Demigod brain storming

By Frogboy on May 24, 2009 7:51:56 PM from

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.

+912 Karma | 116 Replies

As far as the karma is concerned, would it be possible to save in-game chat to a logfile, and have a way to submit a given chat log to Stardock, via impulse? I don't know if you have the spare manpower for it, but perhaps it could added into the overlay somehow.

Each game, would record and save the chat log, and would be overwritten at the start of the next game. This way we don't have to rely on trying to "prove" bad behavior through screenshots and video, which as we all know can be easily doctored.

I would like to see the following...:

1. the impulse pop up to show recent news or a click to go to the most recent dev diary. Not everyone checks here so to me this woould be very helpful to inform the masses. This should appear as you logon to the internet.

2. friend join. This is huge!!! Of course I am aware it is coming, but the sooner the better.

3. a pop-up that offers a tutorial/touble shooting guide. This is launched on launch of online or failure to get into a game based on an internal error code or some such. Of course a check bowx to always hide this in the future will be needed, as well. This seems important to encourage ease of access to new players and thus support the community. This would be a great thing to have implemented before the demo.

Also, while I'm on the subjuct, why not make the demo pantheon only. And allow access to only 3 or 4 of the demigods.

Quoting Ceylin,

reply 22

-1 Karma for leaving the game early

+1 Karma for winning a game

+3 Karma for losing a game.

This probably won't work given that matchmaking (may) be using karma to match players. New or bad players may end up with vets, which could lead to some imbalances.

Karma is a great idea.

How about people can give/take away at the end of a game. You should still be able to get karma even if you lose the game, its how you play the game.

In this way you would know who is fun to play against.

Dont track Karma, just track how many times a user has disconnected before the game ended. Allow a threshold at game start and then start counting from there onwards. Dawn of War 2 does this where you can see how often someone has disconnected from a game.

Thanks for all your hardwork Stardock

I'm in Australia, and along with my friends. We're all really looking forward to the code going online that will let us use our local proxy. At the moment having an AU player proxied adds +500ms to his latency. Which kills the experience for a lot of us.

Defense of The Ancients is very popular over here and Demigod goes on sale in our retail stores on the 4th of June. If you can get our proxies online and working before that date. You have an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past and -

Have another go in the Asia Pacific region.

Quoting Dielan,

reply 25

I feel like karma should be used for something more universal than the endless concession debate. I would rather see people who constantly insult and put down their teamates lose karma rather than people who say gg and quit a few minutes before an inevitable defeat.

I agree, karma should not be used the endless concession debate. This may be too big of an idea to try to tackle, but what about a playstyle chart instead of just a karma chart. You always said that you wanted the match making system to be like eharmony for gaming. Here is the idea:

People have 6-8 categories they can fit into. Two of these categories are diametrically opposed. So basically you have the personality/job chart from high school (social psychology), but this one is for gamers. When you log in you put what kind of player you are and what type you like to be matched with. So for example (on a scale of 0-10):

Would you say in game you are:

Quiet and Silent<---------->Talkative

What kind of teammates do you like:

Quiet and Silent<---------->Talkative

Do you like to:

Taunt/Trash Talk<---------->Help others

Do you like teammates who:

Taunt/Trash Talk<---------->Help others

Do you prefer to:

Win<---------->Have Fun

Do you prefer teammates who play to:

Win<---------->Have Fun

This system rates you and places you in a quadrant and tries to match you with people in the quadrant you prefer to play with and who prefer to play with people in your quadrant. The other advantage to this is competitive players will not try to join the groups where "people play to have fun" or they will also have teammates with this style. This really gives a new dimension to the game.

Then post game you have the opportunity to rate people as like or dislike or nothing. The key to this is that if you rate someone as like or dislike, a box pops up asking why. This gives you the familar choices: they were quiet, talkative, taunted, helped, fun, or focused on winning. This is the key. You do not change their karma but add a variable to their personality profile. By giving your input you slightly affect their impulse gamer personality. Also, and here is the other key, you also affect your "wants" or "desires". So the questions you answered about who you want to play are slightly affected, as well. This further refines your profile. Interestingly, this also does not assign a judgement such a good or bad, but rather your perception (like or dislike) of an experience (their playstyle).

