I’m back.

The team randomizer would be nothing more than a novelty if there was a team automatch.

Clan support and a 'working' friends application are essential to the longevity of this game. This is a 'social' multiplayer game, yet it's extremely difficult to keep in contact with many of the people you come across, unless everyone relies on third party applications. If the majority of people that PuG now had an easier time of forming clans and keeping in contact with people on their friends list, the competitiveness of this game would skyrocket because there would be a lot more 'team' games. Following closely on the heels of clan support, should be 'team' vs. 'team' matches, as there will finally be enough teams to compete with each other. Randomizing groups is nice for PuGs, but premades are what will keep this game alive. Once all that has been accomplished then worry about implementing 'meaningful' stats. Right now stats are part of the problem and not the solution; sure they need to be fixed, but they are definitely not the #1 priority.

Mod support is nice, but as someone mentioned previously, a lot of people will not use a mod that has not been approved by SD/GPG, and that's going to take away resources which are very limited. Not too mention, we are a relatively small community and I seriously doubt that many players have coded a day in their life. Realistically, mods from the community will be slow to arrive and will come in small quantity. Mod support is nice, but the game needs to have a strong following before it's really beneficial.

Demigods, maps, and items are not something to be pushed aside! If SD/GPG wants to keep their current players interested in the game they better throw them a carrot on a consistent basis. If GPG wants their player base to become uninterested in the game and not recommend it to their friends, then pushing back releasing new content in the game is likely the best way to do it. As it stands, the game has almost been out for 3 months and the community is becoming extremely irritated at the fact that no new items, maps, and demigods have been introduced, let alone mentioned to any extent.

Lastly, bug fixes. Prioritize them based on how heavily they impact the game. I'm not a fan of the pathing or the AI, and I think both of those could use a good overhaul. Because pathing and AI affect everyone pretty much equally, it's hard to say they are game breaking, but they sure can be annoying.

I was quoted from another thread but I'll repeat it here, when you look at the current rankings it's all people with 90% and higher win rates on top. Honestly tracking the games better would have a minimal impact on the rating system because the way to the top isn't by quality of games but by quantity.

Until the best players start playing each other the whole experience system isn't really going to work and recording any one particular game (such as a big win vs. a high rated team) isn't really a major concern. Please don't place stat tracking above matchmaking.

2) Stats are stupid. Don't bother with stats, wipe them clean, take them down till you DO have a budget to fix them. Stats prove nothing in this game, and no matter what you do with them, they probably will only be a guestimate of how good somone is, or how frequent they play. It can't take into consideration all factors, such as how good their opponent was. The best WC players weren't judged by their "ranking" they were judged by competeing on live tv. Tournaments that take NO resources but community support and are an accurate judge of "skill".

This isn't right though, rankings are an excellent way to measure player skill when good players fight each other. Works fine for chess, quadradius, warcraft 3, WoW, and a number of other games.

Modding is going to be more important. Clan support and such is only important to a small minority of elite players, you should just have unranked games. Mod's however are the best thing you can do to a game. I've gotten bored of playing the same 8 maps with the same 8 demigods. Give us mod support and in no time we'll have plenty of new stuff to try. We were told we'd have new demigods by now but it clearly isnt happening. Mods first then you can do whatever you want.

My 2 cents is that clan support needs to come before modding. Right now I am not playing due to the fact that I cannot join my friend in a pantheon match and if we choose to play customs we have to deal with rage quitting and and all the dregs of the community.

I'd like to come back and play over having new mods and the same old issues. Most mods are going to be custom game mods anyway, so we would (likely) have the same issues we have now with more maps floating around.

I'm very eager to see modding enter the game, being that I am a modder myself, but not at the expense of playability.

You don't build the top of the building before the foundations, nor do you stick bells and whistles on your games before ensuring they work right. At the very base of Multiplayer is connectivity and ensuring that works correctly. Until you sort out the poor connections and constant spiking issues everything else is just worthless.

Bloating the game with even more options while connectivity is shakey will only serve to exacerbate the situation and make it even worse.

Disclaimer: Yes, i am one of those lag spiking players eagerly awaiting the issue to be fixed.

Welcome back

For me :

1. Modding
2. Replay
3. More maps !!

Team randomizer sounds really good too but it's more icing on the cake, I think we don't really need it.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 19

I can say, the game NEVER crashes on us here and the reason GPG hasn't already fixed it is that it doesn't happen there either.

