The last time I can remember truly losing myself in a game was probably the summer after my third year of middle school. Back then, the game was Rust.
After that, high school started, and gaming became something I only did on and off. For a long time, I never really had another stretch where I could keep playing and keep enjoying it the way I used to.
Rust gave me a lot of online friends: Big Face Cat, 00, Shuzi, fk, yuwen, Mystery Man... That was in 2013, and somehow ten years have passed. My younger brother still plays with them now, just in different games. That kind of connection is honestly strange and amazing.
Big Face Cat stopped playing with us around 2014. I heard it was because he got busy with work and no longer had time to join us. At the time, I couldn’t understand it at all. Why would having a job clash with playing games? Surely adults still had time to play.
Only after I got into high school did I realize how naive that thought was. When I was younger, it felt like my energy would never run out. Later, I simply didn’t have enough left in me to keep playing games for long periods. When I had free time, I mostly just wanted to chat with friends. Games slowly became more like a social tool than the main event.
During that period, the only game I could still play regularly was Honor of Kings, mostly because it didn’t require setting aside a huge block of time.
Then, on July 24, 2023, after some encouragement from Daye, I bought Civilization VI.
And that was it. I was hooked.
The first night actually went pretty smoothly. The latency was a little high, but we still managed to get the game going. I started at nine at night and played straight through until three in the morning.
The second attempt, though, was nowhere near as pleasant. Because of network problems, one person among the three of us would always disconnect. For three days in a row, we would start the night excited to play, spend three hours wrestling with the connection, and end up with only about two hours of actual game time. Then the next day, it was back to work.
It kept happening. Two people could play just fine, but as soon as the third person joined, everything would become laggy.
Later, I bought NetEase UU and used its acceleration. The trick was to use thread mode. With thread mode enabled, Civilization VI worked. If I used router mode directly, Civilization VI being in the China region would cause it to fail to launch under a Chinese IP. So thread mode was necessary.
After turning on NetEase UU, the next couple of days were playable. There was still a little lag, and it definitely wasn’t perfectly smooth, but at least the experience was acceptable.
During this whole process, we also tried easyN2N, Joel’s Civilization VI accelerator, and the Youxia battle platform.
Youxia had the best experience, probably because it was based on LAN play. But it was too expensive: 20 per person, or 54 a month if three people bought the package together.
In the end, with no better choice and with poverty firmly limiting our options, we finally found a long-term stable solution: changing the NAT type.