try to host a custom game I get the Nat facilitator error.

My ports are forwarded, Windows Firewall isn't even running, and as said, my connectivity was perfect prior to the recent patch.

Have a happy anniversary

Its... I can join a game, granted. No problem there, since the update. But the last couple of games I've tried its ALWAYS ended up either 2v1 or 1v1 plus a bunch of AI joiners. Now, I havn't disconnected, and neither has a friend I often play with/against. But we still see huge drops. Then again, we both have high end computers.

Getting into a lobby and starting a game is a breeze, much easier than before. That being said I almost always get dropped from a game about 5 minutes into it, which never happened before. Might wanna look into that.

While the initial connectivity seems a bit better for most players, it is even worse for others. This affects us all because we need everyone working to make games work seemlessly.

Last night I had a friend on my LAN and we found it very difficult to get into games together.

Once in the game it seems to be crashing more than ever. People are getting randomly disconnected and there is also random massive lag spikes. There was also a NEW error we had never seen before and that is this 'desync' window that pops up like a jack-russell-fucking-terrier every 10s until you get frustrated and quit.

Most of the fun of this game is destroyed once there is ONE disconnect ingame. The bot takes over and then the opposing team precedes to farm the shit out of said bot until they win with gold advantage.

Cannot connect to a NAT facilitator. Please try again later.

I've been trying all weekend, several hours a day, and have been entirely unable to play a single game. There is always at least one person I can't connect to, and I have to quit to let the others at least play. I've re-checked all of my settings as per all of the official instructions and everything is as needed. Unless I'm doing something terribly wrong that I can't seem to figure out I beginning to think I can't play Demigod at all.

In my experience, it seems like 1 in 10 clicks on the fight button for pantheon actually turns into a match.  Most of the time in the connection info box two out of the four people just can't connect to eaxh other and then the NAT fails.  Someone usually just drops out to try again and then you're left with a 2vs1.  No one wants to be the 1 so then everyone just quits.  About half of the ones that get past that will actually try to load the game, but someone will quit during the loading or lag out in the first min or two.  That means you have a 2vs1 still because the AI is worthless. 

The only error messages I get are "because NAT has failed" or because matchmaking has failed.  More descriptions in the error/status messages might be helpful in reporting.

Worked last week before my hollidays... not working anymore 7 days later...

Played a quick skirmish. Four players joined (total), 2 dropped out once the game began loading the map but before play had started. The game was rock solid for us remaining two.

Most players I can connect to fine and connections are quicker. However some players I just can't connect to at all despite repeated attempts.

My experience is the same as Ashain's.

I'm not interested in playing custom games, so I don't know how my connectivity would be there, but in Pantheon it seems like there's usually either one person who can't connect to anyone, or two people who can't connect to each other (but have full connectivity with everyone else).  It was much better for me before the recent patches, although I don't know if that's due to a technical change: with all the talk about connectivity improving, it could be that people with marginal connections who gave up on the game are coming back, but some of them still can't connect, thus Pantheon games fail a lot.

Ok, heres an update from my end again.

I play in two places, work and home.

At work - I'm behind a symmantec NAT router, and our setup here prohibits me from setting up port forwarding to my IP. I can connect to approximately 20% of the community. I can easily spend 20-30 minutes finding a 2v2 game that I can connect to. 3v3 once in a great while, I've never played a 4v4 or 5v5 game.On my end there is no solution to this problem that I can achieve. If I ever want to play at work (Yeah I know, I'm at work I should be working.. thing is, I'm in video game development so playing games for part of my day IS work).

At home - Router is sorted, I'm usually the first to connect to people who don't suffer from other connection issues themselves. It still takes about 10 minutes to get a game going. Over the weekend I played about a dozen games. Only 2 played out to completion. One was a 3v3 game, the other a 2v2. The other failed attempts were 4v4 games. In each situation with a 4v4 game one of three scenarios played out. I could never successfully get a 5v5 game going (and have yet to actually join a playable one).

1. All users with pings around 80-120 but the game jerked/lagged to the point where its unplayable. Everyone insisted no firewalls or scanning programs were active at the time. After about 5 minutes with the problem getting worse and worse, we all just decided to alt + f4 out.
5 times

2. Finally getting a 4v4 game going with only a little notice-able lag, only to be ejected and shoved into a singleplayer 4v4 match for no discernable reason (?? whats this about??).
2 times

3. Rage quitters on opposite teams deciding that about 10 minutes to cry about *something* and bugger off in a fury.. Remainder of the team leaves after the first one since they know they have no chance. Yes happends to me on my team too, but I'm one of those people who likes to play it out to the end, even if its almost assuredly going to be a loss.
3 times

Frogboy, and you other guys at Stardock - I love you, I love your dedication to your product and your communication to your community. I do hope that connection issues continue to get ironed out because they are still far from what I would consider a "smooth" experience.

I hope to one day be able to hop in and see 4v4 and 5v5 games populating the game lists and know that I can join one and have about an 80% chance to get through it, other than the current 16% chance.