You just need to check custom games . You will see then, how lobby can mess up ONLY because some player changed his lobby slot !! And if someone leaves lobby, there is a chance, game will crash for EVERYONE who was in lobby this time.

But the truth is, if game finally starts, it works fine for me. I'm not counting here lags, hanging while "waiting for players" / map loading or game freeze (but in-game chat works) for all players, so only ctrl+alt+del works to exit the game (when you press "end game", nothing will happen).

So yeah, maybe I don't have (never had) random crashes in game, but still see SO MANY problems here .

This isn't right though, rankings are an excellent way to measure player skill when good players fight each other. Works fine for chess, quadradius, warcraft 3, WoW, and a number of other games.

It is right. There is no accurate way to measure how good a player is by the games hes played because it cannot take into account all factors, especially if were counting "custom games" in the ranks. The moment you start letting people choose their opponents stats mean nothing.

And no, they mean nothing in wc3. The best players of WC3 don't hardly even log into battle.net, same with starcraft. There is NO better way to determine top ranking players than tournaments.

Quoting WickedBear,

reply 9

It is right. There is no accurate way to measure how good a player is by the games hes played because it cannot take into account all factors, especially if were counting "custom games" in the ranks. The moment you start letting people choose their opponents stats mean nothing.

And no, they mean nothing in wc3. The best players of WC3 don't hardly even log into battle.net, same with starcraft. There is NO better way to determine top ranking players than tournaments.

Alright, you didn't mention custom games at all in the post I read. I agree that custom games shouldn't be ranked.

The way people prepare for WoW tournaments is playing ranked ladder games. WoW's ranking system may not determine who the absolute best player is, but it's still precise enough to match those tournament players against difficult teams that help them hone their skills. None of those guys have 100% win rates on the ladders or even 90% win rates, they're generally down around 50%.

Stats can be an extremely useful matching and rating tool and the fact that some guys on top of the ladder may not log in frequently has nothing to do with their skill level. If that kind of thing bothers you then you should be arguing in favor of decaying stats and short ladder seasons, not against stats in general.

Stats can be an extremely useful matching and rating tool and the fact that some guys on top of the ladder may not log in frequently has nothing to do with their skill level. If that kind of thing bothers you then you should be arguing in favor of decaying stats, not against stats in general.

I don't really care whos on top of a ladder. I've never been point centric in games because it defeats the purpose of what a competitive player should be doing: learning. Ladders don't mean much because of this. The best WC3 players hardly login to battle.net and spend most of their day training with their team. The only thing the ladder ever helped with was identifying players who could get a free ticket to tournaments.

I'm not AGAINST stats per se, but I am against it being any kind of a priority when the fundamental requirements to make it work aren't even in the game at a basic level.

I REALLY hope these kind of posts resonate because it's true. There's no system in place which would make 100% accurate stats meaningful. In fact stats really just reinforce the worst of current behavior. They promote pub stomping, then they make pub stomping visible to normal players who then avoid said pub stompers which results in the pub stompers having to play against the newest of players who don't understand the system. It's a cycle that makes itself worse and worse.

Also please put the matchmaking ahead of modding. I realize this game wouldn't exist if the genre hadn't been started by a Warcraft 3 modder, but WC3 had a functioning ladder and larger playerbase when modding became popular. I think modding has a chance to splinter this community and drive off players if it's implemented before the team features are implemented.

Players who are sick of getting stomped will choose weird mods that no one is good at and no one will agree on which mods are fun, so you'll have more and more reasons more and more players are unwilling to play with each other.

Btw. I like the idea of the randomize teams feature, but ONLY if this is relatively easy to do. Honestly I think that promoting skirmish play would be a simpler way of doing this. What if you just renamed skirmish to something like 'quick match' or something that sounds more serious than skirmish, and restricted the game type to conquest?

I think the most important thing to do at the moment is work on the matchmaking. Games with a seamless matchmaking experience (The Halo series comes to mind - they do a pretty damn good job) tend to do well, and I think that would be a driving factor behind Demigod's sucess.

