Life in the Demigod lane

By Frogboy on May 2, 2009 12:43:45 PM from

Last night we got the update out. The change log can be found on Impulse (right click and view the change log). Lots of improvements.

We ultimately marked it as a beta because we ran out of time and couldn't integrate the updated connection code which meant that the existing connection DLL had to be included which has a launch bug that causes an occasional crash when combined with this new build.

Anywyay, we had been hoping to surprise people by having the update include the Proxy server update. But it too wasn't quite ready. We had pushed until Friday to try to surprise everyone but we didn't want to go a second weekend without showing some substantial improvements for those people who have been having difficiulties.

We're going to have an update probably on Monday to move the beta from release.

The problem with betas, as some of you no doubt have noticed, is that you split the multiplayer community and that can make the skirmish and pantheon games a lot less fun because you end up with a lot fewer 3 on 3 human games. So we have to do these sparingly.

Now, that said, I want to address a nmber of points in one place that keep coming up online:

Comment 1: "Stardock is overstating Demigod difficulties, to get coverage, the game works fine for me"

First, yes, while the game works fine for most people. There are a significant number of people who are having problems connecting through the built in multiplayer match making. While I may seem to focus a lot on those issues, in the long run, this is a game that will live and die on its ability to sustain a MP community and it is important that people know that we are taking their issues seriously.

Comment 2: "The multiplayer match making is totally buggy, how could they release it like this???"

So at the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the people who are having trouble getting into games with the built in match making. I share your frustration. But Stardock was in no rush to release Demigod. Demigod was done as far as we were concerned.

Now, as the publisher, it's our responsibility to make sure problems in anything we release are addressed. But we haven't been fixing "bugs". We have been getting a crash course in P2P scaleability (or lack there of).

Should Demigod have had a big huge open MP beta? Yea, in hindsight, yes. If we had a time machine, we would do that. But we've released games that have MP before (Sins of a Solar Empire, The Political Machine, The Corporate Machine, and OS/2 games before that). The difference here is the difference between MP-centric and a game that's mostly played SP that has MP.

And how does that difference translate? Well, in Sins, you might (and Sins players can attest to this) a game that tops out with 200 people playing online at once versus a game that has 1000 people in games online and another 8000 people who are online in the process of looking for games. And as many people have said, it works decently overall.

There are programs like Game Ranger that largely take care of the match making for people who want to use that while we migrate towards a system where we host the games for players but it's not something that's easily done overnight.

PC game expectations have come a long way over the past several years. Leaders in our industry like Blizzard have raised the bar with things like Battle.net and our friends at Relic have created RelicOnline which works very well. And of course there is GameSpy Arcade which has evolved over a period of years.

We appreciate the patience of those who are having difficulties. I can assure you that Gas Powered Games and Stardock are working inhuman hours to solve their problems as quickly as possible (70 to 90 hours last week for instance per person involved). But these hours aren't about "finishing" a game. The game shipped finished. It's the scale of things that we were (clearly) unprepared for. We can't change the past, we can only take things from where they are now.

A lot of progress has been made internally. In less than 2 weeks, we've taken a game that is a peer-to-peer game and developed an infrastructure from scratch to make it so that the publisher's servers will be handling potentially 100% of the network traffic for all games played throughout the world. This was not contemplated prior to release but we are commited to making sure that MP is bullet proof even if it takes longer than we all wish.

We're working on it even now.

+912 Karma | 77 Replies

Well, I disagree to some extent, as I wrote in several posts / replies.

Anyway, get some rest guys. U can't fix anything if u can't think, and often you don't know you're too tired until you're properly rested.

This will take weeks to sort out and bring to a satisfactory problem-free status, all told. So no use pushing ahead like it's just a few more days. Ease up, take good weekends off.

Cheers

Thanks for the update.

Sorry you are getting blasted by the same stuff that is 10 others posts/.

