Plutonium

To all Iraqi players, here are my recommendations for you.

Fixes:
1- Go through the pain of VMs and buying decent VPN. Or you could pay someone from the Kurdish region to host VPNs for you. But first, make sure they also can play Plutonium flawlessly, as just not long ago, I've played with a friend who lives in the Kurdish region and he hasn't complained.
2- Pool together some money for development. I myself recommend paying Plutonium devs to do the work.
3- Play split screen via parsec with your friends on RPCS3 (this automatically adds a player limit of 3, as for me even with a powerful laptop CPU, it will struggle with 4 player split screen). Keep in mind I have not tested Xenia!
4- Buy and mod a Xbox 360, they're very cheap! But modding them may be a headache, and modded ones are less cheaper. And you can avoid Xbox Live and all that bs with LAN games, you can use Hamachi for this, as it virtualizes a LAN connection, bear in mind it's not great.
5- Contacting your ISP, I don't recommend contacting ISPs about this issue, they generally do not care about a small group of customers, unless you have some influencer on your side.

Splitting the cost:
You can easily gather a large group of people to pay, how will you do that? Not going to explain, even a child knows how to do that!
I also recommend talking with game center owners to add T5 and T6 to their list of games (Tell them it's only 35 Gb both), as there are a lot of people willing to relive a childhood memory. Why am I telling you to do this? Because game center owners are greedy fools either fully willing or fully unwilling to do anything to gather more gamers. They generate a lot of revenue, so $100 is nothing for them. In the end, both the average person and Plutonium players get what they want.

Recommended payment option:
For payment, I recommend using banks as I've heard they let you pay with a lower IQD-USD exchange rate. Generally you will pay 150 IQD less per USD. For 100 USD, this will become 15,000 IQD which is a lot.
I myself would love to help out Iraqis, but I don't have payment methods.

For now both T6 multiplayer and zombies work fine with 5 UDP ports open, being 3074, 4976, 4977, 28960, and 28961. Further testing will take place within the future.
Note for future readers: The ports in the above may not work for the other games such as T5.
Note for future readers: If you have enabled port forwards correctly and custom games do not work, please give your router 10 mins, then restart both your computer and your router.

(Not necessary to read) Within the future, I will remove all of the port forwards, then add them once again one by one, with tests being taken per port added within 1 hour duration each, as to see which ports are responsible for T6 custom games, I may perform tests on T5, although that is not a priority for me now. (Not necessary to read)

Dss0 I made the claim that zombies worked without UPnP nor port forwards, this claim is false as I've discovered.
(Explanation, reading is optional) The previous tests I mentioned before, such as the successful zombies test was taken after the unsuccessful multiplayer test, thus a duration of time had passed in between them. I suspect within this duration of time, my router made port forwarding changes I had made within the UI before the unsuccessful multiplayer test. I bring forth this suspicion because we use an older router than what our ISP provides today, and older routers take a surprising amount of time to make simple changes. I may not speak for newer routers, as I've not experienced one first hand. (Explanation, reading is optional)

Dss0 Resxt and anyone who is reading this:
Zombies without UPnP and port forwarding somehow works. But even with UPnP and port forwarding set up (correctly), multiplayer couldn't get to work. But why is this the case?
Now, we tried Zerotier, and it works! Although I must say the connection isn't great, he is rubber banding all over the place, ping is very high. I'll see if I can host my own network. I've come to the conclusion, using Hamachi or Radmin is much better for the average person. As if you want to get better connection, you have to set up a VM. Although I make this claim without trying them out.

One more question, can't we run the Steam original BO2 exe and not connect to any public lobbies? Just connect to each other?
I've also found a console command site: https://gmzorz.com/bo2dvars.html#dvars

Dss0 Thank you for your explanation, I might've not fully set up port forwarding correctly, we were in a hurry. Although it has moved my curiosity, I will certainly read on this subject fully.
I will post on this topic again within 2 weeks, if using virtual lan software helps.
In the meantime, is there a console command to check my IP and port?

Resxt
Dss0

Please do not tell me to follow the plutonium guide, I've already followed it.
Please do not tell me to join an empty server, we already did and we had horrible connection.
And no, I'm not going to set up a dedicated server just to play some BO2 for a short period of time.
Please answer the 3 questions, you can find the questions by searching for "?", please use the Ctrl + F shortcut. Furthermore, they're italiced.

In short, I want 2 things:
1- Help setting up custom games without "Unable to join game session".
2- I want a reasonable answer as to why "Friends list", "Network", and "Help" section are removed with only "Server list" section being left.

1- Me and my friend can't play with each other even though I've followed the guide: https://plutonium.pw/docs/custom-games
If we were to use a virtual lan software such as Radmin VPN, will it fix our issue?
Does having a custom reticle cause the issue?

2- Strange enough, back in 2020 there was a section for helping you play custom games, here's the link to the proof: https://youtu.be/jWEyQouCDjg?t=69
Now, there's only "server list" section left.
My question is, why did they/you remove them?

Thanks man!

Do you have the filenames?

I don't know the file name for dual band scope reticle for T6.

Greetings! I've looked through the prior Reshade topics, and it plainly condemns Reshade, despite the fact that no reasonable alternative was presented by the staff or community.
As you may know, BO2 is superior to BO1 in terms of texture and models, but it lacks the same attractiveness. The visuals need some tweaking in order to play the game in delight by making it less difficult to see. To begin, a reduction of vibrance and other visual effects is much appreciated. I, and other common players, dislike delving into our display or GPU configuration for such a thing as we consider it inconvenient, as we have other games on our system. I fully understand that tryhards will do everything to avoid being banned whilst gaining the maximum advantage.
Furthermore, high-end players may enjoy post-processing effects, particularly bloom.
I appreciate the hard work of the plutonium staff, and I want you, the reader, to view this as a recommendation, rather than a complaint.

Almost every single BO1 zombies mod I try, it either crashes, or barely works. Most of these mods need the linkermod made by Nukem9.
Is there any way to make them work?

Dss0 , so in short, you can't play T5 with Zombies Reimagined mod, is that correct?

I installed BO1 Zombies Re-imagined mod, and this mod requires this "https://github.com/Nukem9/LinkerMod" which needs to be installed to the BO1 folder or "pluto_t5_full_game".

I was wondering, will this ever affect multiplayer?
Will I get banned for using this?