vulchor: This doesn't sound right to me. Can someone else confirm or can you show us where you learned this? I thought that the whole purpose of Galaxy was to allow cross-platform multiplayer, so we could play with Steam users and the like. What about people who have the Humble DRM-Free version, do they not have multiplayer then since Humble doesn't have a client? This just doesn't seem to add up.
Gremlion: Dev said here
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showpost.php?p=359283&postcount=23 that cross-platform is something they are looking into.
Multiplayer through galaxy between gog-game-owners is available (there are some reports on this forum about looking for friends)
Without galaxy you can set up lan games.
Same with humble, although I suppose they give gog-key.
Thanks for the info Gremlion. I had misjudged Galaxy's capabilities I guess, based on what GOG had sold to us prior to its release. I really hope they implement cross-platform play. GOG is growing every year, and while it'll likely never get as large as Steam I can't think that we're insignificant either. GOG is the second largest digital games distributor.
MaceyNeil: People playing instances in Galaxy are few and far between.
I myself don't bother, because i can't be arsed waiting on people to get into the game and without being able to hot join someone elses due to the password locks everyone insists on (even for 2 player multi) it's just not been worth the time me bothering or being concerned over.
No the whole purpose of Galaxy is to allow a steam like multiplayer with a friends list (although it doesn't show who's playing what or a current list of what they are interested in playing or a realtime chat popup like skype).
For Galaxy to have cross play it essentially is up to primarily the DEVS not to platform lock the matchmaking system (seems like they did by not hosting the matchmaking themselves or on a unified entity) and secondarily on steam for not supporting crossplay (why would they apparently 100's of games of grim dawn on their server & like 10 at most on ours; so they'd gain very little for essentially helping their competitor [GOG] be more successful).
The fact of the matter is if you want more multiplayer you dimwits have to 'host' open (unlocked) multiplayer and be open to a wider character level range. the reason there is no multiplay community is because your not making any.
My other recommendation is dual instancing, host one, hot join the other.
That way theres an server accumulating players while you play and when the server your playing goes dark you just switch to the one your hosting.
The amount of server traffic would of course double, but seeing as this is an ARPG with only 4 players the bandwidth total would be negligible.
And thank you Macey for the explanation and suggestion on increasing available multiplayer games. Have you personally done this dual instancing? Does it affect performance much? I didn't know you could run multiple instances of Grim Dawn, I may give this a try.