I'm beginning to think there's a correlation.
I would bet most.
People who know Stardock already know Stardock didn't develop Demigod or its connectivity code. Stardock is the one who made the decision to publish Demigod and made the decision on what NAT program was used.
Someone compared Stardock to Flagship studios (makers of Hellgate). Flagship Studios didn't publish Hellgate London. Electronic Arts did.
The difference is that when something goes wrong with something released by Stardock they seem to have a fanatical habit of taking blame and trying to solve it.
To continue with the analogy, when Hellgate London had problems, it's not like EA jumped in and solved it. With Demigod, Stardock would have surely been within their legal rights to toss the Demigod connectivity problems over to Raknet or Gas Powered Games. But instead they brought in their own development team to fix them. What other publisher would do that???
That's why there are Stardock fan boys. Because if you buy something with the Stardock label on it, you know they will go to ridiculous lengths to make good on it.
I'm not one complaining, but I'm wondering what your insinuation is here? That StarDock games always don't work when released and need to be fixed by numerous patches over the span of a month and a half?
disclaimer: i haven't complained about there handling of the situation at all. in fact i've praised their open communication style. I'm also a frequent Stardock customer. I own Galactic Civ 1 and 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire, and now Demigod.
Demigod is the first game I've seen Stardock publish with a multiplayer component as large and complex as this. even if you had bought games from Stardock before you wouldn't have experienced these kinds of problems simply because multiplayer connectivity wasn't a big deal in those games and the multiplayer communities were/are tiny.
Alot of companies badly fumble multiplayer game launches. The entire history of the MMO genre (whethers its MMORPGS like WoW and Everquest, or MMOFPS like Battlefield) is filled with humiliatingly awful launches full of connection problems. Most games that are played online either tap into an existing big infrastructure like Battle.net or Gamespy or Windows Live or they try to do something new and independent (like GPGnet or Impulse reactor). Its not surprising that when you try and do something new and different you have some growing pains.
I think the players who are complaining do not have enough perspective, experience, and/or patience. If they only find existing systems acceptable then they are condemning the gaming industry to be nothing except the products of a few monopolist companies (Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft primarily). We need to have patience and show support for the new guys like Stardock or else we'll never get the variety of content that we would like to have.
I don't know if I own a stardock game, but I do think SD is great for doing what they do
wish i lived in your world full of flowers, peace/love and understanding. the fact is stardock realsed a horrible flawed multiplayer system, and got understandable flamed for everyting as they should have been.
a large number of online games experince big issues at launch but i had expected a more polished connection system after they had a beta, this was obviously a mistke from my side.
"show patience" this i think is the worst ting to do, complain loudly and maybe they will fix it. keep quit and you will be ignored by a larger % this is my guess atlest no facts supporting this that would stand up to closer scrutiny. the goal is not to be polite, the goal is to get a structure bent on making money spend money on "fixes". complaing is the logical thing to do not very effective but better then nothing.
this is my first stardock game, have not complained about it on the forum except indirectly. i have sent mails to SD to help me with techincal issues; not very helpful but did get more then copy/pasted drivel. as the connection issues were so insanly large i did not see the need to complain to make them aware of them.
i would say most but i anit complainging about it i think they handled it opretty well
I'd just like to point out that although stardock published the game, the multiplayer network code is part of impulse. What that means is that stardock DID do the networking. GPG focused on the actual game programming. Much of the design was also done as a collaboration between stardock and gpg (this is evident by Brad talking about several of his game design sit-downs with Mike Marr)
To that flagship/EA comparison, that's not quite accurate because EA had nothing to do with hellgate except give them a bit of QA resources and a bug tracking program. EA didn't give them any game-critical code.
Networking is hard as hell to do well, and for a smaller company like Stardock who focused on single player games up till now, it's not that surprising what happened.
When Brad mentioned that a month was an enternity to debug and fix the network code, alarm bells were going off in my head. I'm not saying Brad is a poor engineer (far from it!), but it looks like they didn't consider all the various edge cases properly when designing the architecture. Problems like pirates issuing server-gets, exponential connections, too many sockets opening for many routers to handle, etc, would have been avoided by companies with more experience.
yeah, the problems would have been avoided by a company with more experience.
but i'm happy to help Stardock become an experienced company.
maybe i'm an idealist and maybe i'm in a small minority, but i don't like the idea of eating your young, which is what is essentially happening when players expect every company in the business to put out games that behave exactly as the latest major release from Activision/Blizzard or Xbox Live.
for the sake of actually having an industry and not just a Big Brother UberCorp that makes all your games, i really want to help Stardock (and other smaller publishers) succeed and build up competitive infrastructures. for me its worth it.
i'll gladly suffer a couple of weeks of bad connections if it ends up working in the long run. i know that what i'm getting for my trouble is a stronger company in the future and more good games from them.
