I dont think that demigod is DEaD

What things do you think need to be "fixed" as opposed to things you wish would be added?

The only issue that I'm aware of that needs to be addressed is the problem in pantheon where players will quit when they see who they are playing and leave the remaining players with unbalanced teams. That will take some doing obviously but other than that, I'm not aware of any serious "bugs" or "handicaps" in the game.

This has got to be the first time I've seen a top 10 best selling game with a growing online community have to fight to say it's not "dead".

BUG: Demigods and minions ignore previous orders in favor of automatic behaviors. For instance:

You tell your demigod to run, it turns around to whack a creep that just hit it.

You tell your priest to back off, it turns around and starts chasing an enemy demigod.

You tell your Rook to auto-attack something, you have to keep clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking because if you don't it turns around and starts attacking something else. Instead your hero just stands there doing nothing because you are stuck in this loop between it doing what it wants to, with you constantly interrupting it, trying to get it to do what you want it to do.

And so on and so forth.

BUG: Demigod crashes out of game lobby after kicking people. This happens often and I've sent you data dumps over this specific issue.

BUG: Game splits irrevocably and somewhat randomly. The net code is still too aggressive about dropping people. Yes, the connection is otherwise solid (I can be right in the middle of a VoIP conversation while a game INSTANTLY splits)

BUG: pathfinding around corners is ridiculous. Demigods and minions get stuck and give up. More mindless clicking clicking clicking needed to correct it.

BUG: replays don't work. I can't fathom how a feature that was such an integral part of the Supcom/FA experience was left broken and never addressed during the beta period.

Yes, all of these issues are in GPG's domain.

Can I get some clarification on this pls.

You say that the biggest reason u get weird matchups is due to people quitting cos they want to do premades.

What percentage of unbalanced teams would u say is due to:

1) Premade team quitting.

2) The system making unfair teams on purpose (due to ranking etc).

The follow-up question to this is:

Would you say that if:

1) Premade Quitting was eliminated by introducing a Premades Only Pantheon (and also stopping players from seeing who is in the connection queue)

and

2) The unbalanced team matchmaking system is removed

.. then 80%+ of Pantheon games would result in equal number of players on both sides?

Only times I've had those first bugs, shadow, is when I miss click. Otherwise they have always followed my orders very specifically. Now minions won't allows chase a Demigod even if you tell them to attack it but it moves outside their normal range. That could be fixed.

Whenever you use an "instant" item or skill, it resets your behavior so that if you are next to an enemy you'll auto-attack instead of continue running like you might be doing.

regabond

Only times I've had those first bugs, shadow, is when I miss click. Otherwise they have always followed my orders very specifically. Now minions won't allows chase a Demigod even if you tell them to attack it but it moves outside their normal range. That could be fixed.

Whenever you use an "instant" item or skill, it resets your behavior so that if you are next to an enemy you'll auto-attack instead of continue running like you might be doing.

It's not just miss clicks. What part of clicking way outside of the battle (you should know this habit from supcom/FA) is subject to interpretation? I didn't mention it occurring after skill or item usage because that's more annoying then "buggy."

Very good list _Shadow!

Ignore the posts that are simply "DG iz ded", looks to be a phase at the moment on this forum. The sales tell the real story.

I've got to admit I have had some of the issues Shadow has mentioned. There also seem to be rare odd occurances where clicking wide open spaces does not initiate a response at all from the DG. Both me and a friend have experienced the same thing at one point or another. I can think of twice tonight on Mandala that I had to click for a good 15 seconds to get my DG to move. Perhaps this is the conflict shadow mentions between what I tell it to do and what it wants to do?

I have also noticed the DG stopping and turning to start autoattacking grunts, as mentioned above...

Also, not sure if this is a bug or the way they're programmed, but I've noticed the AI standing completely still at some points in the game. Closeish to a battle, not low on health or mana, not responding to anything for a short period of time. Am I missing some design intent behind this or is it an issue? I'm not sure why any character would ever stand still (except perhaps on a flag). That's probably a tricky thing to answer though.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 1

What things do you think need to be "fixed" as opposed to things you wish would be added?

The only issue that I'm aware of that needs to be addressed is the problem in pantheon where players will quit when they see who they are playing and leave the remaining players with unbalanced teams. That will take some doing obviously but other than that, I'm not aware of any serious "bugs" or "handicaps" in the game.

This has got to be the first time I've seen a top 10 best selling game with a growing online community have to fight to say it's not "dead".

If you check my post history there are a few very important issues missing. AI DG farming issue by hunting massive exp/gold from exploting poor AI, Ping indicator on its own is useless measure in lobby. No hotkey to cast ability on self. No easy way of casting ability to a specific DG when the screen is jam packed with 3 different DGs including your own overlayed on top of each other. DGs being hard to see sometimes without highlighting. Negative spiral zero sum gameplay that makes comeback almost impossible.