Keep up the good work. I love the game even if it isn't perfect.

many of the majopr glitches came due to rushed updates

I just want to say, that I'm tired of all of the complaining people are doing about the game. Sure, I can get into games, not always, but usually, and sure, there are problems. But I've seen oh so many games who don't even care. The two, equal reasons that I bought this game were I tried it out and thought it was fun, and Frogboy. A week before I got the game, after the review on Gamespot, I hopped on over to these forums, and saw the daily updates you did on the status of the game. I then picked it up, and have enjoyed it since. Is it perfect? No. Should we hold you responsible? Hell yes. HOWEVER, people just need to calm down. It's a game. If you hate it, go do something you don't hate for a while. If someone had told you you could get this game which is working perfectly well early, before any of the stores are releasing it, because they're doing a mass beta, and that you would still have to pay for it, would you not get it, even though everyone told you everything was working properly? I thought so. So would I. And then when we all got in and it didn't work, the only difference would be they could say "Well, it's beta, I'm going home at a normal time this week" and it wouldn't be done as fast. If it's not working, calm down and if it's something new, bring it to the devs' attention, or get a refund. And that's all I'm saying on the matter.

going away from the game for a few weeks isnt possible as you fall behind from the rest of the guys trying to get better , otherwise i would

Quoting Awbee,

reply 4

Does that mean the proxy servers might be ready for the monday update?

Possibly.

I hate getting people's hopes high but I think Monday's update is going to be the first major connectivity update we've had that should lay to rest most people's concerns.

Quoting Azrailx,

reply 4

many of the majopr glitches came due to rushed updates

This is true. A lot of the post-release grief, particularly with favor points and favor items, has to do with the post-release updates. Those issues aren't hard to get working again, the problem is that the same people working on connectivity are the same people who deal with things like the stat tracking and the like.

If they deemed a certain part of his post as inflamatory, delete that part. You don't delete a post containing a legitimate list of issues with your project simply because they've been mentioned previously, and then link to a post that refers to some of the issues while writing off others.

The issues have already been raised. They are well know. It was an inflamatory post by someone that didn't use the search function or just wanted a turn on the soap box to shout "This game is a rip off" it's perfectly understandable why the thread was locked.

What got me all riled up is when a company's CEO starts selectively acknowledging issues and dismissing others.

Please show me the quote where Brad says they aren't problems and they won't be addressed.

edit: The forum is buggy... it didn't like me pasting something formatted. WYSIWYG fail. As such, the quotes are broken...

I have an idea why it got locked,[/quote]

Disclaimer: I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THE CONNECTION ISSUES

Problems which are not related to multiplayer connectivity:
•   Wins count as losses, and vice versa (tracking issue which doesn't seem to have been introduced after release)
•   Favor is broken (edit: tracking issue introduced as a bug after release, so doesn't count)
•   The game crashes very often when you alt-tab
•   The game crashes very often when you get the Failed to connect error
•   Your DG will often freeze and refuse to do anything until you tell him to move
•   Your DG will often stop in their tracks when using an item like the Heart of Life, or the item will not be used at all
•   Your DG will sometimes turn around to attack enemy reinforcements, while on the move and without being given a new order
•   When the game crashes, in the vast majority of cases, the game window will remain "always on top", preventing you from accessing the debug window that pops up when it crashes.
•   When running with more than one monitor, the mouse will move off the game to the other monitor. This is related to the above, and suggests that Demigod runs in a maximized window rather than full screen. This is usually done to make it less painful to alt-tab, but since that results in a crash many times, all it does is reduce performance. Since many people use the mouse to move across the map, this makes it impossible to use two monitors.

Missing features. Implementing them as they go along is something that happens in a beta, not a retail game.
•   Grouping
•   Minion HUD (count)
•   Inviting friends to games
•   Chatting to people who are already connected while joining a new game, while on the Connection Info window (the server should relay your messages)
•   Private Messaging people who are not your friends (useful because of the lack of the above feature)

Most of the above (except perhaps the last 3 on missing features, and the first one under Problems which[...]) are GPG's responsibility, so the team that works on multiplayer connectivity (Stardock) is unaffected by their working on these.
These bugs/missing features are all things that either happen frequently or that almost anyone wants to have in the game, respectively. There is NO excuse for this, other than they released the game before it was ready. It's nice and all that they're working on it now, but they should have done this back in beta.