I never buyed before a Stardock game (GalCiv and Sins are not my favorite types of games), but i know that they were only responsible only for the NAT program and the Impulse Reactor (ingame chat and friends list). But, and that's a big but, they were also the publisher and the publisher has the right to set the date when a game will be released and finished. Demigod was poorly tested and QA, so this is the fault of the publisher, Stardock. My 2 cents.
What happens next, it's 95% in the hands of the people from GPG. Maybe SD will add some more features to the ingame impulse interface (i hope!), but that's all they can do, as far as i know. And that's why i'm worried about, GPG are just like 99% of the devs out there, they are not known to support their games long enough. They allready work on Dungeon Siege 3 and SupCom 2, so they look pretty busy in the future. Imo, if they can't continue the work on DG in the future, what should they do is release the SDK of the game and let others make content for it.
I haven't really complained a lot about the connectivity problems, nor have I bought a stardock game before this one, I tend to agree with nilsy on this one.
Yes it's great that Stardock are trying hard to fix the problems here, but there shouldn't have been any problems in the first place, so I reckon a lot of people are right to complain
You have no idea what you're talking about Jinx on this part.
I think people have every right to be ticked off at the state of the Demigod launch.
Demigod makes use of a lot of libraries and some of those libraries use other libraries.
You may have noticed the Raknet logo at the bottom of the page. That is where the NAT handling is. Raknet handled the connection between players and then hands it to Demigod for the rest of the game.
When it became apparent that there were scaling issues that could not be easily (or quickly) resolved the Impulse team was re-assigned onto Demigod to write a nearly completely new system.
And let me say, what has been developed over the past 3 weeks, largely from scratch would normally take 6 months to do but people worked insane hours in order to make it happen.
Stardock was certainly involved in the design of the game to be sure. But our involvement on the network connectivity only extended to choosing the library to handle the NAT connections between players which has subsequently been redone.
I think Frogboy is overworked and needs to hand off forum policing to someone else. I have seen several posts being condecending to customers, and deserved or not, it just doesn't sit well. One in particular seemed to cross the line where a post was recently locked where you urged people to never buy another Stardock game again to those who agreed with a banned poster who was irritated at not being able to play online consistently, and without hassle (regardless if he logged 20+hrs...how many was spent in frustration?). Why would you say this...don't you know that people who come home from work and are hoping to play some sweet Demigod are totally irritated when it takes 30 minutes to get into a game? This guy probably just came off a marathon of trying to play and vented in the forums. It just doesn't reinforce the immaculate image I had of Stardock. Unless that guy was constantly trolling, it just doesn't seem right for him to have been banned for the comment you quoted. You are human Frogboy, and you are working insane hours. You shouldn't be dealing with pissy customers.
Umm.. sorry I am such a noob - I expected a game I purchased to work. If I had as much experience as you stardock fanboys then I would know then I was just forking over money for something that shouldn't be actually expected to perform.
As the game developer, Stardock made a decision between building code in-house or saving money/time by buying a 3rd party solution. Part of that decision is an understanding that the 3rd party code is out of your control and if you run into issues, you may have to build you own code anyway. You also understand that extra testing and preparation is needed to ensure that the 3rd party solution that you saved money on actually works in the context of what you are trying to use it for. Most importantly, you understand that it is your name at stake regardless of how the 3rd party code performs. Users really don't care that you saved a few bucks by purchasing 3rd party code when something with you brand name on it flat out doesn't work.
Image buying a Honda. They hand over the keys to you and you try to start the engine, but it does not. The guy just stares at you straight-faced and says "well, we didn't make the engine, somebody else did, you understand, right?". Are you just gunna be like "oh, gotcha.. well, that's cool. I guess I'll be on my way then.."?
maybe some of you should go check the current state of the game, 1 month after its release.
whenever i do this (go into the game and see what its like) i notice that these days it takes me about 2 minutes to find a match and about 10 seconds to connect to all players inside that match. i find that maybe 1 out of 4 lobbies fail for some reason but most of them don't. i find that of the games that i launch into (which is about 75% of the games i try to join) about 75% of those are most flawless, with acceptable levels of lag and all players staying connected until they decide to quit or lose.
in other words, 1 month from a rocky launch, after all their hard work, Stardock has managed to put in place a multiplayer connection system that is about as good as anything else in the industry.
to extend the car analogy:
you buy a car but the engine has a transmission flaw. the car company issues a recall so you bring it in to the dealership and they offer you a trade in for a model that doesn't have a transmission flaw or they offer to fix the transmission flaw for free but the car will be in the shop for 2 weeks.
thats the real situation.
That kind of hyperbole (in bold) really doesn't help pitch your point. Read one of Ke5strel's critiques for how to effectively dissent with quality/features/etc.
