Battle.net... First introduced in Starcraft to the masses. At launch it was awesome. Not to say it didn't have problems, but in STARCRAFT it did some really cool things:
1) Chat rooms for everyone. Just create a new room, chat with friends, have a clan channel, etc. Cool.
2) Double click on someone and vuala, get their stats. Pantheon stats, Regular game stats. Etc.
Then Warcraft 3 came out.
3) Icons which upgraded as your rank upgraded. A sort-of show-off of your skill.
4) Tournament games. Matches you based on your rank to other players so you can play at your approximate level. Not to say this strategy didn't have problems, but it worked reasonably well.
And of course:
5) Always integrated into the game. Felt like a natural part of the game rather than a hacked on interface.
Now this was 1998 and 2002 (I think). I am NOT talking about any recent improvements in Battle.net.
Now lets look at Demigod and Implus' integration.
1) Friends list. This sort of 1-ups B.net. I think. I not sure if it had a friends list, I just can't remember.
2) A hacked-on single-room IRC chat. No pretty interface for making channels. Just a window.
3) No ability to just look at other player's stats. Gota go to the website, then find the player, and see their stats. A hastle if you not playing in windowed mode (I play in windowed since its the only way to not crash my computer when the game crashes, which is WAAAY too frequent).
4) Not integrated into the game. It is in no way a "part" of the game, it is something hacked on last minute. Or so it seems.
5) The user experience and community-making abilities are next to nothing. I can't end a game and tell everyone "hey get into channel "foo"" and everyone just clicks "join channel" and boom we can all talk and play again, rematch, make friends, whatever.
Impulse DOES have SOME advantages. Perhapse the only good features:
1) Friends list.
2) Notification when friends message you (though it would help to make some indicator that the messages you are looking at are old, with a red line below or something).
3) An IRC client. If you know IRC this is good, otherwise its a hastle.
4) Ability to chat and be in a game lobby at the same time.
In my opinion I had a lot more networking going on in B.net in 1998 than I do now with demigod. Simply because of the deficiencies of impulse.
Hope the dev team takes this as a constructive criticism and works on integrating impulse chat and so on, and making it a part of the game, integrate it, think about usability. I would hate for DG to come a dying game simply because of the inability to form good online communities (the game IS an online game after all).
Battle.net has a friend's list. I'm not sure if it was around during Starcraft, but it got steadily improved upon over the years. You could PM your friends within a game, see who's online, get notified when friends come online/enter game/leave game/etc.
Yes, Impulse can definitely use a lot of improvement on the community aspect and Stardock knows this. Frogboy did mention that stuff is being planeed.
You have to remember that Impulse isn't JUST a multiplayer matchmaking/community utility. It is more of a"digital store" WITH community aspects, WITH multiplayer functionality, WITH auto patching. It did not start out as primarily a matchmaking utility, as battle.net did. You have to remember that.
I agree that they should've had more features at launch considering what year it is, but regardless, it is first and foremost an autopatch, digital store, and multi purpose community utility. New features are on the way, that much we know. They are working it, they have stated this. I'm not trying to flame you, I'm just saying, keep in mind that Impulse is not going to be limited to just being a matchmaking servce for only what... 2-3 games? So yeah, it's easy to see why battle.net worked as well as it did but you can't really compare teh two, as they are PRIMARILY, different services.
Your making a bad comparison. Blizzard with it's battle.net developed Starcraft/Warcraft 3, so they were able to integrate as much of battle.net into the games as was needed or wanted.
With Impulse and Demigod you have two different companies and teams to combine. Stardock with Impulse publishes DG, GPG developed it, so SD are limited as to what they can incorporate into Demigod through Impulse.
Had SD developed DG i'm sure we would have seen some cool new Impulse features that were directly layed into the game, instead of having to be tagged on to the back end.
Not saying your point does not carry any weight, but that it's not a totally fair comparison given the differences between SD and Blizzard in relation to the games in question.
