Network game problems.

Hey there mates.

I was wondering if any of you have managed to play a good network game on FM14 ?

The problem me and my mate have been facing is just a generally to slow and buggy game.

If we play FM full the person who connects to the others game has a variety of problems and we never manage to start the game properly. What happens is the following

-First try to connect to the game we get the window saying "Connecting to Online Game" - it stays for 30 seconds and then you are taken back to the screen which lists available network games
-Second try you get past that window but not much more, you get this - https://sortitoutsi.net/uploads/mirrored_images/SY8qd1wopMubLylX2E2xSknQ7iQymHopOOM0jM3c.png
-We did sometime get past that processing thing but then things got even more weird, the person who joined was asked if he wanted to save the game, which makes no sense seeing he is not the one who can do that as he is not the host.

We tried both hosting, both forwarded ports on our routers. We both have a 50/50 mb connection from the same network provider. He has brand new iMac and I have a solid gaming computer - i5-3750k OC'd to 4ghz, 8gb of RAM and etc.

We also tried to play FMC and that seemed to go somewhat better but the person who joined just had the game way to slow to even be playable. We have played network games since CM01/02 and we realize that the connector always has delay, that 1 or 2 second from every click which gets somewhat annoying but is playable. But this was ludicrous, each click had a delay of 30-50 seconds and the game felt like you where running it on a 10 year old computer. Mind you this is always just the person who is connecting, the host doesn't feel any of the bugs. But we both have pretty ideal setups regarding internet and computers to host a game.


Anyone who has had these issues and knows what's up ? We certainly have tried all we can.

The only thing I can suggest that could be the problem as I have no experience using a mac is that maybe the cross platform thing is causing the problem. Me and my mate have no problems(apart from the slight delay on the non-host pc) with our network games and have played over 5 seasons with them.

The problem with that is that I tried having my mate with a windows computer and a almost identical to mine (meaning it's a solid rig) connect and he had the same issues, we also thought that at first but I tried to experiment that with another windows person joining me and it wasn't any better.

Thanks for the advice though, posted a thread on SI forums 4 days ago without any answers.

Aah that definitely sucks then. I assume you have steam and fm added to your firewall exception list?

As the connection is actually made through Steam as me and my mate found out when we tried to play over a network with no internet connection. It just won't let you start network game even though if you lose internet connection during the game it will carry on playing as normal.

Sorry to be a pain but any chance you could get a screenshot of your network game options screen? It's a longshot as I don't think anything on there should cause the problems you have.

Yeah I'll post it once I get home.

I have my firewall disabled and I guess he doesn't have to worry about it with Apple.

We also both forwarded ports and etc. - I just think the main problem with FM over the internet is that one person is always hosting and there are just so many things that can cause issues it seems like. I'd love for SI to setup a dedicated server of some sort where you can choose how you want the game set up and just have both parties connect to a neutral server, sort of like you do with most games. But I get that would of course have to mean a somewhat revolutionized system but we wouldn't have to worry about things like packet loss or anything seeing it's not exactly a reflex based game like FPS for example.

I just really feel that the best way to play FM is with mates or other people, playing just against the AI gets boring after sometime, which is why I've played FM less and less in the last few versions but always tried to do network games and when we have we play them a whole lot.

I agree, although I enjoy my solo games. I find my network games to be more fun, the banter etc is always (well almost lol) friendly.

Another thing I forgot to ask was which skins are you using as I find that some skins tend to slow the game down, not processing wise but more when you change screen etc?