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.
I think the problem lies in the ridiculously OP rewards given for killing a demigod.
You get gold (500+level*100) and XP (not sure how much, but i guess its proportional to the gold gain), and the opponent gets benched for 20-30 seconds. Even worse, if someone just so much as coughs at the victim, they also get half the gold reward.
He gets no gold during that time and not XP, while you also keep your regular income and can farm further XP from creeps.
More gold means you will be able to afford better items, and more XP will mean more HP/Mana/Armor/Skills. So what happens when the victim respawns? He will have an even harder time against you, making it more likely that he will die again giving you even more gold and XP.
A vicious cycle that will spiral towards the eventual doom of the side that gets behind in kills.
This is why there is practically no chance of a comeback if the opponent knows what it does.
What they could do: Fix gold rewards for killing demigods. There is really no reason a level20 is worth more than a level 1. If anything, killing a level20 is easier (as you also have comparatively better skills/equipment) than killing someone at level1. So fix the reward and modify it based on level difference inside a -90% / +100% range and 20% steps. So if a level10 kills a level10, the killer gets the standard reward 500 gold. If he kills a level 5, he gets 500 - 5*20% (capped at -90%) = 50 gold. If he kills a level 15 or 20, he gets 500 + 5*20% (capped at +100%) = 1000 gold. Optionally, you can forget about the cap for killing higher level demigods.. after all, killing a level 20 at level 10 might sure be worth 1500 gold as well.
Also.. instead of giving fixed reward for participating demigods, pay them based on the damage they did. (divide the reward between them)
Obviously the numbers above are ad-hoc, they are merely meant to illustrate the principle i think the game should follow. Nonetheless.. not giving insane rewards for killing demigods 5 levels below you would go a long way towards helping the weaker side recover and would also make sense.
I think the solution here is that the citadel upgrades (for tower damage, specifically) need to scale EXPONENTIALLY. Who the hell cares that towers are doing 10%/20%/whateverthehell more damage? That's not even going to slow down the mob.
But if towers were dealing 100% more damage after buying the third upgrade, and 200% more damage getting the final one, now we're talking. They're real defense again. They can stop the creep zerg - assuming you invest in them. It should cost a lot and it also means that gold is wasted since towers give no offensive benefit but it will at least slow down the massive momentum the winning team has.
I've just come out a game where the opposing team had a godlike player and 2 others with streaks, while I was 0 - 5, the rest of my team being 0 3 and 0 4. Needless to say, we were getting owned. We turned it around and eventually won. What did we do?
1) I bought all the gold upgrades as soon as they were available. Yes, even currency 3 at level 7. This gave my other two teammates the cash influx needed to catch up to them.
2) My teammates bought creeps as soon as they were available. This means that they never had a creep advantage.
3) We avoided all fighting and cap locked our portals when retreating. This way we didn't feed. When we did fight, it would be guerilla warfare, meaning spits, mines, and fireballs before promptly retreating. Then, we healed, came back, and tried to gank someone.
Eventually we got to wr lvl 10, got giants, got a bunch of cap locks and perma cap locked their portal. We then used that distraction to cap the rest of the maps and cap lock as well. We by this time had significant amounts of gold, and I was able to get Aegis of Giant (16k). This allowed me to tank their entire team all by myself. And thus, we turned it around, cap locked both their portals, killed their cit, and I ended with a 9 kills 7 deaths score. Not bad
So: gold, creeps, cap locks, and harass. The golden rules for the losing team.
Your post is interesting and an example on how coordinated teamplay should work (though it rarely does). But I don't understand the way you use some terms...
"Creeps"? I hope you mean armor and weapon upgrades? Surely not priests?
"Feed"? Do you mean that you didn't kill waves of creeps? How did you get experience?
Creeps means monsters or reinforcements or minions or whatever this game calls em. I call em creeps. We got priests and angels at lvl 7, after I got currency 3, then Catapults right away at level 8 and Giants right away at level 10.
