I've made a number of posts on the rage quitting phenomenon and even a topic arguing for it.
The reason in Demigod is the fact that if you allow the other team to get a head start in levelling, there is more often than not no way of making a comeback.
This is a design flaw in the game.
It is made worse by the fact that there currently is quite difficult to judge if you are facing a team of good opponents or not, and if the other side is full of beginners or not.
It is also made worse by the fact that the in-game communication options are very poor, with no quick-command for signalling for help on the map and no voice chatting or even a permanently displayed chat window.
And this is a newly created flaw, in my opinion:
FPS: In the classic deathmatch, you often respawn at a different place on the map, allowing you to switch tactic (perhaps pick up a sniper gun instead of a close combat fun) and get a new angle of approach (sneak up from an unexpected position, etc).
RTS: With classic resource gathering and base building, you often expand and build a backup base, so if your first one is destroyed, you can regroup and launch a new attack from your secondary (hopefully hidden) position.
Arcade type racing games also often have a "catch up" feature that gives the loosing player a slight speed boost, to give him a chance to compete and retain the fun of the game, but perhaps that is stretching it a bit.
If nothing else, the game badly needs a "team concede" option, though that is not actually a solution to the root of the problem.
That's what Heart of Life is for.
Meh,
I've had more than my fair share of comebacks (against me ) after dominating a team in the mid/early game.
Played game last friday. Played as a hammer-slam rook. Something like 18 kills, got Ash, was totally unstoppable. Had their citadel down to 4k hp at one point. I probably only had 1 death.
They pushed us back some (started playing in a more concerted fashion, while our team was trying to push on the side from the side portals on Leviathan). Suddenly, they upgraded to giants in one fell swoop.
While we were bashing on their citadel, they had wiped out some defenses on our left side. They got giants, and flag locked a side portal.
Panicked, I ported back to the citadel, sold ash, upgraded to giants, but 2 waves of giants had already spawned at this point. Ported back to the artifact flag, thinking my teams could hold them off while I try to reclaim the side portal and then pwn to their citadel. They had our citadel down to 0 before my wave of giants got close.
It happens sometimes; and yes, I made mistakes. But at one point I'm sure I had then plenty demoralized, when I was crushing them around their citadel; had I remained pounding on their citadel instead of running for health we might have won then and there.
*shrug*. It's a young game, and some of us are still learning it.
good idea
This
Only if rebuilding it costs gold equal to the amount of health the tower will have. Also, they don't get any bonuses from citadel upgrades. Destroying a tower for the second time shouldn't be as hard as the first time.
6000+ gold for a SINGLE tower? That's crazy.
First off, it sounds like this cirticism stems from a lack of experience in this game. The flaw is not in the game's design, but rather the notion that you have zero options in every game you happen to get outleveled in. Coming back is not impossible and it isn't uncommon for my team to beat a group of opponents that have outleveled or outkilled us, or vice versa.
The designers have given you multiple routes to victory. Winning is NOT about levels and kills and damage dealt.
I can't even count how many times a week my partners and I get outleveled in the first 5 or 6 minutes of a match (playing at least 3 matches a night). No matter how good you are, it's just something that happens and you have to learn to adapt as the game progresses.
Rather than looking at the raw numbers, try to think of different approaches to get a victory. There are a number of things you can do rather than making this a straight up A vs. B fight:
A) Camp and Creep and try to catch up
Don't engage them and push into a different lane
C) Find the one with the lowest HP and burst him down with hit and run ambushes
In an FPS are you going to rush a guy packing an RPG with no armor and a pistol? In an RTS are you going to keep suiciding your troops into a choke point that is obviously too reinforced? The same goes for this game... if you can't kill your opponent in a straight up fight, look for other avenues to win.
No matter how many levels the opponent has on you, it's physically impossible for them to be everywhere at all times. They can only defend so many locations at once while trying to push into your base and you really need to exploit that rather than trying to figure out how to rebalance the game for matches in which you get outleveled.
It would be a better buy mid-game when it can still take multiple tries to take down a tower, but I agree that late game it wouldn't be worth the cost.
You shouldn't have let it get destroyed in the first place. Destroying more towers than your opponent gives you a great advantage. You shouldn't be able to rebuild a tower easily. Besides, I was thinking that you could pay, say, 3k gold for a tower with 3k health.
But I'll compromise. 1 gold per 3 hit points, or 2k gold for a tower with 6k health. Costly, but affordable.
You do know there are innumerable ways to destroy towers that you cannot stop?
Snipe spam from the fountain is a good one. Snipe can hit towers you know.
Last Stand Oak is another. Literally - you can do nothing.
Then there's the plentiful ways you can "stop" but in reality you aren't going to be able to. Torchbearer rain of ice can hit towers from very far away. How can you stop him? He can also fireball them from out of range. Spit is another one, UB just needs to get in range for a moment. Regulus can autoattack forever if you don't go stop him, and burning teleport scrolls whenever he gets near one isn't economical. (He'll just run away anyways)
Saving towers is often not plausible. And they're not nearly as important or influential as they were in Dota. Plus there's a lot more of them out there.
