I decided to ask Claude to see if it could figure out what none of us were able to--why the multiplayer server pings stopped working. It suggested some fixes, we tried them...and it seems to work? Don't expect to find many players, but if you have a friend you want to play with (and you're on the same side of the world) then it probably will work now? Posting this as a minor update to see if there's any feedback. If it appears to work, we'll make a "regular update" post to bring it to more people's attention. Also I don't want to update the store page and say multiplayer is working before more independent confirmation.
Full disclosure: AI code tools were used to identify the fix, but humans still did the rest of the work.