Dearest Gearbox,

I have not yet had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, so please consider me a humble fan. I'm writing you today on behalf of myself (and likely others) in order to rectify a most troubling situation. For reasons I shall expound upon shortly, it has become quite evident to me that the online portion of your remarkable shooter "Borderlands" appears to be a scrotum-hammering flameshit fucktastrophe.

I'm aware of the severity of this accusation, so Allow me to delineate:

I refer specifically to the timeouts my would-be vault hunting partner and I encountered when attempting to establish a public or private game. Regardless of who hosted, the issue was constant. And clearly this was our fault, make no mistake about that. I'm certain a triple-A title producing behemoth such as yourself has an unfathomably rigorous QA department, and every possible connection error was accounted for prior to release. The failing was almost certainly due to our sub-normal intelligence.

Despite our evident down syndrome, my compatriot and I endured. We pored over forums for over 2 hours clinging desperately to thoughts of your glorious apocalyptic playland seemingly within our reach. We forwarded ports, reset routers, disabled firewalls, tried fixes that worked for others but did not work for us. We restarted the game, tested, restarted, and tested again.

And as a brief aside, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for making the 18 distinct logo screens both blaringly loud, and entirely unskippable. Watching claptrap become dismayed at the non-functioning Nvidia logo remains a delight, I'd hate to give in to the temptation to cut to the chase and get into my game quickly. A tip of the cap to you.

In the end, we were left with no option but to employ a 3rd party piece of software titled GameRanger. I'm overjoyed to inform you that I have since had no issues establishing a game, and have been gleefully scouring and destroying every square inch of Pandora.

Yet there are those I've spoken to who brashly declare that the use of Gameranger should not be required. These ne'er do wells often say they should not have to be a "goddamn systems administrator to play a game (they) paid $50 to fucking play". I take great pains to explain to these ill informed few that forwarding ports and exhaustively searching forums for glimmers of hope is all part of the experience for those wishing to engage in online frivolities. My tireless adversaries then counter with: "Left 4 Dead works perfectly because Valve doesn't have their heads up their asses and actually spent time creating solid netcode".

I fear I am out of answers. I implore you, Gearbox: extend your benevolent hand and bestow upon me a fragment of your not inconsiderable wisdom that I might allay the antagonism of this naysaying rabble.

Or maybe just...I dunno. Don't develop in a fucking vaccuum.

Sincerely,
copilotlindy