Majority of Patheon problems I have experienced is not due to people who quit when they see who they play with. It's that the game screen takes ages, more than a minute in cases and won't actually proceed until someone quit due to impatience. I have this happened to me for 2 days that I was able to only have a game successfully loaded 2 out of 15 times. A significant majority of failures also involve excessive delay in finding players and attempt to connect; when one player didn't make the connection window, the algorithm takes 60 seconds to decide the player can't make it before replacing another. The process repeats and that's another 1 minute. It is not hard to think why people just hit cancel. Another issue is that even when connection info shows everyone being connected to each othter, there are incidents that the game loading screen won't launch. This, combined with frequent lock ups at game loading screen, mark the fact that Patheon is simply broken. This is not just me, since I used to be able to play Patheon without problems before 3v3 was in.

Bug: Ocasionally the fog of death is not removed after reviving. I have heard numerous people had experienced this before. I have not myself. This however ruins the game for them and their team. It is not possible to play when everything is greyed and that costed me a game today when my teammate was unable to do anything.

Well personally the pantheon just erks me but as you stated it will take some time, here lately it seems that the online play has been messing up, I havent been able to play as much as of this week. I dont know what this has to do with, is it me or my comp? I didnt seem to have a problem, I think sometimes people just love to BITCH! and thats that, theres nothing that you could ever do to stop people from bitching, cause once you fix what they are gryping about, then they find something else to BITCH about and so on and so on and so on. Well I will keep my bitchn to a minimum cause there is plenty of that going on around the forums, I guess my biggest problem is that we get the multiplayer bugs fixed, stability I played a game on pantheon today, against 2comp vs 2 humans, of course it ended up being a 2comp vs 1human+1comp=0( Is Demigod going to stay like it is as far as like um being able to play pretty much anyone in the world? if you get what I mean, like I dont know how to put it, like during the day in the US you play with ppl on the other side of the world, and nite here you play with americans, is this goign to stay like this? I'm not much of a writer so please bair with me.

Im not trying to be one of the ones that come in here and down the game, but i am going to make a list of things that I find need some fine tuning, so I can be part of the solution, because this is a really good game, once it's been polished, I know patience is a virtue and I wish god that he would give me some sometims, lol Keep it up and I will post and repost so that I stay informed about the MIGHTY DEMIGOD, cause I just love the game.

This is an age old debate though.

There are bugs and there are features.

Someone saying you shouldn't get gold from killing an AI Demigod.

My advice is to try to use some precision in what features you want versus what is actually a "bug".

It's not like I am coding on the game so it's not a matter of being defensive about "my code" here. I'm just saying that what I've seen over the years is that when game communities (and each one is different) start to treat every whim of theirs as a "bug" to be fixed that developers inevitably start to ignore them.

One of the reasons why Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire have been so successful is because those communities have developed in such a way that features versus true bugs are articulated very specifically and as a result, the developers will participate in the forums and add to their own "fogbugz" lists things they find in the forums on top of their official lists.

But on Demigod, I fear the community is evolving in a different direction. I read these forums and I see subjective feature requests being treated as "bugs". For example, a guy just moments ago created a post demanding that GPG "fix" the preist upgrades because when "noobs" buy that upgrade early it can cause the one team to lose. That's not a bug and is a perfect type of post that discourages developers from reading through the forums.

My advice is freely given, you guys can certainly ignore it. We can debate how things "should be" in game development utopia but I'm just telling you what I've seen over the years.

Stardock and Gas Power Games Rocks Keep up the good work Frogboy!! I love how much support your company buts into these games!! You are doing a great job!!!

Little bug will be taken off while they add new features....

As Frogboy say, pantheon is the BIG bug present for now that must have priority.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 10

This is an age old debate though.

There are bugs and there are features.

Someone saying you shouldn't get gold from killing an AI Demigod.

My advice is to try to use some precision in what features you want versus what is actually a "bug".

Well this "feature" is ruining pub multiplayer due to bugs that are causing disconnects. No matter what we call it, niether have been fixed.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 10

It's not like I am coding on the game so it's not a matter of being defensive about "my code" here. I'm just saying that what I've seen over the years is that when game communities (and each one is different) start to treat every whim of theirs as a "bug" to be fixed that developers inevitably start to ignore them.

One of the reasons why Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire have been so successful is because those communities have developed in such a way that features versus true bugs are articulated very specifically and as a result, the developers will participate in the forums and add to their own "fogbugz" lists things they find in the forums on top of their official lists.

But on Demigod, I fear the community is evolving in a different direction. I read these forums and I see subjective feature requests being treated as "bugs". For example, a guy just moments ago created a post demanding that GPG "fix" the preist upgrades because when "noobs" buy that upgrade early it can cause the one team to lose. That's not a bug and is a perfect type of post that discourages developers from reading through the forums.

My advice is freely given, you guys can certainly ignore it. We can debate how things "should be" in game development utopia but I'm just telling you what I've seen over the years.