Feed means dying repeatedly to the enemy team's heroes, who were vastly superior. We simply retreated wheneever there was an engagement. We were way behind in experience, about 3-4 levels on average iirc. But we still pulled through.
Interesting... because "feed" to me usually means buying priests early and feeding the other side with gold and exp because of it.
Much like RTS games...
The greater the disparity in skill level/coordination in teams the more likely that a comeback won't happen.
For example:
Lets say player skill is rated 1-10, with 10 being god like and 1 being noob.
Game #1
Team A: Player Skill = 10
Team B: Player Skill = 1
No matter what team B does, the chances of a comeback are pretty much impossible.
Game #2
Team C: Player Skill 5
Team D: Player Skill 5
In this game the odds of a comeback actually happening is very high, because the skill level of both opponents is very close. This type of match up tends to lead to some of the better experiences in a match/game.
How much should demigod try to force a more even match? It's a great debate in game design. Some designers think that very little should handicap the winning team or likewise very little bonus should be given to the losers. This is a harsher system and the main argument is that it highlights player skill.
Other games like DoW2, have an upkeep system so that if you have more units built then your income slows down. This basically penalize the winner and allows for the loser more of a chance to catch up. It's overall a fairly minor tweak but it helps draw imbalanced match ups slightly closer. I suspect it does nothing for a 1 Vs 10 skill match up -- but it might help in a 8 Vs 10.
Of course if it help is very little it leaves the question, should a 8 skill beat a 10? If that's all it does, should not the 10 skill player deserve to win?
-------------------------------------------
As far as Demigod is concerned I like the ideas that player skill could matter. If I've got 100 games under my belt and my ELO ranking is really high, killing me should net more gold then killing someone who just started playing. This could be a very interesting system. But not sure how fair or balanced it would be.
Other ideas I've read on these forums and liked is, diminishing returns. If Y player keeps killing X, after the first death they would start getting less and less reward. Maybe after Z time, it would reset to full reward. This would mostly be a system for helping newer players.
It might be as simple of just decreasing the gold gained at lower levels so that the game ramps up faster as people level up but the weight of killing someone eairly on is not as great as it is now.
Anyway... lots of rambling but hopefully it makes since and gives you some thing to think about
-Jara
BTW, this is a bad idea. Part of the pacing of this game is that it escalates and the game will end.
A big part of that is, if you let towers fall -- there is no getting them back. So the goal is to defend your towers. Of course as the games moves on, towers become easier and easier to destory, again this helps insure the game will end.
That all gives you a chance of a comeback, if the opponent refuses to do the same even after they notice you doing it.
If they start out using caps and beat the living sh*t outta you that way, then theres just no way you will turn the game around.
In other words: turn a game around? definitely possible.. as long as you are better than the other team.
Making either Skirmish or Pantheon use this system and having it as an option in custom would be really interesting. As you say though, whether it would really work or not is another matter (do custom game results count in ELO ratings? I dont think they do...)
Doing that is very artificial and would push good players to create new accounts to get benefits.
On the other hand, if the cash gained from kills in game would depend on the amount of cash already available for both players it should balance things and leave more room for comebacks. Let's say player 1 has got 5k worth of equipment and citadel upgrades and gets killed by player B with 20k worth, player B would get 500 gold, if player A kills B he would get 5000 gold instead => he'd still be behind player B equipment wise but he would catch up quickly to him whereas B would not be able to get too much ahead but would still keep it's advantage as long as he doesn't get killed 4-5 times in a row. It'd help a little to mitigate the slipery slope effect without ever completly negating the advantage one got early, unless you make many mistakes.
Here's a scenario for you to ponder about:
I was just in a game where a top 100 ranked player got schooled by a newbie (according to Pantheon statistics anyway), which was fascinating all by itself, but even more fascinating to me was how we lost.
