Working late into the evening, GPG has sent us an updated v1.01 build based on recent feedback on the forums.  Yes, GPG is reading the forums in case you were wondering and have put together some exciting stuff.

Here are some of the additional new features that will be in v1.01:

Here is a quote from the log:

· Fixed chat history and announcement text overlays interference with mouse clicks.

· Switched order of data calls after hosting.

· Teleportation effect failure handling.

· AI

1. Adjustments to caution and hazard detection and avoidance.

2. Adjusted health level flee percentage.

3. Demigods do not use minions when fleeing, may summon minions in combat.

4. Improved teleportation

5. Increased Demigod planning frequency

6. Improved item usage when endangered.

7. Tower tag improved.

And last but not least:..

· Moving targets in Ability task now properly handled (the famous “Sedna bug”)

This was finally isolated by bman654 who went beyond the call of duty to actually track down the specific lines of script that call the function.  Special kudos to him.

Although we didn’t use his “patch”, we did edit the exact functions he had isolated, and cleaned up quite a lot of surrounding script. The forums are expecting this fix, and we would love to encourage more excellent sleuthing like he did.

We’ll be testing this tomorrow. I can’t promise we’ll be able to get it out tomorrow though (and there won’t be any updates either way on Friday as that’s just playing with fire).  But we are going to try very hard and enlist extra QA from the apps QA team to expedite.

A very interesting video on media bias.

http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/The_Cost_of_Media_Bias/1736/6337/

Greetings!

we get letters… And so here are some answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: When is the Demigod demo coming out?

A: Soon.   Stardock and GPG are working on it.  Probably in the next 3 weeks.

Q: What will the demo have in it?

A: It will be online only (but you will be able to play AI players). It will have 1 map and 4 of the Demigods is what we’re thinking right now. Should be enough to get a taste of the game and make sure the online experience works well for those players.

Q: Speaking of online, so where does that stand?

A: Pretty good.  For custom games it’s fine.  For pantheon and skirmish less fine.  The proxy servers have helped tremendously.  We are nearly done with a rather cool (well I think it’s cool) smart proxy server chooser thingy (that’s a technical term) where, based on your IP address it figures out your latitude and longitude and then maps it to the nearest proxy server.

You still have some people who just will not, cannot talk to each other. I’ve personally seen it.  They can connect to other people but they can’t connect to each other.  Bear in mind, this happens in most RTSs. The difference with Demigod is that we have the connection dialog and we let people in the lobby as soon as they connect to the host.  If this were a different RTS, what would happen is you’d be in the lobby just waiting for more people to show up and thinking no one liked your game.  Anyone who’s ever played an RTS has certainly seen that.  Now you know one of the reasons why.  But in Demigod, it was decided that the host should be able to decide who stays or goes if someone can’t connect to someone. There’s pros and cons either way.

Now, in Pantheon and Skirmish, it’s a different story. There isn’t a “host” per se so if someone can’t connect to another for whatever reason, that’s a problem.  We’re working on a different way to create skirmish/pantheon games to resolve that.

But overall, at this stage, if you’ve played RTS’s before, you probably won’t have a problem with Demigod.  At this point, I would say that (especially for custom games) more people can connect in Demigod than in most RTSs because most RTS’s don’t have proxy servers.

However, that brings me to the next point.

Q: You say Demigod’s online play is fine now but I have a problem.

A: For that I say go to http://www.speedtest.net/ and check your upload speed.  Demigod requires a broadband connection defined as at least 256 kilobit upload and download to reliably play a 5 on 5 game.  A 3 on 3 game requires about 120 kilobit (about twice what an old phone modem does).  v1.01 should reduce this well below the threshold of low end connections.  But if you get a speedtest rating of less than 256 kilobit, you should stay with 3 on 3 games max unless you know how to make sure you’ve turned off other sources of uploading.

For example, it seems like everytime I run into someone whose complaining about “high in game ping even though it was fine in the lobby” it turns out to be someone with a DSL line that has 128 kilobit upload who also has a torrent seeder going on.  Don’t do that.

Also, we have not given up on “edge” cases.  The team at Stardock and GPG keep coming up with clever ideas to help more and more people. 

Q: When is Demigod v1.01 coming out?

A: Ideally Thursday but no promises as this week is a shortened week in the United States (Memorial Day was on Monday).  There’s a lot of changes in v1.01 so we have to do a lot of testing with it.