I am a med student who has created several studies and one I spent a lot of time on was a personality study. This is also a variant of the simple personality/occupational job profile that is standard fare for social psychologists. I know this is hugely abitious, but it is also extremely sound. This is very doable from a study design idea and seems fairly easy to program as well. What are all your thoughts on it?

Quoting Ceylin,

reply 22

-1 Karma for leaving the game early

+1 Karma for winning a game

+3 Karma for losing a game.

Really, what you need to do is reward players for sticking it out. Can't just award completed games, because most people will stay in for a game they're winning, thats not really all that impressive. Most people you'd want to play with will stick it through no matter what.

Also though, the biggest way to fix this is to have a rating system. That way even if they do rage-quit, your rating gets better. This will matter much more though when there are clan wars. Right now, with random teams its too easy to screw someone over.

pretty good idea except early leaves (first 2-10 minutes) should count as negative 2 karma

Hi, after reading this forum for a while and playing a lot lately i came up with some ideas (that most people i guess already had)

So here is a little summary of what i have in mind right now (this doesn't cover, bug fixing).

Before Game

Skirmish : Sort people by level, connection quality and Karma (or any other method to sort well mannered players from raging savages, i'll come back to this issue later on)
Custom Games : set a color code or points (or levels or .... and so on ...) to help people decide if they want to play against each other or not (this guy is too good/bad/leaver ....), also the presentation of the connection information tab should be an array of that shape :

Let players X Y Z and ME (ME being ... well ... you got it)

X Y Z ME

ME connected connected waiting to

X connected connected connected

Y connected connected attempting

Z connected connected connected

(You can replace the "connected" with a check or a smiley or anything you feel like)

Pantheon : give a button to check "Disable AI in game" for the player to be able to choose if he wants his pantheon game to be with or without AI (IMO pantheon should be AI free (but that's my opinion only, to be discussed)). Also everybody agrees that AI should be enhanced, So please buy a beer to the guy who found the idea of AI moding (letting the players do their own AI is FREAKING GENIUS !!!).

In Game

Let players 10s in the beginning of the game to buy their items before being able to move their demigod.
Like in most Strategy games have an attack button to make the demigod go to a location and attack anything close on the path
Have a Stop or a hold position button
Add a button to Stack actions (if it already exist please let me know !) (like the shift button in many other games)
When i click on an ennemy (grunt or demigod) and this ennemy dies, my demigod will stop moving, it would be nice if instead my demigod would automatically go to the location of this ennemy (ennemy's corpse to be accurate)
Add a vote surrender option (many people already asked for it)
add replays (but as i read it's already planned, cheers)
About Leavers : most of us now had to endure at least once the problem of somebody getting killed and leaving due to emotions, leading the game to ruin by different ways (everybody leaving / the game being easily won as AI is most of the time not as competent as a real player (not always true, i won several games 3v1 for instance (not trying to brag) and so on ....)
1. First, let players the possibility to switch side (3v1 becomming 2v2 for instance) or in a more general way if the game is not balanced due to level difference in players ability, a good player could switch with a more challenged one in order to even things
2. Most of the time when a player rage quits, we are able to feel it (never 100% sure) but still we are more or less pretty confident about our guess, when a player dies twice in the first 5 minutes and quits ... well he might be a rage quitter, and when a player leaves while being on a 6 kill streak and no death ... well ... i personnally will think he most likely had a connection problem.

The point being that if a human can guess it, so can an algorithm (i am currently a student in computer science in the field of research in computer science (meaning that i eat algorithms on a daily basis) (if you have jobs opening i am interested ))

Little Example layer A just left at 5min32 while having a score of 0-2, leaving 8 seconds after his second death

well it's not to hard to write a little piece of code recognising it and giving this player a -x score on his karma score, where x would be for example the probability of the player rage quitting (here x would be pretty high), this way the algorithm if written cleverly could really make a difference (writen cleverly means take in account lots and lots of parameters)

Once again this is based on probabilities so it's by construction not 100% accurate, but it's FAR better than nothing.

