Demigod Server Issues

[TidusZ]

Everyone's seen there share of server/network issues with games that are newly released, but I think Demigod has taken the cake for me. I have high hopes for this game, still do, but right now I can't even log in, and when I was logged in, I could barely get into a game without the interface freezing up, creating bug reports, and at the best of times simply being very clunky. I still haven't gotten into a game after an hour and a half. Hopefully it accepts my login/pass and lets me in soon, apparently the website is down atm too.

 

[CottonRabbit]

Some of it may be because Gamestop totally messed up their release plans. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt for a few days (until my copy arrive from Newegg).

 

[Glitchny]

yea the server issues are most likely a result of the fact that the game is supposed to be released TOMORROW. Yet gamestop was retarded and started selling the game incredibly early. Which then forced stardock to sell it on Impulse early and caused all the devs who were supposed to have time off for Easter come in and try to get the servers up and running. Way to go gamestop.

 

[TidusZ]

There is no such thing as gamestop in Canada so I've never seen one, but I already hate them. I hate you gamestop.

 

[TC91]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
There is no such thing as gamestop in Canada so I've never seen one, but I already hate them. I hate you gamestop.

There should be gamestops in Canada. I know of at least one locally. Just bought Dawn of War II from there a few weeks ago.

 

[Dumac]

Wow, that sucks.

 

[TidusZ]

16 hours, that's how long since I finished downloading the game from impulse, and I've been doing my darndest to get in a game, with absolutely no luck. Inbetween attempts I've been playing 2vscpu on lan and the game has a lot of promise, particuarly if the networking is fixed and heros are balanced and added (and some bug fixes are done) over time. Pretty disappointed with the current state of affairs though. Game's multiplayer is nowhere to be seen, even at 4 am eastern.

 

[cirrhosis]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
16 hours, that's how long since I finished downloading the game from impulse, and I've been doing my darndest to get in a game, with absolutely no luck. Inbetween attempts I've been playing 2vscpu on lan and the game has a lot of promise, particuarly if the networking is fixed and heros are balanced and added (and some bug fixes are done) over time. Pretty disappointed with the current state of affairs though. Game's multiplayer is nowhere to be seen, even at 4 am eastern.

Sorry about your DLing time. It took me 30 minutes to get it from Impulse on Monday evening. I'm really digging the game - haven't had this much fun casually in a while.

 

[Ayrahvon]

So strange because the game was amazingly stable during beta when I played it. It already had stable multiplayer when it was shown at PAX last year as well (granted that was local). Hopefully they get the kinks worked out but my hopes of it replacing my terrible addiction to DotA have fallen the more I've played it.

 

[TidusZ]

Originally posted by: cirrhosis

Originally posted by: TidusZ
16 hours, that's how long since I finished downloading the game from impulse, and I've been doing my darndest to get in a game, with absolutely no luck. Inbetween attempts I've been playing 2vscpu on lan and the game has a lot of promise, particuarly if the networking is fixed and heros are balanced and added (and some bug fixes are done) over time. Pretty disappointed with the current state of affairs though. Game's multiplayer is nowhere to be seen, even at 4 am eastern.

Sorry about your DLing time. It took me 30 minutes to get it from Impulse on Monday evening. I'm really digging the game - haven't had this much fun casually in a while.

the download maxed out my connection and was very fast. It's the trying to get into a game that's now been unsuccessful for 28 hours.

 

[BladeVenom]

Originally posted by: CottonRabbit
Some of it may be because Gamestop totally messed up their release plans. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt for a few days (until my copy arrive from Newegg).

Gamestop is a bunch of moronic douches. Can't they be sued for screwing up like that. Their incompetence is making Gas Powered Games and Stardock look bad. They are also stealing business away from competitors by illegally releasing products early.

 

[Saga]

Oh my. Thank you for reminding me this was released. Just bought it, downloading at 888kb/s from home. Already 22% into the 1.88GB download.

Getting pretty excited. The hilarious thing is I was alt+tabbed out of a DOTA game waiting for full members in WC3 and stumbled across this.

 

[Auryg]

*sigh* The game is great, but I tried to get in to about 6 games tonight and had different problems with each. It's ridiculous. Luckily Stardocks CEO/President..I forget which, posted on the official forums already saying they're working on it. It's nice to have that much transparency from a company.

 

[TidusZ]

Ya, but I wish they'd post some ETA's on when we can expect to play online. A little information on what they see as the problem and what they are working on would be nice too.

 

[zerogear]

http://frogboy.impulsedriven.n...od_Day_0_Status_Report

Hi gang!

What an exciting day! I've spent literally the last 40 or so hours playing Demigod on-line or working with people on the Demigod in game chat to show them how to debug some issue or other with either their PC, their router, or some flaw in Demigod.

For those of you having trouble getting multiplayer games going, I apologize.

