Demigod: Fun for casual gamers but also good for competitive players

By Frogboy on April 6, 2009 6:34:55 PM from

Rage Quit: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rage+quit

Dealing with disconnects is a lot more subjective than most forum posters often think. In any system that is aiming to have any semblance of legitimacy, the objective has to be about justice.

Consider these examples:

Example 1: Playing against someone known to be extremely good.

Player hits skirmish and the player cares a lot about their ranking. Players gets into the game and they see that the other team has some player who they know is really good. They immediately quit.

What should we do?

Example 2: Player gets into a game where someone has a poor connection / low end system.

Player hits skirmish and cares a lot about their ranking. Player gets into a game with someone whose system is so low end it’s causing everyone to run at 10fps. They immediately quit.

What should we do? How is this different than the above example from the server side?

Example 3: 3 on 3 game where, after 15 minutes, 1 person quits and that person is replaced by an AI.

In a competitive game (i.e. top players) the AI won’t be as good as the player who quit. The person who quits would get a loss? Or should they get a disconnect? What about the other players? If the new team loses the match (as would be likely) how should it affect their ranking? If you say it shouldn’t affect it as negatively as it would have if the other guy had stayed in, then we reward rage quitting.

And these are just 3 of the dozens of scenarios that we’re working on behind the scenes. And I don’t even mention any malicious examples.

When I played Total Annihilation in PGL, there were all kinds of unbelievably scummy things players did. And you can bet we’ve already added as many malicious scenarios as we can to our list of things that we have to deal with.

The hardest part though is dealing with the subjective justice parts. For example, we are probably going to go ahead and not count games for the player that exits if it’s in the first 3 minutes because getting an unfair loss is a much bigger deal than someone not getting a fair loss. Better to count it as a disconnect.

The good news is, as we deal with these scenarios, they won’t require updates to Demigod itself. It’s all handled on the server so you’ll just see it get better and better as we implement new scenarios or learn new ones.

+912 Karma | 33 Replies

Epochs sound good, but can we have a "master epoch" available as well? With the "total ranking" from every epoch?

-Drexion/Ragarth

Hiding enemy names can help prevent this, but it also works against feelings of community. I like playing against the guy who beat me last time and getting sweet revenge.

This is true. A way around this would be to make anyone in the "Friends" list always visible.

Another thumbs up here for the epochs. I always assumed there would be some sort of ladder, but it's nice to hear it firsthand.

How about giving the players an option of having an arranged team. So they know everyone on their team is legit, and any1 who drops out on the other team results in a win for the first team.

Quoting Haree78,

reply 13

I would solve all of the above with 2 rules:

1) A dissconnect is a loss, in ranked games you are required to have a good connection and enough time to play, bad connection people will have to get their connection improved or accept the losses, that is in no way unfair in competative internet games. Other games use this system and people just learn to live with it.

2) There should be some connection speed/stability monitoring, after 3 minutes of play if this is below the acceptable level (hard coded) then the player is given the option to drop with no standing loss. However the ratio of completed games to drops is monitored and standing is deducted if this ratio is too biased to dissconnects.

This is really how it has to be done.

You disconnect for any reason, guess what it's a loss.

Yes sometimes you'll get screwed here due to having a bad connection but it's much better than the alternative of allowing a HUGE exploit existing (manly I see who's in the game and if I don't like I just disconnect).

-Jara

TBO:

You can still dodge in SupCom, it's possible to learn the player name during connecting. I simply don't spread it around how.

Edit:

For SupCom, myself and another player have been working on a much more accurate performance tester. You could simply bracket people by performance, and if theirs is below X, then play them only with other people below X.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 21

BTW, one of the things we plan to do with Demigod is have Ladder "Epochs". These epochs would mark different phases of the evolution of the competitive multiplayer experience where, at the end of an epoch we would create a new epoch where everyone's stats (rankings) reset. You would still have access to previous epochs so you could see who the top players were at a given time.

This way, it gives more opportunities for players to be top ranked and it gives us a way to reset the rankings occasionally when we've made a significant change to the rules.

For example:

Epoch 1 might only last until the end of May 2009 during which time we discover various expoits or rules that seemed good on paper but got griefed/cheesed. As a former PGL player, I've seen a lot of cheesey lame tactics and I have a long list of such tactics that can be employed in Demigod.

Can I assume I'm not the only one here who has played an online game with stats that's gotten annoyed that the developers overlooked some exploit and the top players were merely the people who had mastered them?

So clearly, Epoch 1 will be the age of figuring out the unique idiosyncracies of Demigod in on-line play and deciding, as a community, the best way to deal with them.

Then Epoch 2 might start in June and last the Summer when we figure out more things.

And so on.

But each Epoch would be available in the Pantheon so people could go back and see players and such. In the long-run, we hope to make it so that replays can be submitted to the server so people can go back and watch games.

I like that idea. But what would be a good addition to this is an averaged score table, where your score over all epochs are averaged, so you get a ladder that shows your standing over time.

For #1 it is very simple. Disconnect of any kind should be a loss, no matter what. That is how it works in sports. If you don't get to the match in time, or for some reason abort the match (for example leave the match in rage), the other team get a walkover and you get a loss. Or if you for example break your leg during the game and can't continue the game in a timely fasion, the other team get a win.

There is no other way to do it as i see it.

However, this brings me on to another topic. About the continue in a timely fassion. If you get disconnected for some reason, you should have an option of being able to reconnect to the game within a certain timeframe. If you do, nothing happens, if you dont, you get a loss and other team get a win.

Quoting hobodefcon,

reply 5

i think for acceptable disconnects, including timeouts, each time it happens, the players should vote on whether to file a complaint, which would affect the quitter's participation rating. Their participation rating should be based on number of games full played (good) and mid game disconnects (bad) and displayed when joining a game.

Yeah in Savage2 you have karma and every single replay of every single game someoen plays.

You can look at someones page on their site, download their replays, and see they only win from stacking teams and quitting when it's evenly balanced.

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Demigod: Fun for casual gamers but also good for competitive players