Oh look, a Blizz/WC3/SC/DotA thread. What a surprise.
I saw your thread title and I agreed with you but then I went through your post and it is so full of errors and stupidity. I could rewrite your OP and make it intelligent and actually prove the point you were trying to make, but I don't have the motivation atm.
I know, right? It hadn't even occured to me that there were other games in the genre before Demigod. I am so glad that somone has brought this to my attention. Maybe we should all look into this Defenders of the Ancient Ones and see if we can draw any more interesting comparisons.
Stardock, I demand that you dispatch a team to investigate immediately!
I stopped reading here.
Battle.net was released with Diablo back in '97, and was a horrible mess of P2P code at launch. If you're not going to do your research before you make this kind of topic, I'm not going to consider your 'points'.
man what the hell are you talking about?
stardock could just use steam and it would be still better than this gayness "impulse".
and btw. stardock had time to go the same way as blizzard.... like they did on dota...
i like demigod too, but im not a fanboy like you.
Doesn't change the fact battle.net multiplayer experience was better in 1998 than DG Multiplayer in 2009.
He has a point.
And a kick-ass screen name.
Ahhh ok, your obviously well informed and knowledgeable...
Stardock could just use Steam....yeah.....ok. And Apple could just use Windows.
Great argument!
Yes, it's true, and now get over it. I've seen a hundred threads like this.
Blizzard learned from their mistakes with Diablo, and I'm sure Stardock/GPG learned from the mistakes with Demigod as well. Nothing can be absolutely perfect at start.
Hmmm...what will be better?A system that has been updated constantly for 12 yerasORA system that has been out for just around a year
Cant believe battle.net is better than Impulse!
The friends list wasn't even going to be integrated into Demigod, but it happened to get pushed forwards.
I believe Diablo was the first to use B.net, and it was 1997ish.
guys you're making a really really bad comparison...
let me explain: Blizzard is a really good game company that takes time to make their games the best in the world. impulse isnt.
Agreed, 12 months after the release of the system it was fantastic, however it had gone through several major upgrades before 1998. In 1997 Battle.net was a joke. Diablo's multiplayer component was horribly unstable and filled with hackers for nearly the first entire 9 months thanks largely to the way Battle.net operated in those days. Demigod has been out for less than 2, and works better now than Diablo, and Battle.net, did at this point in it's life time.
Your assuming that Demigod should work flawlessly because it was released some many years later, however the fact that the technology in Demigod is vastly different to the comparibly simple technology employed then really negates such a comparison. This would be like comparing the high magnitude Earthquake reslience in today's ultra-modern Skyscrappers to that of buildings built using the technology and understanding from several centuries ago. The closest comparison to Demigod's system would be Steam, however being as most Steam games employee a sever/client rather than a P2P system even that comparison doesn't really hold up.
Demigod, and by extension Impsule, is it's own beast.
but yet if we were to say that in relations to Stardock or other Stardock related materials, we get called a fan boy. Wow.
Well, Stardock has a digital delivery platform for its non gaming apps since 1999 ( see http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/345381/Impulse_Road_Map )
And it would have been strange for them to use their own digital delivery platform for non gaming apps while using Steam (which offers only games, contrary to Impulse) for delivering their games.
I give a multiplayer system made in the late 90's a little bit more room for error seeing as they were the first matchmaking systems. This is 11 years later.
Comparing Impulse to Battle.net would be like hmmm, comparing Impulse to Battle.net. They have almost nothing in common.
Impulse is a digital distribution platform that allows users to purchase and download games and update them as they wish on any PC they own.
Battle.net is a multplayer match-making service.
Demigod uses Impulse for updating itself. But the match-making and such in Demigod was developed for Demigod.
The Friends list in Demigod was inserted (as beta testers can tell you) after the beta was complete in order to have *something* for users to interact with.
I think some people need to do some research and understand basic terminology before making these kinds of posts.
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