What language did you write it in? Visual Basic? There's probably code/tutorials which might help in getting sockets to work under that.
There are, but theoretically I was doing everything correctly. Apparently VB6 just can't handle modern TCP/IP over the internet, what with all the NAT forwarding and stuff. I can, however, use HTTP and FTP.
I was actually considering using that to make persistant online multiplayer in lieu of normal multiplayer. You wouldn't go head to head with other players in realtime, but you could end up fighting their decks. (In this scenario, when playing on offense you would control your deck as you do in the current game. On defense you wouldn't be around, so instead you get to stack your deck so that you play whatever cards you want in whatever order you want, with the obvious drawback being that you can't react to your enemy's moves. Thus, defense would be all about building a strong foundation and predicting what your enemy is going to be doing. After all, if you assume your gold production is going to be 8 because you've played 3 characters and the enemy kills one, you won't be able to play the card you wanted if it costs 8 gold...)
The basic idea would be a very simplified MUD consisting of regions (such as, say, the Forest of Doubts), areas inside those regions (such as the City of Angels or the Forest Glade), and specific locations within those areas (such as the weapon shop or the potion shop). The movement would be tiered for convenience's sake; when you left the weapon shop, you'd be in the City of Angels area, able to move directly to any of the locations therein, and if you left the City of Angels, you would be in the Forest of Doubts region, able to move directly to any of the areas therein or to any of the connected regions.
Quests would basically be interactive fiction segments with card battles thrown in, and there would be a large degree of persistence in the gameworld. For example, if you gank 5 karis in the Forest of Doubts, there will be 5 fewer karis when the next player shows up. (However, each player would be limited to how many they could kill before they had to go to another region/area to hunt.)
Players would likely be able to build structures and such and there would be an element of faction control (you could buy troops/creatures to put in different areas in order to hold them, and if you had enough, monsters wouldn't attack you or your allies when in that area--and they may well end up killing all of the monsters outright.)
To keep players from achieving Godhood through sheer grinding, each player would be limited to a certain number of turns per day. (That means I can actually *have* a persistant world without everything breaking because a few people are playing non-stop.)
However, that's a MAJOR upgrade to the current game, and I'm not sure where I stand on it just yet. I'm mostly tinkering with it right now.
Have you ever considered using C# or Java? I'm not as familiar with Java as i am with C# but from what I understand they are pretty close to each other in terms of flexibility and I believe they are both able to do a few more things that VB has trouble with. Either way the Syntax is fairly close to VB as more things are being standardized so I imagine that you could pick up either one fairly quickly. Just a thought really. ^_^
I always consider writing every project in another language but end up writing it in VB anyway just because I'm so good at it. I can write something in VB in one day that would take me two weeks in another language. Of course, it ends up causing me no end of problems later on, but that tends to be true of other languages as well...