Our team fared pretty well about up until level 8 or so. Then the other team got catapults first and later giants. They also managed to get one of our portals, and then the other (the first was good and sneaky and all, but the second was just stupid... I went on defense but never saw my other teammates, and if they were on offense, they didn't manage to get any flags back, nor did they sneak into the other team's base and get their portals).But regardless of this, our creeps were upgraded to the max by me and progress by the other team was initially slow. Between them getting giants and winning the game there was about five minutes where nothing much happened. Apart from the fact that I had over 10k gold, but still not the rank to get giants for our side.
THAT is fascinating to me.
We were on the loosing side, with max upgraded creeps and more than enough gold to get giants ourselves, but couldn't.
So, our loosing side... had nothing to do!
To me, that means that this game is designed to prevent comebacks. It constantly awards bonuses to the winning side, making it easier and easier for them to crush the opponents. And I know not all of you see it like this, because you apparently get comebacks all the time, but name one other game where the "rage quitting" phenomenon is as prominent and crushing as this one?
Sure, people rage quit in games like Unreal Tournament and Quake, but the interesting thing that happens in those game, is that they rebalance themselves by either moving a player from one team to the other, or by allowing players to join mid-match.
If this game is designed to deliver crushing defeats in order to shorten the game time, again, either put a concede option into the game, or provide more incentive for the loosing side to continue (which without elongating the game is a challenge, I admit).
EDIT: I just realized that I wrote that our team "dominated" up until level 8, but that is not really true. We did have all the middle flags, but an equal amount of towers were destroyed on each side, and all players had the same levels on both sides. We dominated in the sense that we managed to keep the middle flags most of the time, while each side pretty much waited to get up to around level 10 to make our moves. There was not a single serious attack attempt made until the first side got catapults. I must say, upon reflecting on this, that most games seems to be a race for cataputs...
I received no replies to the scenario above.
Perhaps with a little bump and the following analysis, people might be able to view the game from a new direction:
The green line is the winning players while the red line are the loosing party.
The point I'm trying to make is that in classic RTS games, both sides have roughly equal amounts of fun (Zerg rush excluded) which lasts quite far into the game. However, in Demigod, the downward spiral starts very early in the game and keeps deteriorating as the game keeps stacking bonuses onto the winning side.
I wonder if part of the reason is because GPG eliminated the "strategy" portion of the game, in favour of it being almost purely tactical?
each dg/build has a, to borrow from the world of automobiles, a "powerband". This needs to be thrown in the mix when analyzing skill level vs dg's vs teamwork. This dynamic makes comebacks very possible depending on your make up.
raise your hand if youve lost a game after dominating the entire time by a late game oak powerhouse
*raises both arms*
one of the posters above made a great point when he said that he was losing early, so they changed tactics, went into defense and harass mode and ended up winning. just because the other team is more skilled killing you than you them, in no way means you cant dominate them by map control. ive won so many games where my team ended up being outleveled and outgunned its ridiculous.
also to the poster who says killing a dg gives the opposing team too much advantage....i believe its that way for a reason. You shouldnt be dying until late game, or at least mid game. Once you learn how to dance, situational awareness, and have a good knowledge of all the DG abilities then dying becomes very difficult to do. then it becomes a game of who can ambush who the best.
To the person who started this post.
You are 100% wrong about the losing team not being able to come back. 2 weeks ago, I was doing a 3v3 on Exile. Was an even game til around lvl 8, one of their players just started tearing it up badly. We couldn't keep any flags...and they pushed us back hard. We were AT our citidel...defending the best we could, and when it said their side had Giants...we all said GG and it was fun... but, we kept fighting. Feeling our doom was inevitable, we just kept fighting. The close quarters fighting, and high xp and gold gain from their units, especially giants...we quickly spent all our gold on the citidel on unit upgrades. One of our guys ported to a tower we still had up they didn't get, got behind them, and reclaimed a few flags... was enough for us to get giants of our own. They kept pushing into our base...but they just couldnt get our citidel down. It got to half way when we killed all their Demi's, including the one that was tearing us up. We made 1 push into their base...and won.
