I have forwarded all the required ports on my router per these two articles/forum posts:

Required Ports for Modern Warfare 2

What ports does this game use?

And yet, I still cannot connect to any games. I try to join a game, and I'm always the only one in the lobby. It searches for games for a good 60 seconds, incrementing the ping tolerance by 10 every few seconds, then finally says "Searching for available games" for a good minute or two after which I give up.

I can see that there are x thousand people playing on the multiplayer screen, so why can't I join any of these games?

I have no problem connecting to multiplayer in other games such as Left 4 Dead and Starcraft 2, and I'm on high-speed cable internet.

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4 Answers

Modern Warfare 2, even on the PC, uses a peer-to-peer model for multiplayer. If there are no games within a certain latency limit of you (I think it's around 100-150 ms) the game will attempt to make a new game with you as the host. If enough other people in your area are also looking for a game, they will join your lobby and you will have the chance to play with them.

However, if there aren't any players in your area trying to play Modern Warfare 2 in the game mode that you've chosen, you'll essentially wait forever for other people to show up. You can try to fix this in a couple of ways, but essentially unless there are people playing near you, you won't find a game lobby. This is complicated by the fact that far fewer people are playing Modern Warfare 2 compared to other games in the CoD series.

A couple of things to try nonetheless:

• Modern Warfare 2 segregates players based on the game type they want to play. Team Deathmatch is generally the favorite, so if you're trying to play some other game mode, you might consider trying a more popular one instead.
• If there's anything else going on with your connection (ie, people you live with watching Netflix, or downloading large files) try to reduce this. This can improve your latency and give you a wider area to search for games in.

Beyond that, it's more just a matter of whether people in your region are interested in playing a game of Modern Warfare 2 or not. Peak times seem to be in the evenings.

Left4Dead uses a dedicated server architecture, and is a lot more forgiving in terms of latency, so finding a game is quite a bit easier. It also has more of a following even this far after release. Starcraft 2 can tolerate much higher latencies and is also quite a bit more popular than Modern Warfare 2 at this point.

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If you have the DLC maps installed, try uninstalling them.

Less people have the DLC than don't. I and my friends still play this game years after release, and even though we all bought the DLC, we don't have it installed anymore. This is because it makes it difficult to find games quickly, and even the ones you do find are often quite laggy.

If I install the maps, I'm unable to find a Mercenary Team Deathmatch game. At all. I can let it sit in the lobby searching for an hour, and only see one person enter and leave. I'm near Denver, there are plenty of people playing, can't connect. If I uninstall the maps, I can find a game in seconds.

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Another thing that's not being considered is that MW2 is a 2 year old game with 2 successors that are virtually identical in genre, Black Ops and MW3.

There is going to be next to nil players on MW2 at this point. While this argument doesn't apply to other games like COD2 or World at War, they're different entirely.

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I don't know what the problem is. I have the same problem, but I have an temporary solution.

Host a game and wait until the game is over, then try to reconnect to the game server and it will work. Don't ask me how to solve this one forever.