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sorry for the really late followup to this, yeah over a year late but i just recently had the chance to make a test system that i was going to wipe the hard drive on. so might as well just test gameranger before wiping the drive right?

well... it looks like i dont have a very good first impression of gameranger. firstly, when i tried to run it, it wouldnt connect to the gameranger server to dload updates to run properly. i had to try it several times in order for it to finally work, so it looks like the servers are overloaded and there's insufficient bandwidth or cpu cycles on the gameranger servers to work properly.

next, when i tried to select elys ds2 bw allsaves as the exe to run, it wouldnt let me select it. so gameranger doesnt play well with mods from the way its been set up to work. one workaround is to run a lan game with elys all saves with the updated mod(s) and then save the game. this updates the ds2party savefile crc so the char will be visible without allsaves. however, this means u have to run ds2 twice whenever u wanna play or everytime when u update something in your mod(s) that changes the crc so this adds hassle to the play.

secondly, the game lagged really bad with only 5 fps after finishing loading the map. after looking around with task manager, i figured out the culprit might be gameranger's voice transmission feature. i had to quit the game and deactivate all voice functions in gameranger's options to stop it and the lag went away. so gameranger needs some tweaking to work properly with ds2 out of the box.

gameranger also took up 75mb of space in order to run and work. not really an issue with today's terabyte sized hard drives but the thing is it doesnt let u set where to install it. it just installs itself to the current user's application data folder.

another thing is that it only runs on winxp or newer. i prefer running dsloa on my win98se retro machine so i wont be using gameranger on dsloa. to play dsloa, i'd rather chat about hosting on irc then start an internet game from the multiplayer options and tell others i'd like to join my ip address. its only ds2 that has problems working over the internet in mp because of the way gpg designed ds2's network stack to work. i think its an anti-piracy feature that gpg made, so users with an invalid cd-key or warez copy wont be able to play the game in mp, only in sp. well... bird brained short term thinking. what happens when the multiplayer servers shut down then? didnt take that one into account, did they? so now we have to resort to hacks, workarounds and other funky digital kungfu tricks to get it to work in mp. booo....