You know, funny thing about running a game developer/publisher. You look at every game that launches with some multiplayer connectivity problem or some server overload problem or whatever and think "Good grief, didn't they see this coming!?" Well, it turns out apparently that no, no matter how well prepared you think you are, there are always going to be issues.

While I can say that there are, even as I type, many hundreds of people playing online together, mostly in Skirmish and Pantheon games, there are many hundreds of others having trouble connecting to people in custom games or having skirmish or pantheon doing something odd due to the server overload.

We are working to address it and what I mean by that is that we intend to release another update this week to deal with as much of what we've found as possible.

It's too early to tell whether Demigod is going to match the success Sins of a Solar Empire has enjoyed. But we're pretty happy with early sales even if we're not totally satisfied with the game's network performance (which is not developed by GPG but by Stardock so don't blame GPG).

With the first official day of the game's availability almost over, I'd like to give you a status report on 4 critical issues we're working on addressing:

#1 Custom Games. The lobby and the NAT connection are seperate which, in hindsight, wasn't an ideal design decision. It's something that can be addressed but it'll take some days to do it. Basically, the connection system needs to be more like a lobby where the host can eject users who have problematic setups, slow ping times, etc. In any other game, if you create a game and you see a user who's got a slow ping, you'd eject them probably. But here, they have to first connect to everyone else. And that assumes their router isn't set up like fort knox whicha lot of users clearly have.

#2 You're connected but not in the game. This appears to be a genuine bug on our part. We're looking to address this and with any luck we'll be able to provide an updated build today or tomorrow. This is a very frustrating problem for users.

#3 The Pantheon / Skirmish games create uneven teams and such. This is mostly due to a lack of data for the system to work off of. When it was developed, it had a ton of beta tester win loss data to create balanced teams. Plus, from a "fun" point of view it was designed to try to get a skilled player versus 2 or 3 unski-er less experienced players as we found that pretty fun during the beta but the problem is, with everyone starting out with the same rating, it ends up with some bad results. This situation will iron itself out in the next couple of days on its own but now you know why it's happening.

#4 Server Load. We can't complete this list without talking about the overall server load Demigod's Pantheon and community features are using. A lot of this is simply volume but part of this is just finding areas where certain calls were being made too often. This will take a bit of time to address but I expect by the end of the week it'll be pretty responsive if not sooner.

As some of you know, we're all over the forums and on the chat channels hanging out.

So how can we make any of this up to you? Well, we've decided one way is to expand on something that our partners at Ironclad (developers of Sins of a Solar Empire) really got going when Sins came out and that is put a lot of "Stardockians" online to play multiplayer games with people later this week.

These Stardockians will be on to help show people how to play the game, give them tips and provide just a good online experience. For people who found themselves trying to get a game going today and couldn't due to server overloads or network connectivity, you'll be able to get a good game going with us.

Thanks for your patience. We'll keep you up to date!

Cheers



Brad "Frogboy" Wardell
President / CEO of Stardock

p.s. I'm on the chat channels if anyone needs me. Though I do plan to get some sleep in the next few hours once we have made some progress on an updated DLL for improving network connectivity.

 

[Auryg]

The one thing that worries me in that update is the comment about "And that assumes their router isn't set up like fort knox whicha lot of users clearly have. "

I'm sorry, but every at home router is 'set up like fort knox.' As far as I'm concerned, I shouldn't need to DMZ my computer to play a game..especially when I have roommates in the house that I'd like to play with online as well. Port forwarding is a hassle too and..ugh, to be honest, I think this is one of the main reasons why consoles are 'winning.' I rarely have to DMZ my 360 to get games working with my friends...each time we try to play stuff on PC we have problems.

 

[zerogear]

Auryg - setting up a router like fort knox meaning that you basically reject every incoming/outgoing connections besides the ones you've specifically set rules to allow, which, I don't see a lot of users doing.

 

[Auryg]

Originally posted by: zerogear
Auryg - setting up a router like fort knox meaning that you basically reject every incoming/outgoing connections besides the ones you've specifically set rules to allow, which, I don't see a lot of users doing.

I hope that's what he means by it, but I doubt it. Right now the game isn't working for pretty much anyone.

 

[TidusZ]

On the bright side I played 4 games over hamachi from 2v2 to 3v3 and it worked well and was a ton of fun. Nobody left on first blood either which was a change of pace.

 

[zerogear]

Just played my first game, after a little compatibility problem with COMODO Firewall was resolved, it was surprisingly fun, though I suck since I don't know what any of the skills do. I can see myself playing this game quite a bit.

 

[TidusZ]

I've played mostly torchbearer, with the -20% cooldown favor item, -15% cooldown flag, and the 4250 health/mana regen orb, you can do quite a lot of damage. Late game 1300 dmg fireballs with 4 second cooldown.

