this sound like someone didn´t open his ports !!
we´ll make more portscans in the future to avoid this.
I´m sorry but because of the way FS Multiplayer works
this is never 100% avoidable. You have a small chance
that it will work after several attempts.. because the server might route you to another member. But I see you allready tried that. You also have a small chance to identify the user. When you are allready in the game itself and you
have this problem... a message might appear after an
unsuccessfull attempt (sometimes it does sometimes not).. like "playerXY has left the session". This marks the player
you are trying to connect who obviously doesn´t have his ports open ! But this only when you are allready standing on the runway !!

best regards,

The standard ports should be ok.
I think it was probabely another User on the Server who didn´t open his ports. This is unfortunately not uncommon.
If you fly on the wspilots Server also make sure you set your
port back to 23456. Having it set to 23457 or 8 can cause similar problems.

But the way FS handles Multiplayer Sessions (peer to peer) can cause strange problems even if anything is set correct. For example
once we tried to connect with 3 people.. we made shure that all had their ports open (checked with NMap). But all 3 player only were able to connect if we connected in a particular order. If the wrong person connected before another one.. the last player always got a "not all players were able to connect".
It can also happen that you don´t see the session at all.
This happend to me several times on the wspilots Server
on local machines.. and also on our Server.
Sometimes after 5 Minutes suddenly the session appeard
and anything looked normal.

Hopefully these problems will be solved with FSX. As far as I know they´ll use a different network engine... cause
directplay is discontinued by Microsoft.

sam