Q: When are more Demigods coming out?

A: We are discussing that topic this week with Gas Powered Games. Obviously we would like to see sooner rather than later.

Q: How are sales of Demigod?

A: The coupon we sent out has kind of muddled the stats since obviously sales were off the charts this past week digitally.  At retail they’re pretty close to what Sins of a Solar Empire did but the digital market has continued to grow which is making it harder to do apple and apple comparisons.

Q: When will Demigod be released in <insert country here>

A: Atari is handling Demigod outside North America. I’m not sure what the specific country data is.  You can visit Atari at www.atari.com for more information for your specific locale.

Q: What about more maps?

A: This is something we’re particularly interested in too.  I would personally like to see some duel maps (1 on 1).  I’ll have more info on this soon.

Q: <Demigod that beat me> is overpowered.

A: No it isn’t.

Q: <Player who beat me> is cheating.

A: No he isn’t.

Q: What are some things YOU (Brad) think Demigod needs to continue being popular long term?

A: I’m just speaking for myself here but these are some of the things I’ll be pushing for:

1. More Demigods, more maps.
2. Better community features. Ways to make it a more positive community.
3. Ways for pros to play pros and casual players to play casual players
4. Networking diagnostics built into the game to improve online experience for non-techies.
5. More items that provide strategic depth.

One of the things we really want to drive home in Elemental that we think will make it stand out is that a well equipped army is a big deal.

The Roman armies dominates much of Europe not because Romans were inherently better warriors but because they were well trained and well equipped.

Contemporary fiction tends to trivialize the significance of a non-industrialized society being able to train and equip 10,000 men with swords, plate mail, steel helmets, leather boots, etc.  But in reality, being able to do that is an incredible achievement.

In Elemental, your first turns will not be about designing and producing fully armored troops. On the contrary, when you see mounted units equipped with plate mail and swords we want it to give the same feeling as when you see the Mongols in Civilization show up with tanks on your island. It’s a big deal.

Because people in Elemental are a resource, it creates a lot of interesting choices on the type of civilization you want to build. You can, for instance, focus on having mass armies of poorly trained and poorly equipped peasants. These hordes might be able to conquer the world or they might meet a civilization that has a much smaller force but one that is exquisitely trained and equipped. That battle, which players can optionally fight in full tactical detail, should be breathtaking.

And of course, what I jut describe doesn’t even touch on the fact that we are talking about a world with magical items and beasts of almost unimaginable might.  As I’ve mentioned previously, someone gets ahold a dragon (and by a dragon I mean 1) that is a huge deal.  Nobody is going to be running around with a “throng” of dragons.

If you’ve ever read Tolkien’s Silmarillion you get an idea of just how mighty some of the beings in Elemental will be.  For those into that kind of thing, if you’ve ever wanted to know one of the inspirations for the Arnor and Dread Lords you can think of them as Maiar.

There are things lurking in the world of Elemental that are just breathtakingly powerful and rare. And rare, I mean that you may only encounter or hear of one maybe after months of playing the game.  We’ll talk about that more later though.

The point being, the armies of Elemental are truly going to be yours. You will have ultimate control over what kind of army you want to have. We’re very excited.

Life has been pretty interesting these past few months.

Besides the Demigod melodrama of having to basically assign my guys to take over Demigod’s multiplayer connectivity and stay there with them into the wee hours, I’m supposed to deliver a manuscript to a major publisher for a fantasy novel by the end of June.  I’m hoping to get an extension until the end of July.

Swarms

On Friday, one of my bee hives swarmed. I’d never seen that before.  Me and my friend Phil tried to get them but they took off before I could go into the Stardock storage area to pick up some bee hive nucs. 

On Saturday, I spent part of the day playing Demigod online.  I’m still pretty dissatisfied with v1.0.  I don’t trust the stats yet.  I look forward to v1.01 being out there so that I can play a bit more competitively.  I’m still working with my friends at GPG to make it so that if someone quits, their Demigod is gone and not replaced with a bot.  If people quit, they should be gone. AI should only take over if someone loses their connection for some reason.

Trees and Demigods

On Sunday, some of the guys  wanted to come in to work on code that we could insert into Demigod to make it smarter on handling proxies but I had to forbid anyone from coming to work.  One of the problems of working crazy hours is that it can become addictive.  And at this point, the only people who have connection issues with Demigod either have crappy ISPs or crappy routers (or even more commonly, can’t be bothered to turn off fort Knox level firewalls).  The proxies are taking care of them but the guys need to take a day off.