Are you saying developers start to ignore balance suggestions? Because it does seem that way. What have we gotten, an Erebus and Heart of Life nerf? I have seen balance lists around here for "features", there was one that went over every item explaining why 80% of them were useless and even showed how they could fix them. The community has offered tons of feedback but doesn't get much response. I think that's one reason why people are saying Demigod is dying. I know you do tons of stuff for Stardock + connectivity Frogboy, but what's GPG doing(besides setting up a a punishment system which is a bad idea)? I guess they're too busy with the 2 new Demigods?

I am saying that all forums I've been on developers will stop reading them if the signal to noise ratio gets beyond a certain threshold. That's all.

I can't speak for GPG other than saying I am in constant contact with them. Right now, they're focusing on finishing of v1.1 and the demo. We are discussing the additional demigods with them on a daily basis as well.

I hope the demo isn't multiplayer only.

BUG: Demigods and minions ignore previous orders in favor of automatic behaviors. For instance:

You tell your demigod to run, it turns around to whack a creep that just hit it.

You tell your priest to back off, it turns around and starts chasing an enemy demigod.

You tell your Rook to auto-attack something, you have to keep clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking clicking because if you don't it turns around and starts attacking something else. Instead your hero just stands there doing nothing because you are stuck in this loop between it doing what it wants to, with you constantly interrupting it, trying to get it to do what you want it to do.

And so on and so forth.

I think this is actualy a bug rather than a feature or a gripe. I do know what you are saying frogboy because there are a lot of people complaining about non issues out there but I think that there are also some things that do need to be fixed.

This game did seem to start dieing while I was playing a few weeks ago. Every week there would be less and less games open to the point where at around 7pm PST there would be a maximum of 5 custom games open. But it died in my eyes when I couldn't finish one game with my clanmates because the game would crash/dc 5-10minutes in.

Waiting on 1.1 to see if this game will ever be worth trying again.

And why did they take down the Demigod Server Stats page? It was nice seeing how many people were online.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 14

I am saying that all forums I've been on developers will stop reading them if the signal to noise ratio gets beyond a certain threshold. That's all.

I can't speak for GPG other than saying I am in constant contact with them. Right now, they're focusing on finishing of v1.1 and the demo. We are discussing the additional demigods with them on a daily basis as well.

The Demigod community is still in infancy, and it may take a couple months for the stable community to find itself whilst the whiners leave to nag other game forums. Hopefully you guys stick around long enough to see that happening and the community mature into what we all want it to become.

A lot of people here do seem to be making suggestions and bug reports, and not in a whining way but honestly just to bring these ideas to the table. It isn't (always) to be negative, but their attempt to help the game grow. I guess not everyone is like that though (clearly), we can only hope they get leave sooner rather than later if they aren't going to change.

NoW^StiL ReY: They took that down because it was purely the beta server stats, and people kept quoting the number on there as the games online population size when in fact there are several servers running. Having people repeatedly report fallacies in their whiny quest to declare DG as dead caused them to (rightfully) take the stats down, possibly untill they can get all servers stats up together.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 1

What things do you think need to be "fixed" as opposed to things you wish would be added?

The only issue that I'm aware of that needs to be addressed is the problem in pantheon where players will quit

So basically you're saying there are no bugs in DG, at current time? Really?

I agree with Frogboy that a lot of people keep saying things need to be "fixed" when the issue is a design decision rather than a technical problem. Some of the people complaining about design decisions need to be more polite and decent in their posts imo.

There are some bugs out there besides the pantheon ones though, although I understand that fixing the pantheon should come first. One such bug that comes to mind is that if you cast a ring of fire as torch bearer, then cast a second one while the first one is still burning (by reducing your cooldown via flags/items), they will both end the moment the first one ends.

About connections though, I don't play pantheon myself. I'm just a custom games guy, but I haven't had any really bad connection issues since the latest round of patches.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 1

What things do you think need to be "fixed" as opposed to things you wish would be added?

The only issue that I'm aware of that needs to be addressed is the problem in pantheon where players will quit when they see who they are playing and leave the remaining players with unbalanced teams. That will take some doing obviously but other than that, I'm not aware of any serious "bugs" or "handicaps" in the game.

This has got to be the first time I've seen a top 10 best selling game with a growing online community have to fight to say it's not "dead".

would be nice to add an option in path and skirm for premades and the type of game you want t play(conquest, etc). I think thats some of the drops cause when i do path if its dominate i will leave. i just want to do conquest.

also in slaughter mode the cital should be unattackable if the object is to kill the other dgs 30 times well thats what should win you the game.

I think the Citadel has more health and fires at you in other game modes.

Frog, do you know if anyone's working on the in-game ping spiking glitch?

GPG is investigating it why some people are experiencing that.

Anyway, we've gone off topic so I'm closing this.

Not to mention, a top selling PC game having people argue that it might be dying because there's fewer games open in the lobby since the connectivity got fixed makes my head hurt.

Before the connectivity got fixed, there were lots of open games because it took forever for a game to get started. Now, people jump into custom games.

The metric we use are the number of different players who play the game each day and the total # of games played each day and that has been steadily going up.

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