[quote who="Connatic" reply="9" id="2182161"]
Please show me the quote where Brad says they aren't problems and they won't be addressed.

It's the OP of this thread. He did not address even a single one of my concerns in the quote above, and yet locked the other thread with a link to this thread saying there's a response. The mere fact my post was deleted shows that they do not want to acknowledge this.

The mere fact my post was deleted shows that they do not want to acknowledge this.

And the dozens of other posts that haven't been deleted?

The mere fact my post was deleted shows that they do not want to acknowledge this.

You're right...it's a conspiricy. They never plan on fixing any bugs and trying to hide the truth from the public so they can get away with it.

You are totally missing the point. There is no conspiracy, probably just some PR. Very rude PR.

It doesn't really matter that my post was deleted - there's also the part where he said there's a response here, yet none of the points I raised were addressed here.

Quoting Kitkun,

reply 11

The mere fact my post was deleted shows that they do not want to acknowledge this.And the dozens of other posts that haven't been deleted?

Almost none, if not completely none mentioned my points (I have not seen one). They are all rambling about connectivity.

Quoting comanoodle,

reply 10

Or the forums ate it, which sometimes happens with forum software. They haven't deleted your hysterical rants about a conspiracy to silence you, so I think your theory needs a little work.

Well, it's almost certainly not the forum, because it disappeared as the thread was locked.

There is no conspiracy theory, guys. You are just too busy bashing me and being fanboys to see that there is something VERY WRONG with deleting a customer's post when it didn't break any rule and brought up valid points.

If you still think it's a conspiracy theory, then I suggest you reread the post. It attempts to exhaustively list features which most people believe should have been implemented before release, and bugs which are unrelated to the early release, pirates, or even the net architecture. It does not attempt to forge a conspiracy theory.

I didn't reply to this thread to attempt to crucify Stardock using a "conspiracy theory"; I replied here because I was furious over my post being deleted AND having ALL of my points ignored in the so-called "response" to the thread.

In that regard, I also came here to mention that although I have been very hopeful and patient over these issues in this past, I am now very close to just saying screw it and asking for a refund.

Comanoodle, i agree, that's what i was talking about in my other reply here. Lots of bugs unrelated to the connection issues or the rushed updates. For example, i understood from some beta player that the DG deselect/freeze bug was known in the beta, but didn't get fixed in the final version. I know (hope) they will get fixed, but the retail game is far from a "finished game"...

They are all rambling about connectivity.

Yeah...which was the most detrimental issue with Demigod right now. I wouldn't call that rambling.

Almost none, if not completely none mentioned my points.

Not true...here we go

We appreciate the patience of those who are having difficulties. I can assure you that Gas Powered Games and Stardock are working inhuman hours to solve their problems as quickly as possible...

It's cute that you are taking this personally, but sometimes the mods have to clean up the forums when threads start to get repetative.

If you still think it's a conspiracy theory, then I suggest you reread the post.

I did reread your post, and they are all issues that have been states many times before.

They did not "clean up the forums", they deleted ONLY my post. The thread is still there, and I was no the OP.

It's nice that it was said GPG is working too, but what they are working on is unspecified and the patches of the immediate future seem to ignore everything from the GPG side (after it was clarified that the Favor issues are on Stardock's side), such as the many bugs or unimplemented features I mentioned.

Even if we were to assume they ARE working on these now (which is still not okay, because it should have been done BEFORE release - by definition, that is an unfinished game), it doesn't change the fact that my post was deleted, the thread locked and then this supposed response thread ignored everything I mentioned (or at the very least, it did not provide any detail indicating that they are not).