Group / Clan play is vital - it needs to be easy to join up with your friends and play Pantheon / Skirmish. Of course, Pantheon and Skirmish need to be able to support group play - this means a matchmaking system that will match groups vs. groups and single players with other single players. I don't think there needs to be two sets of matchmaking as has been suggested (team and single). Simply make the chances of a premade encountering a group of randoms low - basically, premades won't get matched against a team of randoms unless there is no one else in the queue.

This is coming from someone who basically never plays with friends (I've played a couple custom compstomps with friends) - I think part of the problem is that it is too difficult to group up with / communicate with people you play with outside of games. I'd probably have added people I have played with in Pantheon if a party system (ala Xbox Live) was in the game. Even though I don't play with friends / in premades regularly, I think this is the number one issue.

VOIP goes hand in hand with this, IMO. If the game had integrated VOIP support it would be much easier to play with other random players (provided they have a mic). It is irritating to have to rely on Vent or other programs to voice chat.

Bug fixes / balance would be next on my list. There are a number of bugs documented on the forums (High Priest bug, Erebus potion bug, Sludge Slinger etc) that need to be taken care of, and some balance issues (HP / mitigation stacking, for one) that need to be addressed. It's unrealistic for the game to be bug free, but some of the more glaring ones should be fixed.

After that I would nail down the stats.

All of this needs to be above new demigods / maps / items and modding IMO. New content is cool, but I think it is far more important to have a solid matchmaking system and relatively bug free game first.

Don't get me wrong and think I am bashing the game - I love it. But I think all of the things I mentioned are "backbone" issues that need to get fixed before new content is added.

Quoting WickedBear,

reply 13

That's my problem with it. I already wait 5-15 minutes to start a game, with more options to slow the game from starting instead of fixing the REAL issues at hand, I may be waiting 20-30 minutes for a game.

The reason you wait 5-15 minutes to start a game is because you're playing premade, and people either know this when they see your game up and don't bother joining, or they figure it out when they join your game after looking up your players. There are numerous instances of people stating on the board and within the game lobby that they try and join games to get on the host's team to improve their chances of not facing an arranged team - that is the reason games take so long to fill.

It is also a LOT of fun to get with a group of 6 or 8 friends and play a random teams game; this was a very popular game mode in Dawn of War.

Without proper matchmaking and being forced to wait even longer, I would probably quit demigod.

No, you won't. The game is too fun, and you would keep playing.

I'm not saying that there doesn't need to be improved matchmaking capabilities - we definitely need improved matchmaking capabilities so that arranged teams can compete against one another - that doesn't mean the game experience can't be improved for the majority of players who aren't playing on arranged teams.

"Actually, if it's based off of the modified Supreme Commander engine that Demigod uses, then it's requires will be slightly above Demigods."

(quote doesn't work in Chrome)

Well, that's not true is it?

SupCom has like 2000 times more units crawling around than Demigod.

I'm also guessing it doesn't faff around with 'real-world physics' that Chris Taylor loves so much.

eg if Reg snipes and on the way, the arrow hits another demigod, pretty sure it doesn't take that into account... unless of course it does but it just doesn't do anything with that data.

Imagine 10000 billion units firing projectiles everywhere and the system kept a track of each of them at evey single pixel of it's flight path.

That's one of the reasons why u needed a supercomputer from the year 2500 to run it properly.

SupCom 2 will deffo require a supercomputer from the year 3000 as posted above.

And SC2 will prolly run on a Asus Netbook and it will have about 2 billion players.

The reason you wait 5-15 minutes to start a game is because you're playing premade, and people either know this when they see your game up and don't bother joining, or they figure it out when they join your game after looking up your players. There are numerous instances of people stating on the board and within the game lobby that they try and join games to get on the host's team to improve their chances of not facing an arranged team - that is the reason games take so long to fill.

The reason I wait 5-15 minutes is because people can't play pantheon, or care about their stupid stats. Being a "Premade" is not the underlying issue, it's broken matchmaking. Putting a randomization option while, probably not difficult to implement, takes time away from fixing the REAL underlying issues.

No, you won't. The game is too fun, and you would keep playing.