To this day, it is my favorite round I've played. We were dead...defeat was definite...but we didn't want to stop... So, if you wanna cry and say the losing team can't do anything...do us a favor. /Uninstall, and give the game to someone who won't quit so easily.
Kthx.
How about a "revenge" buff? Call it, Out for Blood.
How it works. Rook kills UB aided by Sedna. For 1 min (after respawning), UB gains a 50% damage increase against Rook and 25% against Sedna. If Rook kills UB again, damage for UB is increased 100% for 1.5min. A third and final time up to 150% for 2mins. The buff is instantly is removed if revenge is achieved at any point. Obviously this buff only works against the demigod/s who killed you. It would also force a retreat giving less skilled opponents a chance. You could probably even add this to the citadel as purchasable upgrades.
I wouldn't make this a normal function, perhaps an option you can add to some custom games (wouldn't seem fair in a Slaughter match).
Perhaps something like this may be too difficult to code in an already finished game.
there's nothing wrong with the actual game. The problem is skill levels. This should be addressed not crazy tower upgrades and weird buffs.
Just got another idea.
How about adding a purchaseable wave for 1 turn?
This gives the advantage to the team closest to their citadel. If your a demigod making the push, it behoves you to continue making that push, but if your backed into your corner, being able to buy an extra wave might help.
ie. Creeps come out every 10seconds. So it's 10-10-10-10-10
Buying an extra wave for one turn would effect timing like this: 10-5-5-10-10-10
Price is affected by level (the lower you are, the cheaper the cost).
Lets say you can only do this 5 times a match.
I agree for the most part. There isn't anything wrong with the game, comebacks are possible but there also isn't anything wrong with having the option to add handicaps should you want to give one to your friends
Last idea.
A aura buff you can purchase for the citadel that effects Hps/Armor/dps the closer you are to your own citadel.
Effects everyone on your side (minions, creeps, demigods)
I think you are basing your analysis on a flawed observation. The titles should read:
Top image - unmatched, unbalanced opponents
Bottom image - well matched, balanced opponents
If you are having an inferior team that gets dominated, then you really get to what you see in the top image. If you are having a balanced set of players on both teams, who are roughly equal in skill, then the game looks much like the bottom image in demigod as well.
What demigod desperately needs is a matchmaking system, that automatically matches players by their skills. So you pick your demigod and the type of game you would like to play (like 2v2, 3v3, conquest, etc) and the game automatically finds a game for you with players of roughtly equal skill levels.
For this to work, there should probably be a bigger community tho. I do believe warcraft 3 has a similar ranking based matchmaking system. Anyway. Game balance and the fun factor are okay as long as you are playing against/with players of equal skill. Once you get noobs into a pro game, or pros into a noob game, things get thrown out of balance and the enjoyment factor of the game quickly diminishes.
I don't think it's all about unmatched opponents, but yes that is a big part of it.
Also, I think this problem is a lot more common than what those who don't agree with me believe.
I just noticed this on Penny Arcade (which is quite an influential site), written by one of the creators:
That sounds very much like a description of the curves in my Demigod diagram...
However, the map ping is very, very rudimentary. Supreme Commander had much better ping options. First of all, the ping was visible on the map itself and not just on the minimap. And secondly there were 3 different types of pings + a marker ping where you could type in a description.
Okay, lemme point out a few things here:
All the feedback defending the way the game is, explaining why certain things are fair, reasonable, well-implemented, etc. are missing the point. The point isn't what you think is fair, it's about what's causing the rage quits. The word implies the subject is being irrational.
You tales of comebacks mean nothing, because clearly someone who's losing fairly badly isn't concerned about the 10% chance of pulling out a win, they're concerned with the more probable scenario of getting trounced for the next 15-30 minutes and would rather do something else.
Rage quitting is about PERCEPTION, not facts. The perception of futility needs to be addressed, and I think there's a handful of really simple ways it could be done:
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