TheVille

Let me start by saying, nothing makes me appreciate Steam like trying to use Games for Windows Live! amirite?

I was gifted a copy of Chaos Rising by the estimable metacide recently. I was very much looking forward to playing it, since I loved Dawn of War. However, GFWL seems to not want to communicate with its servers. Now, I already had a GFWL account from some other game, and I've used it on this same PC with the same ISP and same network hardware and never noticed a problem.

Since the interface is useless in telling you what might be wrong and the Live! support forums response to everything seems to be 'get new network hardware or a new ISP hurr hurr' I am looking to see if anyone else has dealt with something like this? The only thing I can imagine is that my wireless network possibly has UPnP locked down (I assume so, since I know I have the right ports open but the almost-informative Network Diagnostic dialog box that GFWL includes does mark UPnP as 'not logged in'.

Unfortunately my network is ISP provided and I can't access it to open ports or enable anything, but I assume people somewhere must both have my ISP and actually play XBox games or something. Anyone have a suggestion/solution?

Let me say after trying to use their interface and support, I will never buy anything that uses GFWL again.

I spent about an hour and a half trying to play Dawn of War (also gifted from metacide). Of that hour and a half 5 minutes of it was in a game. I had about 5 crashes during that time and it kept saying windows live needs to update.

In contrary, I also bought dirt 2 and just played about 45 super fun minutes of online play via games for window live.

Well, lucky me, I only had to download updates for GFWL twice and it managed to not crash, either time. I can play with a local-only profile, but I was really looking forward to an MP game or two. . .

Dont know that I can help with the server issue, but I have done a couple of multiplayer matches where I was either invited to the lobby or made the lobby myself. I havent tried browsing for games yet.

I did have it crash on me twice while trying to play multiplayer maps, I was able to get it to stop by disabling the mic in the GFWL settings.

You said you had the ports open, do you have them forwarded as well?

No, I haven't forwarded them, I'm not clear on how, the links that were suggested in the Live! support were for commercial forwarding software which seemed like a scam to me. . .

Meta also gifted me a copy. It's pretty fun, but GFWL is definitely a pain. I had to do the update thing about 5-6 times because it kept failing. I also have a couple of other games that use GFWL, and there always seems to be an issue with it.

I, myself, haven't had to forward ports for it though, but you may have to. Do you have a router at home, or did your ISP provide you with any sort of external router or modem?