Regardless, you are all missing the main point: They (GPG) are working NOW (maybe..) on features and bugs they should have worked on BEFORE release. Additionally, deleting a seemingly legitimate post and not providing an explanation is extremely bad practice.

As for the "reread my post" quote... it was aimed at getting you to realize there is no conspiracy theory brewing going on. Even if they have been mentioned "many times", I have personally not seen them mentioned even once and that testifies that the connection issues are mentioned much more often. Again, in contrast with the connection issues, these are issues that existed before release and should have been taken care of THEN.

It's cute that you are taking this personally

I can't stress this enough: I am not taking it personally. A post like that should have never been deleted. I would have been just as outraged if it weren't my post.

Read this post, on page 1 of this thread: https://forums.demigodthegame.com/350220/get;2181735

I don't think it's accurate to say that the game works fine for most people. Without going into the non-connection related bugs, it works fine (connects) for me, but when every game has someone else drop, that still ruins my game even if I can look past the other issues.

The game is only playable in custom game mode with favor items turned off right now, after you make sure yourself that everyone involved is going to be able to stay connected by kicking iffy people. That doesn't meet my definition of working fine, though I guess that one niche aspect of the game works if you are patient enough to do it.

Quoting Connatic,

reply 9

I want to clarify - it was not an inflammatory post. It was also not aimed directly at Stardock, but at everyone else in that thread who were yelling at the OP for mentioning the connection issues... except he wasn't. He was complaining about the issues I mentioned.

The only thing even remotely inflammatory was the last line, and it was well-warranted considering all the people attacking the OP in that thread.

I am playing the 0.0108 version now. People joining custom games seems a little better if they are there. However, it seems like there aren't a lot of people surfing to join custom 0.108 games.

However, in 2 out of 3 of my multiplayer matches we had a huge number of disconnects half way thru the game.

Yeah, Blizzard and BNET have set the bar really high. I hope you guys succeed. We need more diversity and competition in the field.

Keep up the hard work, it will pay off.

But in hindsight, yeah you shoulda had a longer massive multiplayer beta.

I just don't understand why companies make their beta's so exclusive, even toward the end. If it's a good game, it will hook people and those that get to beta it, will buy it.

P.S. The games on Gameranger are mostly 0.91 version games and I don't want to play with people who pirated the game.

They (GPG) are working NOW (maybe..) on features and bugs they should have worked on BEFORE release...Again, in contrast with the connection issues, these are issues that existed before release and should have been taken care of THEN.

Should we give them a spanking? You are just stating the obvious now, we all know and understand that very well. But this is what we got. If you don't like it you can get your money back. They have been giving us daily updates on how they are improving this game from it's dismal launch. It's impressed me so I'm sticking with it.

There is no reason to get all flaming hot about this. Most of the crash bugs will probably be fixed with the patch on monday. The rest are minor and I'm pretty sure are in GPG's court.

The first big "No No" when posting on a forming, is to making another thread about why your previous thread/post got locked/deleted. You should be mature about it and PM the mod.

"The change log can be found on Impulse (right click and view the change log). "

That doesn't work and hasn't since beta.

Quoting Trigeminal,

reply 10

Quoting mehoo462,
reply 7

I would love to go easy on you for these issues as I have with the connection stuff. But unlike the connection issues which was a simple miscalcluation, the fact that Attack-move doesn't work is a BUG, the result of a faulty QA process. And these things are extremely difficult to tolerate with patience. (especially as you stand and vehemently defend your QA)

GPG is in charge of that stuff. A GPG dev said in another thread just yesterday that they tracked down the cause of the bugs that cause abilities not to go off and for you to stop chasing. Hopefully we see those soon.

Thats very good news. Been waiting for this realm of fix myself.

Quoting Plavski,

reply 23

"The change log can be found on Impulse (right click and view the change log). "

That doesn't work and hasn't since beta.

Actually, it's View History, and has always worked. At least, when there is actually a change log posted.

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Life in the Demigod lane