Why is plaync sending me UDP packages?

I have gotten 33 UDP packages from 206-127-156-126.plaync.com between 7.51 am CEDT and 10.21 am CEDT today all to ports 33436-33438. 7.51 might be when I logged onto the game, but I wasn't logged on more than 10 minutes or so (just checked day jobs)

Does anyone know what this is about?

TCP/IP packets use error checking so that if a packet isnt received it is requested again, re-sent by the server and then when all packets are received they are put in order and presented to the user (a basic description, not 100% accurate).

If CoH used TCP/IP for game data updates, you would get *a lot* of dithering and delays as you waited for all packets to be received before you saw the position/change in your curroundings.

UDP doesnt care. it just streams a load of data at you, if some goes missing it ignores it and continues to receive packets. hence you might get a bit of jumpiness as packets are lost but you see the end result.

media streamers are the same. live broadcasts use UDP otherwise you would get either a: serious delay as all packets are resent and then arranged for presentation or b: garbled rubbish as the packets are presented as they arrive without any order , a re-requested packet would arrive a few seconds after it should have been shown.

admittedly, newer games can use tcp/ip connections and use their own inbuilt engine to filter unwanted packets but CoH is 5 years old

Its not wrong, its a good thing. nothing to worry about.

Reason I know about this is that my Windows box isn't on the internet, it's on a twice NAT-ed net, behind the Linux server that sits listening to the internet.

I know about TCP, even if it was a bit more than ten years since I wrote a TCP-stack at university. It's not the fact that I recive UDP-packages that I'm wondering about or why you use UDP instead of TCP, it's the fact that plaync try and send me UDP-packages several hours after I have logged off and shutdown the windows box that I assume was the target machine.

I wondered if anyone knew about what kind of packages it was, as you said it can't be automated resends since UDP uses the fire and forget method of package delivery.

ah sorry, misunderstood your question.

could it be connected to the "download updates once you log out" i wonder ?

No need to be sorry, after re-reading my own post I don't think it's crystal clear

I'll set up a tcpdump on the Linux box and use wireshark to see if I can spot anything when I get home.