So we’re finally putting the last touches onto the much anticipated connectivity update. During the past few days, we’ve been documenting the whole experience so you guys can get an idea of how things have been this week.
Here’s a fun little preview:
![469292162[1]](https://draginol.stardock.net/images2009/Imfinallycool_AC5C/4692921621.png "469292162[1]")
Finally upgraded our network here at Stardock. w00t!
Updates at bottom
This will be a little rambling so hang in there.
Sales
Sales of Demigod have remained very strong. A lot of work was done this week to help Atari with the international release of the game. Reviews have been generally quite favorable. I loved the Xplay review in particular.
Overall, sales of Demigod are about where Sins of a Solar Empire is, far above Galactic Civilizations were at this point. But it’s way too early to tell the game’s overall success.
If you read the forums, it becomes pretty clear who the people are that have bought Stardock games in the past and people who are new to Stardock games. So let me address that here.
Many users say that the support of the game is up to the game’s developer only. Stardock, being only the publisher (we’re Paramount Pictures to Gas Powered Games’ JJ Abrams).
With Supreme Commander, THQ was the publisher. With Dungeon Siege, Microsoft is the publisher.
And while I won’t deem to speak on behalf of Gas Powered Games, I will say that the combination of developer and publisher makes all the difference in the world.
Game Updates: This week
From GPG’s side of things, we’ve gotten two game updates this week from developer Gas Powered Games and you wouldn’t believe how much they got done in a week. People with sound problems on lower end CPUs? No problem, GPG went back and re-did huge parts of the sound system and even the original tracks to help with that. Favor points and favor items? Both GPG and Stardock had to put in work to point things to the updated servers (those who have been reading this awhile know the issue there). Want your achievements stored on the server instead? Yep, they did that too (instead of a fragile local file). Even balance like Life’s child removing inner grace on Sedna, yep, changed. And that’s in one week.
When a developer makes new changes, they have to go through QA. Most publishers have a very specific (and increasingly finite) budget for post-release QA. So even if the developer makes some great change, the publisher may not release it because there’s no QA for it. On Stardock games, we have essentially no limit to how many updates we’re willing to do if the developer provides them. When Ironclad sends a new update for Sins of a Solar Empire, we put it through its paces and then release it.
Now one thing that helps with that big time is that Impulse (and Stardock Central before it) allow us to distribute updates marked as beta. This lets people who want to try the latest and greatest to get an early shot even if there might be bugs. There’s a beta of Demigod up right now that has new features and such but it also buggier than the released version.
We plan to refresh both the beta release and the release version this week still. The beta version will get the new Demigod build that GPG sent plus the connectivity updates. The release version will likely only have the connectivity update.
Game Updates: Near-Term
One of the best parts of publishing Demigod has been working with Chris Taylor. People ask me what Chris is like in “real life”. I can tell you he is one of the most awesome people I’ve ever met. He’s full of energy and boundless optimism which works as a great counter to me – I’m full of energy but I always filled with doom and gloom as my journal entries probably make clear. 
We’ve brainstormed on all kinds of ways to keep making Demigod cooler and cooler. Moreover, the GPG Demigod team is simply fantastic. Mike Marr, the lead designer is an incredible game designer. And I don’t say that lightly. Even if GPG people don’t post much on the forums, it’s only because they’re so busy reading them and doing something about them. They’re listening.
So one of the future updates we talked about is internally called Demigod: Clan Wars. This is where people will be able to form up clans and battle each other on the Pantheon. Think of it like the existing Pantheon except that instead of choosing light or dark, you’ve chosen a clan and your clan is on one side and another clan is matched against you with the system keeping score of who is winning.
Connectivity for people who have trouble connecting
Most of you know that my personal focus has been on the connection stuff which means a lot of these journal entries have focused exclusively on that. I apologize if I sound single minded but the issue is a big deal and must be solved. I’ve thrown everything we have at it these past few weeks and even added myself to it yesterday to start learning more about the architecture of these things. Next week, we’re flying the lead developer of Raknet (the network library licensed) to Stardock to work with on on this.
I’ve also been talking to the creator of Game Ranger about ways we can better work together. Those of you who know me know that I’m the opposite of “NIV” (Not invented here). My interest is in making sure people are having a fun with our games. Lots of people are playing Demigod games on Game Ranger right now without incident.
