I would like to hear your opinion about simple and effective improvements to the multiplayer and multiplayer interface.

1. I really like the idea from warcraft 3 where games are hosted by battlenet. It means same pings for everybody

2. When you play a game hosted by firaxis or gamespy it should be included to your profile (counted as ranked games). Same rules for everybody, no quiters and no disconnections because someone started to download porn movies.

3. When you host a game you could specify if you want to let somebody in with less than 20 ranked games for example or registered at least month ago. It would be also useful if you could specify ping (for example <100ms)

This isn't an FPS. Ping isn't that vital.

the only improvement you propose is about ping ? Oh, yeah... -_-"

of course it is vital!

It is not only about ping but also about statistics. If you had lets say 34 wins and 15 loses would you not care to continue the game even you are losing but at the end things changed and you become a winner?

Whats good about statistics is that when you create a game and let only to join people with more than 30 wins you will definitely expect a good and enjoyable game.

The ping i get in diablo 2 in downright terrible, it doesn't cater well for every region, you could be playing your next door neihbor and they would have a ping of 200.
Not to mention the cost to firaxis for dedicated servers would by far outway any posible benifit... id much rather them use the money for improving singleplayer.

A ranking system however would be good, i play alot of TMU and one of my favourite aspect of the game is how it ranks everything you do, even in singleplayer mode you are still in competition against others.
But with the open source nature of civ4 it would too quickly become a cheat fest.

Not to mention the cost to firaxis for dedicated servers would by far outway any posible benifit... id much rather them use the money for improving singleplayer.
Blizzard has never complained about the costs and in my opinion they are far better than any other company when speaks about multiplayer.

I dont know if this is true but just thinking about it if the game was hosted by firaxis it would be not possible to cheat. Of course It would require to adopt the code so that every move by the player is verified by the server and then send back to the user and other users. Everything would take place on neutral server side.

From my point of view your suggestions are not so important.

1. ping - we play only turn based games, when BtS will be available we will use also turn based mode for teamers. Civ is a TURN BASED STRATEGY, not RTS (Real Time Strategy)

2. quitters/ranking - there are several clubs over the net. Check out for example ours: http://forum.kac.org.pl/ we have a ranking with 2741 games played, no quitters, games are played fair. It solves the problem.

Blizzard has never complained about the costs
Thats No small wonder considering how much they make from wow, and from the multiplayer competitive aspects of starcraft. The only reason they dont complain about diablo & warcraft is because they setup blizzard.net to try & prevent piracy and thus gain money which would have otherwise been lost to piracy, same reason why hl2 uses steam.

However the difference is that the number of people that wish to play multiplayer civ4 is insignificant in comparison to the number of people that play singleplayer. The amount of money lost from potential consomers is no comparison to the amount of money they would loose to setup dedicated servers in each country just to host games for whats considered a small number of online players.

I just logged on during this post to get a glance at just how many people were online & there was only about 30. 30 people is not enought to justify spending about 100000 it would cost to setup and then a approx of 10000 per year maintenance... and even those figures are probley even a huge understatement.

And as for this statement...
1. I really like the idea from warcraft 3 where games are hosted by battlenet. It means same pings for everybody
If you are say in australia, and the game server is in america, regardless of who host it the lowest ping you are ever going to get is approx 300... nothing short of the invention of faster global networks will ever change that.

Back in the day when i used to play Q2 & half-life online a ping of 200 was considered awesome, then isdn was released and a ping of 100 became the norm preventing everyone that could'nt afford it from enjoying the multiplayer aspect, now with adsl2 with a ping of 20 is considered the norm. but even with speeds such as that, a ping of even 700 wouldnt even stop me from enjoying a multiplayer game of civ4.

Whats good about statistics is that when you create a game and let only to join people with more than 30 wins you will definitely expect a good and enjoyable game.

only americans are obsessed with game statistics. The rest of the world doesn't really care much, although I must admit that lately this mania is spreading like a plague.

I just logged on during this post to get a glance at just how many people were online & there was only about 30. 30 people is not enought to justify spending about 100000 it would cost to setup and then a approx of 10000 per year maintenance... and even those figures are probley even a huge understatement.
It does not include players who are playing games. Anyway you have to invest and I am sure it would pay off in couple months. And I bet if we have in civ4 much better multiplayer interface with profile statistics it would motivate people to stay longer in lobby. If you take for example battlefield 1942 which was very popular even without statistics it didnt take much longer to triple amount of people playing battlefield 2. Everyone liked the idea playing for something (awards in battlefield 2) and statistics no matter if you like it or not it helped game become even more successful.

If you are say in australia, and the game server is in america, regardless of who host it the lowest ping you are ever going to get is approx 300... nothing short of the invention of faster global networks will ever change that.
Thats why blizzard has divided servers into areas. There is one for europe, one for asia, two for america

smith-b-d right now most of Europeans are at work :) I play almost every day, but I start around 19:00 CET - it is now 16:00 CET. That's why you spot only 30 players in lobby :)

MP statistics would not be good. How many games do you really finish?
When its getting useless, most often, people call it a gg and start a new game to get a new chance.
Average quitting ratio: 80%?

another argument for MP statistics is very popular ladder cton. Stats are the way forward no matter what you think... sory