I spent Sunday getting more up to speed on a new weird hobby (because bee keeping isn’t weird enough I guess) and that is forestry.  I have a property with 13 acres of woods on it and there’s a lot of trees on it.  There’s various types of apple trees, yellow poplar, walnut trees, maple trees, and a number of fairly rare trees that certainly don’t seem very impressive but my Forestry friend from the university was very excited about.  It’s going to cost an arm and a leg to rehabilitate those trees though.  But I think in the long term it’ll be worth it (well not financially but for posterity).

I researched how to try to catch some of the swarms and found out that Lemongrass Essential Oil 2 dram in a box will help. We’ll see. I ordered some and maybe I’ll pick up some bee swarms. I also went ahead and bought a bee keeping veil for my son since social services says it’s “cruel” for me to have one for myself while my son gets stung when he’s helping me at the hives. I try to explain I’m building character or something. 

Power tools and police scanners

On Monday I started reading up on power tools. Now, I can’t build anything. When I’ve leveled up in life, I put all my points into increasing my nerd skills. So I’m a level 20 hacker, coder, spread sheet jockey, economic analyst, and flame war artist.  But I have no clue how to use the whacker to put spikes into wood.  I did some research on electric saws, drills, and nail guns. I didn’t buy any since I should probably up my insurance first.

Also today I ordered a Uniden BCD396XT Handheld TrunkTracker IV Digital Police Scanner as I’m ridiculously nosey and not brave enough yet to get into ham radios. This is what happens if you spend too much time on the Internet. Everyone you know is someone online and so human voices have to come through an expensive box. Plus, having gotten multiple tickets on I-75 up near West Branch I’ve gotten a bit fed up with the speed traps.  Yes, I could just go the speed limit but it’s straight, open roads, middle of the day no cars, and the 911 Turbo forces me to do things against my will.

Coding is life

When the book is written, I mean to get back to C#. But first I have to pick up and learn Python since I promised the team and fans that I would put a serious effort to let people mod my future AIs and since Elemental supports Python this is a good opportunity.  I’d love to also start modding Demigod, I don’t know LUA but it can’t be very hard.  I think its AI could be improved just by having more awareness of damage per second it’s taking and a few triggers to know when to flee to a safe spot to recover.

If I had more time, I’d like to learn how to make Demigods and Demigod maps. While the game’s launch was a total disaster, I feel pretty confident that its sheer excellence (Dota zealots not withstanding) will ensure it has a long-term audience that will only grow as long as we keep supporting it.

Hiring

This is the time of year we usually hire people. Michigan is at its best in the early Spring. But with all the crazy hours lately, we haven’t had a chance to hire.  A missed opportunity.  We’ll have to revisit it later in the Summer and see where we’re at.  There’s so much to do. 

It’s hard to believe, given everything Demigod has been through, that it’s only been available for about a month!

This week we’ll be putting the first significant update to Demigod through QA to see if we can get it out this week. v1.01 has all kinds of improvements to make the experience AFTER you get into a game much better.

But there’s some things we’re going to be looking at doing to improve the online experience before you get into a game.

Here are some examples:

1. We’d like to have the connection information dialog also display a performance rating. This is an issue that people are familiar with all the way back to the Total Annihilation and Starcraft days.

2. We’d like to display the skill rating right in the connection dialog. This will take a bit of doing on our part but I think it’s worth doing. That way, you get into a game where it’s 4 buddies ready to keep crushing 4 random guys and you can see what you’re getting yourself into.   It will encourage much more even games.  Few people like an imbalanced game experience.

3. Net connection quality.  Games usually just display ping.  But ping isn’t enough.  As we’ve seen from the Speedtest thread there are a surprising number of users who have incredibly poor connections (think barely better than 56k modem).   Some DSLs have 1megabit downstream but less than 150kilobit upstream.  There’s no way that person is going to have a good experience in a 5 on 5 game. And they’ll bring down everyone else.  So we need to find a way to calculate that and display it.

4. Karma.  Okay, this is a controversial thing to have so we’d love to hear from you guys on the best way to find out if a particular user is a griefer.  No system is perfect but I am sure we can think of  a way to make it so that people can do something about that.

