It’s hard to believe, given everything Demigod has been through, that it’s only been available for about a month!
This week we’ll be putting the first significant update to Demigod through QA to see if we can get it out this week. v1.01 has all kinds of improvements to make the experience AFTER you get into a game much better.
But there’s some things we’re going to be looking at doing to improve the online experience before you get into a game.
Here are some examples:
1. We’d like to have the connection information dialog also display a performance rating. This is an issue that people are familiar with all the way back to the Total Annihilation and Starcraft days.
2. We’d like to display the skill rating right in the connection dialog. This will take a bit of doing on our part but I think it’s worth doing. That way, you get into a game where it’s 4 buddies ready to keep crushing 4 random guys and you can see what you’re getting yourself into. It will encourage much more even games. Few people like an imbalanced game experience.
3. Net connection quality. Games usually just display ping. But ping isn’t enough. As we’ve seen from the Speedtest thread there are a surprising number of users who have incredibly poor connections (think barely better than 56k modem). Some DSLs have 1megabit downstream but less than 150kilobit upstream. There’s no way that person is going to have a good experience in a 5 on 5 game. And they’ll bring down everyone else. So we need to find a way to calculate that and display it.
4. Karma. Okay, this is a controversial thing to have so we’d love to hear from you guys on the best way to find out if a particular user is a griefer. No system is perfect but I am sure we can think of a way to make it so that people can do something about that.
Connection info in game
Another thing we’d like to do is have a way to easily make people in your games friends so you can grab them later. We’ll be doing a lot of things in the coming months with the friends system. We hadn’t originally intended to deploy the Impulse friends system in Demigod at all as it was being designed as an Impulse Phase 4 feature but it became apparent in beta that we needed some way for people to interact. So you’ll see that sort of thing evolve a lot going forward.