After Game

Ranking and stat accuracy is i guess very important for many people, it's also important to sort people by Level, So why not add a ranking summary at the end of each game ?

Also first favor item should be free ... to make favor points reset less painful.

Well, that's it folks, i guess i am out of ideas for now, if you liked this post i am glad ; if not please make it better.

Did the problem with saving Favor Points ever get fixed? I continue to play and my favor points are never saved.

oddly, mine have started saving again.

Karma's a funny thing. I don't know how you'll avoid situations where people just kick folks with less than X karma... or some other randomly objectifying characteristic.

I don't think there are enough TRUE griefers on line to justify implementing such a potentially harmful system.

The current plague of "rage quitting" stems mostly from the fact that there's no valid way to resign.

I do not like the idea of a karma system because it is easily exploitable by people that just want to be jerks. Then for the people who can't get enough, they will have jerks kicking them. I think the in game "personal ban list" is where we should leave this type of thing at. You can get the job done and it doesnt publicly display biased or misconstrued opinions.

Take out the names from the list and the connect stuff for at least a minute. People seem to look right away, 5 seconds into the connection, "well, someone isn't connected yet", leave game. This is the primary reason I believe it takes FOREVER to get a pantheon game going.

Also, is there code to where a person does not play with the same pantheon teammate over and over again? It seems, that if you can see names, you know when you got your buddy playing with you on your side. This is another reason i think names should be removed, at lteast for pantheon.

I havn't used it in a while, but the eject button is still available in the connection screen during pantheon games. It use to work and you would be able to force a 2v1 and such, just bringining it up.

Karma: treat it like they do in LBP (Little Big Planet) .. although in LBP you have the hearting, could have a similar thing however for rating .. after a match would be cool to have a small window with the players, their scores, their ranks, and some stars to rate them ..

Overall: I think heaps more info is needed.. However, I think you should stop putting these things into these overlay popups .. Or make a better popups .. Honestly i dont recall ever NOT hitting the connection info window, would be ncie for it to be open by default ... but then I ask myself why doesnt this stuff get integrated into the lobby? and for panth games, a lobby should be added.

IMHO I think the popup technique for all this stuff is a little sketchy .. Most of this info should be easier to get, currently its like I always have to repeat my steps just to see the standard info

-move around some boxes since they all popup most of the itme on top of eachother

-click the windows to expand their info

-resize the conenction info so it actually shows more then 4 players

-move the IRC chat since it overalays diff windows at diff times ...

Just seems like a chore .. would be sweet if we had even just some persistant windows .. why not make room in the HUD for the IRC window to sit all the time.. or the connection info

how is this going to work?

will it be measured on amount of kills, favour, assists or wins and loses?

what happens if a new player cannot gain in skill rating?

I am wondering. If karma's aim is to give a value to enjoyement of playing Demigod with a given person, why not to give negative Karma to disconnecting people (but less than to quitters)?

why not to give negative Karma to disconnecting people (but less than to quitters)?

you cant prove the difference between a disconnection and a rage quit. even if they are raging hard, u still cant know, unless they do admit it themselves that they are going to leave.

Don't put karma!!! Terrible terrible idea. To each his own. If you don't want to play against someone then just leave the game or have him leave the game.

Quoting Ceylin,

reply 22

-1 Karma for leaving the game early

While I appreciate that these changes are just stardocks side of the code, implementing a lot of the ideas simply isnt going to work until the game is more stable and has the network code tweaked/optimized. The above example is an obvious example of something that you just cant do when people are freezing when going into games, and whole sides are crashing out mid game.

Skill rating is likewise meaningless when so many of the games are decided by who drops connection first.