 

[Saga]

I've played all demigods a handful of times, but Regulus and Unclean Beast seem to have the most potential for outright ganking. Endgame regulus just has amazing range, stacked with speed increases, 25% or so lifesteal, and double-crit haste items he can crit for 2500 with wings out and run faster than you can run away. The only one that can even take more than a few shots of that is a HP buffered Rook and even he dies once his structure leech is used.

 

[CottonRabbit]

Stardock had some interesting things to say about launch day server problems:

After a marathon coding session with lots of server moving we were able to release a Day 2 update which, from what we can tell from both the logs and from talking to people in chat has made a drastic improvement in the multiplayer experience. In a nutshell, today?s update let us connect to a different multiplayer NAT facilitator than the original. This one isn?t touched by users who get the game at retail (or those who have a warez version of the retail).

Now, I do want to address something about the update that I?ve seen users talk about. We aren?t blaming piracy for the fact that the day 0 multiplayer experience absolutely sucked. The issue boiled down to us having put together a multiplayer infrastructure that was designed to handle around 50,000 or so connected users. If the game took off, we would simply add more servers as the load increased.

But what happened was that we ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers. Now, the roughly 120,000 users that weren?t running legitimate copies of the game weren?t online playing multiplayer or anything. The issue with those users was as benign as a handful of HTTP calls that did things like check for updates and general server keep alive. Pretty trivial on its own until you have 120,000 of them. Then you have what amounts to a DDOS attack on yourself.

So the day 2 update we released basically made sure legitimate customers were no longer being affected by those users. As a side note, no we can?t just eliminate the infrastructure being used up by warez users because they?re running the unprotected retail version and we can?t make a distinction between retail and pirated since there?s no copy protection. It?s not a huge deal in the long run (except to our metacritic score), it was just an unexpected challenge that made day 1 a very bad multiplayer experience.

What?s next?

So we still have lots of areas to improve the multiplayer experience such as dealing with European DSL stuff (one example) and we need to make the pantheon and skirmish stuff more robust and provide more feedback. The team is probably exhausted so the next update may not happen until next week since the day 2 update seems to have made a pretty big difference for the majority that I think we can probably take the weekend off.

But next week I expect we?ll have an update that addresses a lot of the above plus starts to look at balance and regular in-game bug reports and such that we?ve been collecting. Anyway, that?s all for now. I?m going home to sleep. No really, I mean it this time!

 

[Fenixgoon]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
I've played mostly torchbearer, with the -20% cooldown favor item, -15% cooldown flag, and the 4250 health/mana regen orb, you can do quite a lot of damage. Late game 1300 dmg fireballs with 4 second cooldown.

i played a game with dual torch bearers (1 fire and 1 ice).. we cleaned house against the other guys. but it's probably because everyone is new

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: CottonRabbit
Stardock had some interesting things to say about launch day server problems:

After a marathon coding session with lots of server moving we were able to release a Day 2 update which, from what we can tell from both the logs and from talking to people in chat has made a drastic improvement in the multiplayer experience. In a nutshell, today?s update let us connect to a different multiplayer NAT facilitator than the original. This one isn?t touched by users who get the game at retail (or those who have a warez version of the retail).

Now, I do want to address something about the update that I?ve seen users talk about. We aren?t blaming piracy for the fact that the day 0 multiplayer experience absolutely sucked. The issue boiled down to us having put together a multiplayer infrastructure that was designed to handle around 50,000 or so connected users. If the game took off, we would simply add more servers as the load increased.

But what happened was that we ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers. Now, the roughly 120,000 users that weren?t running legitimate copies of the game weren?t online playing multiplayer or anything. The issue with those users was as benign as a handful of HTTP calls that did things like check for updates and general server keep alive. Pretty trivial on its own until you have 120,000 of them. Then you have what amounts to a DDOS attack on yourself.

So the day 2 update we released basically made sure legitimate customers were no longer being affected by those users. As a side note, no we can?t just eliminate the infrastructure being used up by warez users because they?re running the unprotected retail version and we can?t make a distinction between retail and pirated since there?s no copy protection. It?s not a huge deal in the long run (except to our metacritic score), it was just an unexpected challenge that made day 1 a very bad multiplayer experience.

What?s next?

So we still have lots of areas to improve the multiplayer experience such as dealing with European DSL stuff (one example) and we need to make the pantheon and skirmish stuff more robust and provide more feedback. The team is probably exhausted so the next update may not happen until next week since the day 2 update seems to have made a pretty big difference for the majority that I think we can probably take the weekend off.

But next week I expect we?ll have an update that addresses a lot of the above plus starts to look at balance and regular in-game bug reports and such that we?ve been collecting. Anyway, that?s all for now. I?m going home to sleep. No really, I mean it this time!

Those darned pirates! Why can't they just go around playing with their eye-patch and repeating "Aaargh", instead of ruining the game experience for the rest of us?