If nothing is showing up you may be at an off peak time. It is usually the most busy when the Yanks are awake and online. Also people are very hosting-phobic. If you can't find a free game, host one up and usually you will have players shortly. Also you can try jumping in the various IRC channels to find players.
Ther servers can be quiet, but there's usually plenty of people on. One way to be sure if there is a problem- there is an option to filter games (usually set to 'can play') change that to all games it will show up in progress games as well. If nothing comes up with that then he is having a problem getting the games list. This can be an issue if he has a slow internet connection, as for some reason the games list uses rather allot of bandwidth. Another thing to check is if he is connecting to his router via wifi? A cable connection is prefferable as otherwise you can get high ping. Final question, can he play single player ok? Currently single player (either skirmish or the 'Galactic War' mode) are hosted on the remote servers so if that works ok we can rule out firewall problems.
For anyone who wants to test this: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-optimise-user-tag-map-mod-to-improve-startup.63917/
What, you've got to be shitting me. O(N) connections, where N is *every user you've ever encountered*?!
eg just played a 10 FFA and 10 new users were added to my user tag map which means 10 more network connections at startup.
This works almost perfectly. The only thing that should be stated is that you need to restart PA after you click "optimize user tag map" Other than that this is really good, nice job man. I had 1898 connections before, maybe i play too much PS. I am playing on steam. (an i copy pasted this from the WIP section)
Thanks... when you click optimise user tag map it will update playfab so that your next startup is quicker. You should see the counter increasing as you encounter new players including those just joining and leaving prior to game start.
Definitely speeded things up for me. I was up to 146 usertags. Down to 1 now. The server browser is still laggy as **** but that's to be expected with the *other* bandwidth-hogging issue.
What are your graphic settings at? Your Radeon HD 8550g is pretty low end. Edit: Also, what is your internet bandwidth? What kind of internet (E.g. broadband, fiber, satellite, etc....)? Is your connection to your modem/router wired or wireless?