Heart of Life is several kills worth of gold. The fact that they need one and you don't helps balance things out. Besides, angels pretty much negate the HoL.
You don't get a Heart of Life so you can camp out in front of their base.
You get a Heart of Life every single game for every hero because it's the best item in the game. Angels don't negate it if you're competent.
^ truth
[mod edit: inappropriate lolcat removed]
FYI I dont get HOL and I do very well in this game. I tend to play Reg.Erb/TBFire. Because I mainly play an auto attack/mine Reg, HoL is not cost effective. That over 4k that could go to an artifact. Now I know my flaw is that I am ver squish all game, but assuming they dont crazy stack armor, 500+ attack with 2k crits all the time means they dont have time to hit me.
In short HoL is not the best thign in the game... In reality nothing is "the best".
Sedna has little use for it, better off getting the 2 helms.
You would do better if you got one every game.
Each use of the Heart of Life is equivalent to multiple potions that cost 275+ gold each. You make your money back in minutes.
Usually you aren't even using it for the life, but the MANA. Every hero uses abilities. Heart of Life allows you to spam them with abandon. Spamming abilities wins over those who cannot. And certain heros can finesse the heart of life DURING fights with other heroes. This gives an incredible advantage.
You can spam pounce and heal at the same time. You also get the 2 helms (assuming you mean top left and middle right (vlemish), because that's all you need)
Heart of Life is good for every hero, every game. It's not even that expensive.
I find Oak to be impossible to garner a comeback on too little AoE power for me
Awesome post, and sorry for butchering it, but I feel I have to comment certain parts...
When I created my topic in defense of rage quitting, people seemed to love comparing this game to sports. You show brilliantly that this isn't really appropriate.
Good example, and creating traps and sneaking around is very, very difficult early in Demigod.
In-game voice chat is extremely important for teamplay. But unfortunately, here your example is about late-game comebacks.
I acknowledge that mid to late game comebacks are very possible. I'm saying that early game comebacks aren't, and early game domination is overrepresented in this game (hence the abundance of the "rage quitting" phenomenon).
This is a very interesting proposition.
having neutral creeps like in dota "jungling" would be an interesting thing to try. Not really necessary but interesting.
Agreed, comebacks aren't meant to be commonplace. Though it can be difficult to finish a game of DG under 20 minutes unless your opponents are terrible, despite the game having been decided some 15 minutes previous. I can see people being aggreived by that.
Actually I get the plenor and the vlemish. With that much mana pool and 30/s regen I can spam everything all the time, including Silence if I play more conservatively...
I'm not saying you're inherantly wrong or anything, but I play Sedna exclusively, win most games, and I don't buy the heart any more (used to). As you say, buying both the heart and both helms is the best option, but that's 7k gold.
For that much I can buy the two hats, upgrade my priests, get armor, and get the wand of speed. That's really all you need to decide the mid/early game as Sedna. You can then run around backdooring portals to your hearts content, upgrade your citadel and finish the game.
im sorry for all the lolcat mods =p
There are several reasons that comebacks are improbable. By late game, in order to stall a push, you need to have demigod parity at the push point. Towers become a non-issue (for defense), so unlike the beginning of the game, you can't use a tower to force a stalemate. If you need demigod parity to just stall a push, then you cannot spare someone to start recapping the map. I personally think that every demigod should have to be in range of a tower in order to damage a tower. The only benefit of defensive structures for mid-to-late games is fleeing through them.
Second, because defensive structures do not exist for the losing team to flee through in the mid-to-late game, the losing team will necessarily have to overextend to make any progress. With port scrolls and speed + items being more plentiful for the winning team, overextending = feeding.
Third, once they have access to your portal flags, it's basically game over if you aren't close to accessing their portals.
Comebacks are certainly possible but only with a team that can work together. You just won't see them in a custom game that often. If you are on a team that can work together in a custom game, then you won't be losing in the first instance. No later than 6 minutes in, you can generally see who is going to win. Sometimes you can see much earlier. It is those types of games that are just painful. I do not begrudge anyone for leaving when the game is determined. I do not consider that a rage quit.
Throwing out something radical - but reinforcement upgrades should come automatically with warscore. That would give the losing team an experience boost as they start to fall behind in warscore. A smart team that is winning will not get upgrades to purposefully prevent the other side from leveling (depends a bit on the map).
Everyone knows that in any competitive game that once a team gets an advantage they have won and the other team should just give up.
So rather than adding a concede option, GPG should add a minigame window that pops up when a player has died, a tower is lost or that team wasn't first to the xp flag" so that the losing team can play tetris, solitaire, minesweeper etc. while the winning team is left to win as quickly as possible while the losers idle.
Or just add a mechanic that when the first player dies, their citadel collapses.
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