1761

Well… I am probably going to have to pick this one up now that things are settled, I will see if target has a copy.

1762

Why not wait a week until everyone is loaded with 50% off for friend coupons?

1763

On the other hand, matches regularly last an hour, and it’s rare to be done in less than half an hour.

If you reduce the snowballing effect, you drag out the game, no two ways about it. I have a feeling it’s exponential, too.

I don’t like playing hour-long matches. I certainly don’t want to play a two hour match. If anything, I’d like to see a way for the “get it over with” part of the game to speed up a little, but I can’t see a clear way to do that which doesn’t also pretty much destroy any hope of comebacks.

Frank, regarding your girlfriend - dude, you never, never start a game of Demigod if you don’t have an hour to kill. ;) There’s just no way to know it won’t last that long, and you know it’s going to be at least half an hour.

1764

Oh man, 95%. That would be awesome.

Here’s what’s really going on in the game, though.

People start up a custom game, and someone joins and makes several of the ping times go yellow. You look at the connection status and see that there are two players who just can’t connect to each other, sometimes three, even though those players can connect to everyone else just fine.

Nobody will begin a game in this state. People are booting folks who have the yellow pings. The game may start, but it won’t go 2 minutes without that player timing out or dropping in some way, causing the 30-second connection window for everyone and bumping in some AI. Then everyone starts dropping out, because if they wanted to play with/against AI, they’d play single player.

As a result, even people who can get into a game, can’t really get into a game. Quite often you have a person who joins games and has the green ping, but then they join some other game and has a yellow ping and can’t connect to one or two other players, for no good reason. So you have players who “can connect just fine…except sometimes they can’t.”

Of course, since it’s P2P this one bad apple spoils it for everyone.

I suspect there are some players that just run into weird limitations on open sockets or ports or whatever. More than once I’ve seen players that connect just fine when there are 5 of us in a lobby, but when the 6th person comes they can’t connect to him and vice versa. Of course, this makes it look like it’s both the 6th person’s fault AND the fault of the person who has the real connection problem. Either way, this one or two person problem screws up everything for six people (in a 3v3).

I don’t think the connectivity is anywhere near 95%. Or let me put it another way - if 5% of the PLAYERS have bad connectivity, it messes up 5n percent of the GAMES, where n is the number of players in the game. One in 20 people may have a connection problem, but that one person messes up the connectivity for 5 other people in a 3v3. So it’s not 1 in 20 games getting screwed up, it’s any game in which one of the 4-10 players is in that 5%.

1765

wait… explain this to me.

1766

Jason, I think yours must be a geography- or ISP- related problem, because while I see the yellow ping thing all the time, games have been rock solid for me once they start up.

Ragequitters are still very common, of course.

1767

Ehhhhhh…

I’ve had my fair share of splits and weird disconnecting problems once in the game, too.

1768

I would totally pledge friendship to someone for a 50% code – I was a complete DOTA nut and I’ve wanted to give this game a run, but I’m a little strapped for funds at the moment. /sadf

1769

Take a peek a page back or so. Brad’s latest “state of Demigod” post mentions the 50% off coupons.

1770

same here… sometimes pings are ultra high until all connections are made to people and then settle down… but other times they never calm down. And then it seems as if dg has locked up my router/ports in one way or another and the only way I can get into any game successfully is by restarting my the application.

Its as if something isn’t properly resetting.

1771

I skipped the QnA part.

Anyhoo… I would love a 50% off coupon! :)

1772

I’m sure you know this - but if you have a yellow ping you cannot start a game. It’s not the host just not wanting to start the game, it won’t start :(

Makes sense as it’s usually because there is a failed connection behind the scenes.

I don’t think a bad ping causes yellow - if it does then I guess those games may start

Tals

1773

I’ve gone back to playing custom games more and more. On the plus side, it does appear that a game will work more often. On the down side, by the time game loads up, it seems at least one person doesn’t make it in, if not more.

Less annoyances, but still there. Did find a couple of good games yesterday though, so that was good.

I can’t wait for clans and team joining. Assuming they get the rest of these connectivity problems worked out…

1774

I’m not sure the rule is “yellow ping = won’t start.” I think the rule is “all players not connected = won’t start” and that’s the most common source of the yellow ping.

Certainly I have seen a couple yellow pings in the lobby and had the game start. It may be that those were there because people weren’t connected, and then they got connected and the lobby window just was taking its sweet time updating that by turning the pings green. Who knows.

It’s a terribly uninformative bit of interface design. How is a person supposed to intuit what a yellow ping number means? If it’s critical the game not start (or it can’t start, or they can’t connect), shouldn’t it be red? Shouldn’t there actually be some text or something next to that player’s name in the lobby window saying “not fully connected” or something?

Hopefully the proxy system will alleviate this. I worry what it will do to the smoothness of play when you have people who have a 280ms ping already and are going to be going through a proxy.

1775

I am hoping that in six weeks they suddenly drop a patch that’s client/server and are just like, “Well P2P sucks, sure it theoretically has less lag but this is the internet so that never happens. Here’s 2 new Demigods and host your own servers. Peace.”

A man can dream, can’t he? A man can dream.

1776

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1777

Is this game all lobby based, or is automatch able to resolve the P2P connection problems behind the scenes?

1778

That is the idea, but it doesn’t work too well in practice, for whatever reason…

1779

Your link won’t work. I guess they won’t hotlink. I put in the URL and I gotta say…

nope. Actually, it’s not my connection that is one of the weird ones that simply won’t connect to certain other players for some reason. In fact, since last week’s patch and my router firmware upgrade, I’ve been able to connect very quickly.

But I’m not imagining it:
http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/352854/Pantheon_No_its_not_just_you

1780

Okay, it’s just that after taking a break from games for 5 years and seeing how great automatching has evolved, I shudder to think about kicking and lobbies anymore.