Connection info in game

Another thing we’d like to do is have a way to easily make people in your games friends so you can grab them later.  We’ll be doing a lot of things in the coming months with the friends system. We hadn’t originally intended to deploy the Impulse friends system in Demigod at all as it was being designed as an Impulse Phase 4 feature but it became apparent in beta that we needed some way for people to interact. So you’ll see that sort of thing evolve a lot going forward.

One of my hives swarmed today. I chased them but they’re gone now. Rats!

Greeeeeeeetings!

Well tonight we updated the new network system a couple of times. Micro updates via Impulse are totally the way to go. 

Anyway, the proxy server system is working far better than anticipated. But to go any further with improving the networking, we need some changes that GPG is putting into v1.01 which I mentioned in a previous journal.  I don’t have a set day for that but I am hoping this next week. We already have the release candidate for it.

I was able to verify that tonight’s update does fix favor points and favor items as I finally started to be able to buy some better gear though I still prefer swift anklet to almost anything else.  I think more favor items are going to be needed down the line but that’s another story.

One of the things the Impulse team (which, as some know, was assigned the task of developing a new network connectivity system after the…unpleasantness of the game’s launch) wants to do is have the game more aware of when people are using the /serverproxyonly flag. 

Personally, I’m almost inclined to just have all games be proxied. The big fear we had was that it would add too much lag. But we’re not seeing that in practice. A number of people can hopefully attest that it has totally turned things around for them.  But it works best when everyone uses it.  The downside (for Stardock) is that obviously we have to pay for a bunch of bandwidth around the world. 

In my mind though, it’s simple economics. Stardock’s name is on the box. Nobody cares who made what or why there’s a problem. It’s our job to get in there and make good.

Coupons

The Demigod coupons went out today. There’s been some mixed reviews as some people didn’t understand the rationale.  The idea is that between launch and last week, there were a lot of people who just couldn’t play the game.  Those people could have asked for a refund but they didn’t. They stuck it out.  Now that the multiplayer connectivity is largely fixed and people can play (and yes, we know there are some people who still can’t but the # of games being played nearly doubled overnight since the Impulse team’s code was delivered so we know it’s working a lot better) we want to reward those people.

To everyone else, including people still having issues but have decided to stick it out, we are also going to be sending discount coupons to anything on Impulse.  A lot of the coverage has neglected to mention that part.

Weekend off

It’s supposed to be nice this weekend and it’s memorial day. The crew has the weekend off to relax and recover from the past month.  I don’t know how many games of Demigod I’ll have time to get in this weekend but I’ll probably be around.  If you hang out on the chat channel you’ll occasionally see me on there (make sure it’s an op with my handle and not some random person with a similar handle). 

A lot of the progress this week is thanks to a handful of people who have ISPs/routers that we weren’t familiar with. I won’t mention everyone but here’s a few shout outs:  Boxleitner, pugmastaflex, Dopefish, Gank, Hoverdisk, JudeTepes, Lionheart, MrRyan, and many others who gave us lots of helpful data that has made a big difference. 

Have a great weekend!

So how complicated (as internal critics put it) or sophisticated (as internal advocates put it) should the Elemental economic system be?

We have the code in for handling a pretty sophisticated/complicated economic engine.  But the debate is, is the system sophisticated? Or just complicated.

Let me give you the arguments of each camp.

Camp #1: “Sophisticated”

1. Everything in Elemental is a resource. Food, metal, swords, armor, horses, you  name it. 

2. Resources can be processed into other resources.  Iron Ore into a Sword.

3. Part of the fun of the game would be running a proper empire (or letting AI governors take care of it). 

Example:

A mine is built on an iron resource. The mine produces 10 units of iron ore per turn. That iron ore is then directed to go to the city of Torgeto where a blacksmith is able to produce 5 swords per turn. The unused iron ore is stored in a warehouse that can store up to 100 units of iron ore.

Those swords can be directed to be shipped to various other places (with sliders or other UI  means to determine what ratio goes where). 

In some of those places, the swords are issued to soldiers. In other places, the swords are sent to an alchemist workshop who, taking potions that have been shippped in from Wellford which in turn had taken Aeoronic crystal mined in another town to turn into those potions.  The resulting magical swords are then shipped out to various places with the player (or governor) able to control the ratio in which they are shipped.

Caravans appear on the map to show the items being shipped. If those caravans are attacked, the items are lost.

