Sounds like a dumb question. I have 2 steam accounts, each with the game installed. We're on a LAN, connected to the internet. One guy starts the game, invites a friend. The friend sees the invite and tries to join, but it says the other player isn't in a server.

What gives? I know other games like Left4Dead has similar issues with the router not supporting loopback, but that was resolved. Is this the same thing, or am I doing something wrong?

No one plays online on the pc any more. Its a shame, because both were very fun. Infact co-op is some of the best ever made. Its just happens to be too short to go back to. Online just died for some reasion. It was good, but it most likly was not what First person shooter fans wanted in an online game.

I've been playing on line. I've had the same issue as OP with remote players, at least one fixed it by rebooting their router. I suspect you may be onto something with the loopback but try rebooting stuff first I reckon.

Are you finding people on line eaay?

For testing I went ahead and rebooted my router and disabled the anti-virus and firewall on both machines. Still says "Player is not currently in a game server" or something like that.

I have been down this road before, so I replaced my router a while back with a linksys model running a linux OS, and loaded DD-WRT, which is third party software with much more functionality than the Linksys stuff. That fixed my problems with other games that had problems not allowing loopback.

I also this morning, for testing [didn't really expect it to work, and it didn't] set the DNS of my NIC's to an external DNS server. I have a Windows domain here at my house so all the machines point back to my domain controller for DNS. That wasn't the problem, but I had to try it.

I don't know how RAGE handles this, but I expect it is not sending the WAN IP address back to the master, or something like that. I guess I could try putting a machine in the DMZ, but that's really not going to fix anything because the machine itself will still have a LAN IP address, and besides, I shouldn't have to jump through those kinds of hoops to make it work.

I wouldn't say it's easy, and it does depend on the time of day etc. but there are still some players out there including myself. GivinPain, you might try just joinging public games and see if you end up on the same server, I haven't really investigated the problem too much because most of the time when i run into this I send the invite (as opposed to the other player) and it works.

I was under the impression that there weren't actual servers? The goal is to play coop with the other person in my house...actually sitting beside me on another computer. If we can't invite the person to join and have it work, then it's not going to work with us both selecting a "quick match" and hope that we join each others game by magic.

Maybe I'm wrong about the servers, and if that is true then I'd just like to know how to run a local server cause I can do that too. Just fire up a dedicated server on another computer and have it serve our games, but that's not how I understand RAGE works.

OK, I feel dumb. K-dog, you made me think that maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. Before I was starting a lobby and then issuing an invitation to the other player. That never worked [and still needs to be fixed].

But, then I thought that I just needed to try to join the other guys lobby without an invitation. I started a private match, but set it to "open to all" instead of "Invitation only", and it works fine.

Duh!

Thanks for the help. Sometimes you just need to chew on stuff for a while before the lightbulb goes on. But, the inviation thing still needs repair.

I'm glad you got it working. There is definitely some bug here but like I said I haven't investigated enough to properly report either. Hopefully patch 2 will fix this all up anyway. Happy coop'ing! I love it personally.