FYI, the game comes equiped with two seperate pieces of installs. One for a client, one for a server. You can choose to install one or both from the get go. Running both on a normal system does take up a lot of bandwidth and is not recommended by me or Digital Anvil for that matter. The best case scenerio is to have a stand alone computer running only the server software on a large pipeline. If you want to play on your own server, then try do so from another networked computer via LAN (if you have the resources). I played both on mine and it did okay, but it wasn't the best of perofrmances. When I didn't run the server software and connected to another server, it was very smooth going.

The server software by default will connect to a global server that holds all the other server from around the world. These servers will list such things as IP's / names / ping times / a "visited" column / Other (for whether the server admin has turned on player killing or protected with a password.).

Server Admins have the rights to kick and / or ban people from their server. They can type in server messages you can see before you connect and seperate "news" you see once you make a connection. Generally, these two places will indicate where the server might be located and what the system specks are for the server. But this is completely up to the server admin what is in there. Server admins can also speak directly with players/ systems / the whole univerese. Suggstion, if you see a message pop up from the CONSOLE, best acknowldge it!! This can be done by hitting the "Y" and then arrow up until you see CONSOLE. I've never been able to initate a conversation with a CONSOLE, it was always me getting pinged first.

Multiplayer server stability can vary widely from one to the other in regards to performance. Factors such as distances from you and real pipeline bandwidth used are the biggest factors. Some might be running through firewalls, some may not. Firewalls don't prevent people from connecting to a server, they actually provide the portal so the can. Not required on all systems!! I ran mine with very little custom confuration needed, but without my firewall, I could not connect to the global server. NAT's seems to dictate that issue.

Servers can be connected via directly link if an IP is published somewhere. this is problematic on systems that do not have static IP's of course. Roaming IP's are not conducive to having a lot of people on all the time if the server dumps. The global server does go down from time to time and connecting via direct IP is the solution.

I made add more info to this later. Enjoy.