Camp #2: “Simple and Fun”

1. There are only natural resources (food, iron, crystal, horses, etc.).

2. When a natural resource is controlled, the player assigns that resource to a specific town.

3. Only that town can make use of it. Towns that don’t have a resource assigned it cannot build units that require those resources.

Example:

Unlike camp 1, there are no ratio sliders to mess with. A resource is assigned to a particular town. That makes certain towns more strategic than others and a lot less micro management.  On the other hand, it means that there will be many towns that can only build weaker units.   Players can research technologies that increase the base (weaker) unit that cities can build over time but some cities will simply be more important than others.

Caravans would still flow from the natural resource to the target town and if those caravans are attacked, the enemy player gains a bonus and the victim player would get a penalty to their production until the next caravan arrives.

The Argument

Camp 1 argues that a lot of fun can be had in putting together ever more sophisticated and specialized items. If natural resources can be processed into new resources that can in turn be processed again and again and again, you can reward players who might be able to equip elite crack soldiers with very rare but very powerful weapons and armor.

Camp 2 argues that while some people would enjoy that, it would result in a lot of people who would find that system burdensome and turn them off to the game entirely. It also says that those who do like the camp 1 system would still be satisfied with camp 2 where those who like camp 2 would probably be totally turned off if the camp 1 system were used.  In addition, they argue that Elemental has so much other “stuff” to it (sophisticated diplomacy, tactical battles, quests, etc.) that many players might find they have to rely on AI governors which would put a heavy burden on having really “smart” AI.

Now personally, I could go either way.  I do like the idea of players having to choose certain towns that are absolutely strategic.  But I also like the idea of being able to have “processed” manufacturing that can keep specializing things until you get some rare but very valuable things.

On the other hand, I’m also worried that a complex system could turn out to fall apart in actual practice (the user interface for it would have to be incredibly good) and then we’d be stuck having to go to camp 2 late in development.

What do you think?

UPDATE: 5/21/2009

Camp #3: The Merchant

Today we looked at the feedback from here and Quarter to Three and came up with a way that may satisfy both camps and increases the fun overall. 

1. Everything is a resource.

2. Resources can be processed into other resources (iron to swords, crops to food, crystal to potions).

3. Resources are sent automatically to other towns based on the resource needs of that town. No micromanagement, no AI.

4. The fun of this portion of the game would be in watching your empire grow organically.

Example:

There are no ratios to set. If I build a town with a blacksmith, then one presumes I did that because I want to produce stuff that requires a blacksmith. If I build (or upgrade) more blacksmiths, then one presumes this town is a place where I want to crank out a lot of stuff.

Similarly, if I build a town with multiples barracks it presumes I am trying to train soldiers which means that stuff should be shipped there, particularly if I’m in the process of building a particularly type of soldier.

Caravans (which aren’t player controlled) send out regular shipments of resources to the various towns.  When these shipments arrive, they’re available for use on demand or, if the town has a warehouse, they are stored.

When players design a unit, they choose a category of weapon and that category of weapon (whether in the field or in a warehouse) will automatically upgrade as my tech gets better.  A short sword doesn’t become a long sword or anything like that. But A short sword would automatically become a better short sword if I research tech that improves is in order to remove the complexity of having to “upgrade” units.  However, the cost of keeping a soldier in the field will be fairly high and since soldiers come from population, there’s a real down side to keeping throngs of soldiers idle.

In addition, by building roads, my caravans will arrive a lot quicker (3X faster).  Similarly, I have to keep my supply lines secure.

This also opens the door for a lot more trading. Rather than just having “food” you can have “crops”.  Crops are processed into food and can be traded with other civilizations or used by special buildings (Inns, restaurants, etc.) to increase prestige (which adds to influence).

It also allows players to have the game be very simple (just keep everything local) or highly sophisticated (have weaponry go through multiple processes – a magic sword processed by a Aereon Forge doubles its damage. The town with the Aereon forge is the one that would get on the priority list of magic swords and the Aereon blades produced would be sent to the town with the barracks that is producing your “Night Guard” or whatever you call your designed unit.

But in this way, there’s no real UI other than providing players the ability to close down shops in a city or expedite their priority to get more stuff sent to them. The player remains the king/emperor and not a logistics manager but at the same time is the architect for success of their kingdom’s economy if they so choose.