Net connection quality I agree would be useful, but I fear it is going to make the game unplayable for many people who are excluded from games for their "poor" connection the same way as idiots are making games with "ping>100=kick".

I suppose if theres improvements that Stardock can make that aren't dependant on game stability then that would work, but so far just about everythig I see is going to be skewed by network and stability issues.

i am living in germany and got a good connection with 16mbit down and 1mbit up. thats 100kb upload per second. i know that in other countries there are way higher down- and uploadrates, but in germany my connection is one of the better ones.

altough i have 100kb upload i get dropped out of games but at the same time i am able to perfectly play battlefield 2 with 64 people... or any other game. i know, your game is special, somehow.... with synchronized people... i dont understand it, but if you say so...

i really think you should optimize the netcode, cause you will exclude a lot of people this way.

at speedtest.net germany is ranked 37th at upload speed with an incredible 0.86 Mb/s i think germany will not be able to play demigod for the most part

i really like your game and i´ve got no regrets having bought it, but its very frustrating that i cant play it right even though i have a good (and expensive) connection (in relation to germany).

OK! Finally DG is delivering the goods and boy those goods are good!

The game really needs Voice Comms bad, I have ventrillo so frankly i'm ok but our team work is telling against non vent guys - put voice comms in the game for the teams and it makes it fairer as well as hopefully making a better team experience for both.

Tals

Here is why a karma system would never work:

I think most people quit a game early because they think the outcome has already been decided. It is not fun to play a strategy game if you think there is no strategy that will win you the game, so people quit.

Now you want to motivate these people to do something that is not fun (stay in the game) to get some reward (getting favor points, avoid punishment etc). There is a word for doing something you don't neccessary want to do, in exchange for a reward: Work. And from my experience, if you force people to work in order to avoid punishment, they will not play along.

Here is what I think will happen:

Players will stay in the Game, but leave their computer. They are going to read a book or something while their character is sitting in their base, doing nothing. Other people will still play, but not seriously. A: "Grab that flag, buddy", B:"Why, the game is over anyway"

No matter if all players continue to play the game or not: If the game has already been decided, both the winning and the losing side will play a game that is not fun.

Many players will not know what 'karma' is.

Many players will not care about Karma.

The few people who do care about Karma (I imagine this minority of demigod players makes the majority of people who read or post on these forums) will go crazy on the boards because they somehow lost karma and think they do not "deserve" it.

Some griefers will find some way to trick players into losing karma.

I think it is wiser to concentrate on how to improve the game _after_ a player has quit the game as well as to increase hope of a comeback.

Distribute gold/experience in relation to the number of your teammates and your enemies.
Give gold and experience on demigod kills in relation to skill difference between the two players (good player kill bot => almost no exp/gold etc. ).
Allow surrender.
In pantheon OR in skirmish games, I would even think about random events (like in galciv2). Please not the OR in the previous sentence!

Quoting Invisible_XXI,

reply 21

...

first, you got it mixed up. 1mbit=1000kb/s=125kB/s=0.125MB/s

and i live in Slovakia, got DSL with 1mbit upload(10mbit down) and i didnt have problem - ever. i could connect to players with forwarded ports even on first day of demigod.

you can try to scan your PC for spyware/malware(this helps sometimes)

http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html http://www.kaspersky.com/trials

Quoting Azrailx,

reply 8

Quoting Ceylin, reply 22-1 Karma for leaving the game early

+1 Karma for winning a game

+3 Karma for losing a game.

Really, what you need to do is reward players for sticking it out. Can't just award completed games, because most people will stay in for a game they're winning, thats not really all that impressive. Most people you'd want to play with will stick it through no matter what.

Also though, the biggest way to fix this is to have a rating system. That way even if they do rage-quit, your rating gets better. This will matter much more though when there are clan wars. Right now, with random teams its too easy to screw someone over.

pretty good idea except early leaves (first 2-10 minutes) should count as negative 2 karma

Is it cool if I just join a game and go afk til my team loses?

The Forums Are Now Closed!

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

Demigod brain storming