Answering some FAQs I get
I’ve been getting a lot of email and I did get a chance to read some of them (sorry to all of you I don’t respond to, I’ll try to do better when I’m back to working normal-ish hours).
Q: “Stardock is exagerating[sic] Demigod’s MP issues in order to get press coverage! The game’s MP works fine!!!111!”
A: Well first off, I don’t subscribe to “any publicity is good publicity”. Second, sure, most casual people loading up the released version, hitting skirmish or pantheon or playing with a few friends online works fine. But the FACT is, the built in matchmaking is NOT fine. And the match-making not being fine has nothing to do with piracy (we lost a week because of having to migrate servers due to it but that’s a different issue). The MP match making is not fine because it doesn’t handle the number of users trying to use the currently architected NAT system acceptably. The solution is to re-architect it but as people reading these journals know, it’s not something that can be done quickly.
Q: “The MP match making in Demigod is no worse or better than any other typical RTS [insert game here].”
A: The experience is worse because those other typical RTS’s have a lot more single player content. As a result, a lot of people who don’t normally play online are attempting to do so. Second, IMO the custom game handling in Demigod is worse than other RTSs in that the custom game match making is flakey and frustrating. In other RTS’s it tends to work or not work.
Look, folks, if you release a game that is MP centric and has built in match making it just “has to work”. No one forced us to make Demigod so reliant on MP match-making. There was no gun to our head. So it’s up to us to just “make it work”.
Q: Stardock mentioned sending out 50% off coupons for Demigod to people who bought the game before May 11th. When will those go out?
A: Probably end of next week.
Q: What else does Stardock plan to do for Demigod players?
A: Our focus mid-term will be to keep growing the MP community of Demigod. So what we’ll be doing is sending lots of unique coupons to players. I.e. N% off on anything on Impulse type stuff. So users who are active in Demigod will keep getting lots of heavily discounted stuff.
Q: What can I expect this weekend?
A: If you are willing to try the beta versions, we expect to release build 111 of the EXE along with our connectivity updates. If you prefer the released version, we expect to release just the connectivity update.
Q: What should my expectations be of the connectivity update?
A: We’ve had to scale them back a little bit. We had a huge breakthru last weekend but the time to take us to integrate that into Demigod itself is not incredibly fast (we’re external to Demigod so a lot of tricks have to be used to do some of what we do). But below are some of the things we expect the new connectivity update to do:
Q: What about the proxy servers?
A: The proxy servers are up. However, the connectivity update does not use them. A subsequent one will but the proxy servers won’t be useful until we solve the “flakey” issue I mentioned earlier but many people who think they will need a proxy server may find the update works for them.
Q: What about Pantheon and Skirmish?
A: The plan is that people who don’t have much experience will have bots in their games and people with experience will only play against other humans. This determination is based on who is selected as “host”. We want to make this more flexible in the future but we’re currently having the situation where new players like having bots and people who know what they’re doing don’t. When we do clan wars, bots will not be allowed at all.
More to come as the day progresses.
Update: 9:48pm
This evening we got an even newer build from Gas Powered Games that addresses the issue of Demigods not chasing after a target after using an ability. Since this change has been so heavily requested, we're going to integrate that into the beta build. Once we finish integration and testing, we'll begin distributing it to our server farms. We're still looking pretty good for this evening though - that's famous last words. -Brad
Well, it’s apparently Thursday at 9:18am. The dev team here is still here working on “Wednesdays” beta update. As some of you know, while there have been updated to Demigod, we have not released any connectivity updates to the game yet because once we realized the architecture for the MP was inadequate, we concluded we needed to redo it. We’re pretty close (that’s why we’re still here, it’s like a game in itself – one more turn…one more compile and then it’ll be ready).
We’ll keep you posted.
Update 10:54am, Thursday
So as you know, we’re working on improving the included MP match making. What we have now is a night and day difference for most users.
So what’s the issue?