UPDATE: 5/23/2009

Camp #4: Quarter To Three concept

Having read a lot of posts both here and QuarterToThree we’ve thought of another way to do it that might be interesting.

1. Everything is a resource.

2. Resources can be processed into other resources.

3. Controlling a resource automatically makes it available throughout your empire at a basic level. The more resources you control, the more that basic level is provided.

4. If there is a road to a city that connects you to where the resource is provided, that city gets a bonus amount of that resource.

5. Cities can build improvements that have caravans deliver bonus amounts of that resource to that city from the source.

6. Cities can optionally build warehouses whose only affect is that they can store caravan deliveries for later use. I.e. if I’m not currently building death knights, I can store caravans of “stuff” so that when I do build them, I instantly get the bonus at that point.

Example:

I want my army to be filled with trained knights who have plate mail, steel swords, plate helmets, etc.  Those things are expensive. If I control an iron deposit, I can build them though any town with a barracks. Let’s say it will take 30 turns to create that unit.  10 of those turns is the training of the soldier and the other 20 is the production of the equipment.  If I control 2 iron deposits, that production is knocked down to 18. If I have a road that connects this town to the the iron resource (directly or indirectly) then I can knock it down another turn for each resource.

I can also build a blacksmith shop. By doing this, caravans will be sent from the iron resource production area to the town with the armory. When that caravan arrives, it will reduce the time even further.

Similarly, if I want to make a magic sword that requires Aegeon crystal to be turned into a magic potion then as soon as I build 1 Alchemist lab in any town, then any town can build magic swords at a base level.  If I build 2 alchemist labs, I won’t get any further bonus unless I control more than 1 Aegeon crystal.

So basically, it’s a much simpler system that provides fairly straight forward bonuses for players who want to create a more sophisticated economy.

Greeeeeeeetings!

Well tonight we updated the new network system a couple of times. Micro updates via Impulse are totally the way to go. 

Anyway, the proxy server system is working far better than anticipated. But to go any further with improving the networking, we need some changes that GPG is putting into v1.01 which I mentioned in a previous journal.  I don’t have a set day for that but I am hoping this next week. We already have the release candidate for it.

I was able to verify that tonight’s update does fix favor points and favor items as I finally started to be able to buy some better gear though I still prefer swift anklet to almost anything else.  I think more favor items are going to be needed down the line but that’s another story.

One of the things the Impulse team (which, as some know, was assigned the task of developing a new network connectivity system after the…unpleasantness of the game’s launch) wants to do is have the game more aware of when people are using the /serverproxyonly flag. 

Personally, I’m almost inclined to just have all games be proxied. The big fear we had was that it would add too much lag. But we’re not seeing that in practice. A number of people can hopefully attest that it has totally turned things around for them.  But it works best when everyone uses it.  The downside (for Stardock) is that obviously we have to pay for a bunch of bandwidth around the world. 

In my mind though, it’s simple economics. Stardock’s name is on the box. Nobody cares who made what or why there’s a problem. It’s our job to get in there and make good.

Coupons

The Demigod coupons went out today. There’s been some mixed reviews as some people didn’t understand the rationale.  The idea is that between launch and last week, there were a lot of people who just couldn’t play the game.  Those people could have asked for a refund but they didn’t. They stuck it out.  Now that the multiplayer connectivity is largely fixed and people can play (and yes, we know there are some people who still can’t but the # of games being played nearly doubled overnight since the Impulse team’s code was delivered so we know it’s working a lot better) we want to reward those people.

To everyone else, including people still having issues but have decided to stick it out, we are also going to be sending discount coupons to anything on Impulse.  A lot of the coverage has neglected to mention that part.

Weekend off

It’s supposed to be nice this weekend and it’s memorial day. The crew has the weekend off to relax and recover from the past month.  I don’t know how many games of Demigod I’ll have time to get in this weekend but I’ll probably be around.  If you hang out on the chat channel you’ll occasionally see me on there (make sure it’s an op with my handle and not some random person with a similar handle). 

A lot of the progress this week is thanks to a handful of people who have ISPs/routers that we weren’t familiar with. I won’t mention everyone but here’s a few shout outs:  Boxleitner, pugmastaflex, Dopefish, Gank, Hoverdisk, JudeTepes, Lionheart, MrRyan, and many others who gave us lots of helpful data that has made a big difference. 

Have a great weekend!