I have been having a very hard time with this firewall and online gaming. I play a lot of mmpog’s and after every patch i have a hard time connecting until I allow everything. sometimes it does not matter and i canna connect to the game i wish to play unless I allow everything, which is like having no firewall. Not sure who the target “audience” is for this product but I have found it pretty user unfriendly. If my wife or one of my childern happen to be online then they are completly lost whne they get the pop up asking to define permissions. I am prolly going to have to uninstall this product and find something else. I am unable to connect to EQ2 at all now sense they did maintainence to day. Its a tight firewall, maybe to tight…
Me try creating a rule with the program executable which allows all udp/tcp traffic to that game at any address This is a good temporary measure untill they can get the bugs worked out for us gamers. I also suggest that you configure your “advanced attack detection and prevention” to set emergency mod to 20 seconds. I know it will still get you killed in FPS games but at least you won’t have to continually wait 2 minutes to connect to a server.
I agree with the problems with gaming. The firewall, for no apparent reason, regularily locks out game servers and/or other clients in the game with you, resulting in a disconnect for you (as everyone else but you stays connected) during game play.
A typical simple game server (starcraft/warcraft or Microslop gaming zone games) will drop clients in 30 seconds in order to prevent people from locking up the game for everyone in it.
More complicated games will lock the client who is no longer sending or recieving in their last known position with the result that your “character” gets killed and your forced to build a new one from scratch.
I was one of the Beta testers for the original firewall that was eventually bought by Nortons to become nortons then symancrap firewall (when norton left the company went to ■■■■) And that was actually what made it one of the most popular early firewalls. The fact it could USUALLY identify the difference between the actual game packets and a malicious program emulating them.
I recognise the fact that its obviously much different now as when you connect to game servers now you also have to connect to authentication servers periodically before as well as during gameplay/map changes etc. Not to mention the newer trojans and worms spoofing the game protocols as well.
3 things to remember:
Most gamers never stop gaming as they get older
Gamers were and still are the main driving force behind a huge amount of current computer technology today
If you get the gamers into using your software it will spread really fast and that improves internet securit overall :?)