I've had this game since release, and in all of that time I've never been able to play it other than in single player mode. I kept waiting for patches, but they never seemed to address this issue. After spending my entire day trying to connect with friends today, I am completely fed up. So...

I can see plenty of Brink servers on Steam. I can see my friends' servers on Steam. I cannot see any servers in game.

About the only advice that I could find from the developers regarding connection issues was a work around involving starting my own online game in order to refresh the cache, and then look for other servers - that didn't work for me. Others have argued about port forwarding settings, but the few conversations regarding such ideas eventually ended with, "still not working."

In hosting multiplayer games, I never once had anyone try to join my server at random, which may suggest that no one can see my server. When I sent an invite to friends to join my hosted sessions, they timed out trying to join. When they sent me invites via Steam, my game would tell me I could join as soon as I accepted the invite, but I would time out when I actually tried to join.

Even though everything in my Windows 7 firewall suggested that the game had open access to the internet, I eventually just shut the firewall off entirely. No change. I verified that the firewall on my modem was turned off, as well, and threw a DMZ into the mix just in case. Still nothing.

One thought that ocurred to us was that perhaps the game hasn't updated to the most recent patch, but I can't find anywhere, in game or out, that tells me what version my game is currently at. My assumption is that it automatically updated via Steam whenever a patch was released, but it would be nice to rule it out officially. This is the first game I can think of where it wasn't presented in some obvious location like the main menu.

If anyone can suggest where else I might look to figure out what is going on here, I'd appreciate their input.