Yeah, actually I will. I havn't been able to find a challenging game in a week and a half now. Anyone with decent stats leaves my games after they see im 97% even though that means nothing. I'll give them till the next major patch update to fix the situation.

quoting post

1. I’d like to see a randomize teams in custom games. That is, players press a button and when the game starts, the teams are mixed up. There is definitely a growing issue about “pre-mades” vs. “random”. We will have to talk to Gas Powered Games to see what can be done without blowing up the budget but I think this is an issue that is needed.

definitely NO

no one will use this option anyway, if i want to play with my friends that will be, and even if i play solo sometimes still i don want mixed demigods/players, dont want annoying morons in my team etc etc

this is a total waste of time

2. I also think that clans/groups are probably going to need to be moved up ahead of mod support. Currently v1.2 is looking at modding as a major focus. But I’m curious to hear what you guys think about this because I think modding, as important as it is, may not be as important as making it easier for groups to play together. The pre-made issue wouldn’t be so obnoxious if it were pre-mades vs. pre-mades. Again, the trick here is to do this without blowing up the budget.

yeah told since the start that like every game the social part is the most important one

even the best game in the world sucks if you cant play with your friends

i second putting groups in higher priority

Quoting WickedBear,

reply 9

This isn't right though, rankings are an excellent way to measure player skill when good players fight each other. Works fine for chess, quadradius, warcraft 3, WoW, and a number of other games.
It is right. There is no accurate way to measure how good a player is by the games hes played because it cannot take into account all factors, especially if were counting "custom games" in the ranks. The moment you start letting people choose their opponents stats mean nothing.

that is ABSOLUTELY FALSE

even if i choose always my opponent the ranking after a bit will reflect the right value for each one

if my opponent is a noob i will beat him, i will go up in ranking and he will go down and so on

you probably have no clue how the rankings work, but being custom matters for maybe 1% of the your rating

Quoting ddd888,

reply 19

that is ABSOLUTELY FALSE

even if i choose always my opponent the ranking after a bit will reflect the right value for each one

if my opponent is a noob i will beat him, i will go up in ranking and he will go down and so on

you probably have no clue how the rankings work, but being custom matters for maybe 1% of the your rating

I'm in & out of the top 100 by playing casually and havn't seen a remotely good opponent in weeks, by ONLY playing custom games. You clearly have no idea how ratings work. They're completely broken, represent nothing of value, and should not be a priority when the fundamentals to make it work don't exist. They punish people for playing people of equal skill, and even that is impossable to setup half the time with a full time job.

Good players should rarely be above 75% win rates, if they are, all that means is the opponents are not of equal skill, and therefore, meaningless victories. Before you claim somthing is false.. make sure you actually have a valid arguement.

Quoting WickedBear,

reply 20

They're completely broken, represent nothing of value,

lol you seems a 12yo kid

rating IS bugged here, thats why HERE its useless

the point in fact is just FIXING it to make it represent something

Quoting ddd888,

reply 21

Quoting WickedBear,
reply 20

They're completely broken, represent nothing of value,

lol you seems a 12yo kid

rating IS bugged here, thats why HERE its useless

the point in fact is just FIXING it to make it represent something

Edited: For niceness cause i'm THAT awesome.

So you're argueing with me even though you mimiced what I just said if you actually read my posts. You can't just pick a random statement and quote me out of context. Yes I do believe that stats for the most part are useless when they do in fact work, in comparison to things that are easier to manage, and much less controversial like tournaments.

Meaningful stats in an official ladder require a good matchmaking system, and need to completely disgregard custom games. Players must play impartially decided opponents with standardized game settings. The moment players can choose their own opponents they can ensure that they never/rarely lose by refusing to play good opponents. Sure, it will take longer to gain "xp" by doing it that way, you can still climb the ladder with an immaculate (but meaningless) record.

Better than a ladder IMO would be a league. In a ladder even if team A crushes team B every time they play, team B can still climb above them by beating other teams enough times. In leagues there is direct competition and nothing else, leading to very meaningful final standings (The league champion is undisputably the best, the runner up second best, etc). Of course, I have absolutely no confidence in a GPG or SD sponsored league any time soon, given the number of other things on their plate and the rate at which they are getting done. I also know of at least one player-run league that has fallen flat. However, if the leaders of the other active American premade teams are willing to coordinate with me to try again, I'd be down.

I already have some ideas on how we could make it run more smoothly.

DDD, many people have said they would love a random teams button, and many people would use that function. It would be an "option", so you would not HAVE to use it. But I would use it 90% of the time myself.

You know me and Char are up for it.

The Forums Are Now Closed!

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