I probably can't help at all, but I'm close to finishing a PhD in cybersecurity and part of my research that we ended up not publishing was on low cost DDOS shuffling algorithms. Purely out of curiosity, is there a forum somewhere detailing these issues?

I've opened an issue for this. I believe I've identified the two bugs that cause this issue and how to fix them, but I'm not a game dev so hopefully someone else can tackle this at some point (thanks again for the volunteer work). Link here:

https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues/5989

"Exceptions to firewall have been added." this is likely the culprit. Turn the firewall off completely and try again. If you succeed, it's a firewall issue.

TY!

ah gotcha makes sense regarding the micro. As far as balance changes, ya I'm not sure where that list is?

Thanks, ya no worries if you guys got other stuff going on, was hoping it would be a quick one

haven't played that many RTS games, makes sense

confirmed no mods, played another game, same error. Idk how to attach another log file but it's the same error as the one above. I even redownloaded and installed the game from scratch. (I attached the log file to the og post)

The game I was playing didn't have mods if I remember properly, and I am using linux (ubuntu 22.04). I'll play another game today though just in case to check.

Also after meeting up with some people I learned about all the micro stuff you have to do with your commander in order to remain competitive. Such as move your commander to a spot before selecting to build something so that it's in range. Moving units to dodge artillery. Same for subs. Personally I don't like any aspect of micro stuff, I feel like it should be automated. Why can't the com get just close enough to build something, why is the default to walk right up to it? idk but to me the micro aspects of the game don't add to the fun.

Just joined recently. A few thoughts.

1. When you're rating 0, I've found it takes a very long time to find matches on matchmaking
2. For custom games, probably 50% of the games have a lag issue that causes the game to pause for 2m before you can kick someone. I feel like it should be pretty easy to determine that in the lobby with some type of ping test. Also on team games then the game is pretty much ruined. Super annoying.
3. Maybe 10% of the games I play on large maps like dual gap (some of the funnest maps) straight up crash after 45m of play. Extremely annoying. (https://forum.faforever.com/topic/7335/game-keeps-crashing-on-dual-gap)
4. I feel like a good number of people play with friends from word of mouth, but you can't usually be on the same team as them due to balance issues if they're new. Makes it way less fun.
5. You spend a lot of time waiting in lobbies. A lot. Feels unusual for typical games.

Also I think it would be nice to have a simple optional walkthrough of changes with faf compared to the original game for new players

For some reason on Dual Gap map 12 player map, very late into the game (around 45m to an hour in) the game just completely crashes for me. It's happened fairly consistently recently, and appears to be specific to this map (or perhaps it's the number of players or just the time length of the game). One time I wanted to make sure the game wouldn't crash, so I literally did nothing and just sat there for a few minutes, and the game still crashed.

I've attached the error log. The last error seems to be

warning: Error running lua script: ...\.faforever\gamedata\lua.nx2\lua\effectutilities.lua(345): attempt to loop over field `BuildEffectBones' (a nil value)
         stack traceback:
         	...\.faforever\gamedata\lua.nx2\lua\effectutilities.lua(345): in function <...\.faforever\gamedata\lua.nx2\lua\effectutilities.lua:341>
         	...ata\lua.nx2\lua\sim\units\cybran\cairfactoryunit.lua(62): in function <...ata\lua.nx2\lua\sim\units\cybran\cairfactoryunit.lua:56>

I've attached the full error log
game_22060588 (1).log

Edit:
Ubuntu 22.04, attaching another log file, confirmed no mods when playing. game_22074926.log