That said - do you have the courage to voice such complaints in real life? Would you tell a teacher, a policeman, a service worker that he sucks at his job and needs to listen to you? The answer is likely no. Why do it here? Anonymity? Do you feel ungovernable and thus entitled to say what you want? Your right to express dissent stops at the point it offends the owner, my good man.
TL;DR version - find a way to more creatively express your dissent and be amazed at the response.
I love how even Raknet isn't taking responsibility for this lol: http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/forum/index.php?topic=2406.0
That is equivocation. A car is not a piece of software. Your facile analogy is inappropriately used.
regarding "fanboyism"
if you're not a fan of Stardock what the hell are you doing here? what kind of person has so much built up aggression and so many anti-social tendencies that they have choose to spend their own time participating in a community that they don't actually like?
there's a huge amount of immaturity in this attitude. why would you dislike a "fanboy". what kind of person are you that you don't like people who like things. "liking things sucks man, its totally uncool to like things, showing support for the people who make things you like sucks even worse." do you even listen to yourselves?
this is one of the strange dark sides of the internet, the way it brings out the sociopathic tendencies in so many people. if you don't like the company or the community what the heck are you doing here? it makes you feel better to talk trash right to their face? would you do that in a school cafeteria? sit down at a table full of kids you dislike and insult them to their face? would you do that?
and don't get caught up in hysteria. exactly 2 people have been given "mandatory refunds", both of them for saying things that were beyond the pale insulting towards the Stardock professional team. imagine the car dealership situation again, what if you walked into the dealership and started shouting insults at the salesman and everyone on the show floor. would you expect to be treated nicely or would you expect them to call the cops and have you taken away?
use your head and understand that this is one of the most open and lightly moderated forums you'll find anywhere. also learn to appreciate that the level of service and good faith communication you get from Stardock is miles ahead of any other games publisher.
umm.. sorry, if you had actually read the htread or just had any common sense or basic awareness at all, you would know that Stardock is the PUBLISHER, not the developer
No. It's not really Raknet's fault either. Ultimately, it's still Stardock's fault. An open public beta would have found out this problem.
It's like launching a website that worked great when you had say 1000 people on it but completely crashes when you have 10,000 people on it.
Even now, today, this second, we are still dealing with the scaleability because we still have to rely on some pieces that haven't been replaced yet which creates connection message lag and such.
I disliked the locking of that thread also, as I wished to make a reply.... As Ive probably got a lot of game play, yet 50% was bot games, 40% was finding/loading a game, 10% was probably good fun.Im in a love hate relationship with DG. ATM I dont play it almost at all anymore, as I really enjoyed panth and its pretty busted atm.Frogboy and team, well I want to give you guys huge props for going at this strong, it could of been possible for the team to just do this slow and steady, although that would of pissed a lot of customers off...The thing here is that, you've got a game... You've got a bunch of customers, many who are having difficulties and many who are angry at a game that is pretty much strictly MP, therefore when MP is buggy so is the game. If the devs turned their back, or did this fix over slow time and not clock the time they are doing, then they would really piss a lot of customers off and burn many potential customers and tarnish their name.ATM they are trying to salvage a game, because if nothing was fixed the game would die... When a 100% MP game is broken or buggy, it needs quick fixes, people dont wait. If it dont work then they will quit and you will ruin your company name and the game thats taken hard work to build. If you stay quiet nothing happens... Its something you learn in finance class. Who gets paid first out of 2 creditors, the one who comes to your door every day to ask for the money, or the guy who sits at his office hoping you'll pay him. Pretty obvious answer.The community needs to voice its concerns and issues, because the community is the consumer, and any wise company will listen to the consumer, as they will be your possible future revenue streams. Overall, horrible game launch, and its a shame that its taken weeks to get DG to a fun state, haven't played it with new patch so not sure if its set. It sucks when patches are fixing issues that should of been fixed prior to game launch, instead of balances and new content (of which this game will need).Although the launch sucked and such, Im glad DG is taking the bad launch pretty serious and is releasing patches and trying to adress the problems at hand. As so developers either take to long to solve problems, or just walk away. So cheers to working to a solution.
We are NOT saying Raknet is garbage. On the contrary, Raknet is quite excellent and I recommend it for many things.
What I am saying is that Stardock and GPG failed to test the scaleability of the system with Demigod. A big open beta would have quickly shown the problem.
Blaming Raknet would be like playing a 3D library for not being able to handle 10,000 high polygon models on screen at once due to not ever trying the 3D library with more than 1000 models on screen.
I think you better look up the definition of equivocation..
WTF does this have to do with common sense. FrogBoy is the CEO of stardock, right? He comes on here telling how he has 4 groups of developers working on the game.. that would lead me to believe that stardock is the developer.
Regardless of who did what, the plain and simple fact that this game runs like garbage, and the package says "StarDock". You stand behind your product, not write a bunch of blog posts about how everyone should feel sorry for you.
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