Early on, a design decision was made that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time but is making getting this new system harder to debug. That is, the Raknet library connects a player to another player and then hands over the socket to Demigod itself. Once in the game, they are connected using a different port (that’s why Demigod uses more than one port currently). The problem is, the server is still trying to connect to the user on the old port and when it can’t it disconnects them after a time out. Seems pretty trivial to fix (or at least it did to us) but that’s where we’ve been stuck for the past several hours is trying to figure out why it’s not removing the old record from its database.
So we’re pretty spent at this point so we’re going to hand it off to the next crew and pick it up after we get some sleep. It’s frustrating because it’s so close and it’s such a major improvement both in terms of speed (you get into the lobby in less than a couple seconds), reliability, and scalability (this should be able to handle huge numbers of connections). But we can’t seem to get the bloody thing to remove the outdated record with the host’s old port address.
Example:
Joe on 10.1.1.10:6112 hosts a game.
Alice on 192.168.1.10:6112 joins.
The two connect and the socket is handed to Demigod and we’re connected to each other on port 6112 inside of Demigod.
Now, we start listening for more people to join and the port becomes 6114 for both of us. But server still has a record of Joe on 10:1.1.10:6112, can’t ping it, declares him dead and no longer sees the user at all.
Like I said, it seems trivial to solve. At 3am, we were certain it we’d solve it in a few minutes. And at 11:05am (now) we are still there.
Now, a network savvy person (someone not me) will likely say how silly it is that it hands off the socket. Both Stardock and GPG agree. It was one of those decisions made long ago that is annoying and is being addressed in parallel.
Which is something else I should point out: Think of the support of Demigod occurring in 4 parallel mini-teams.
You have team 1 which I’m directing which is focused on making the MP matchmaking in Demigod work well very very soon as in, by this weekend. BTW, favor points are fixed here now. This update will allow lots of people who can’t currently connect to connect (i.e. we had a lot of success with people who have never been able to connect).
You have team 2 which is headed by our chief architect (the Impulse team) that is working on better solutions but ones that will take longer (>a few days but < a month) which include things like the proxy servers, a more robust skirmish/pantheon match making system that takes ping into account rather than geographic location, supports larger teams, eliminates bots from experienced player matches, eliminates the multiple ports, and a ton of other things.
You have team 3 which is headed up by the lead engineer at Gas Powered Games. He’s working on things like making performance better for low end systems, adding modes so we can do Demigod: Clan Wars (free DLC for this Summer), implementing more robust rules for competitive play, bug fixes, etc.
And then you have team 4 which is headed up at GPG to work on new content and balance changes. New items, new Demigods, game rule changes, updated abilities, new maps, and so on.
Since I write most of the blogs, you mostly hear about Team 1.
Anyway, stay tuned. In the meantime, have fun!
Here’s an interesting easter egg that I didn’t know about. You can drop items for others to pick up by just right-clicking on the item in your item bar.
This post here gives a good understanding of where we’ve been.
But here I want to discuss the technical issues that have plagued the built in MP match-making.
I’m going to start this by sounding like a weasel but it is also the truth: The Demigod MP match-making is basically the same as nearly every other RTS out there. It’s no better or worse. The difference – the fatal difference – is the demographic of who is trying to play multiplayer is radically different and the number of people playing multiplayer is radically different. In short, Demigod’s built in MP, as it is today and has been since launch, is no better or worse than other RTSs on the market today.
Now, before some of you hit the flame key, let’s talk about why the experience of people using the built in MP match making has sucked so bad.
First person shooters vs. Real-Time Strategy Games
In games like Call of Duty or Counterstrike or Left4Dead, you are largely dealing with people picking a server from a list, typically based on ping time, and joining it. The only connection one needs to make is to that server and that server has typically been set up to be as easy to connect to as possible.
In a real-time strategy game, like Supreme Commander or Company of Heroes the connections are peer-to-peer. Each player has to connect to each other player.
GPGNet (Supreme Commander)
In Supreme Commander, Gas Powered Games developed GPGNet. The way it worked is that a person would create a game. Subsequent people would connect to the host and then enter the lobby. The game would then try to connect each of the players up and if they failed to connect to one another, they would get a yellow ping and the host would have to eject them.
However, the demographic of Supreme Commander is significantly different from the demographic of Demigod (as SupCom players here can probably tell you). Casual players of SupCom played mostly single player and the people who played SupCom online tended to be technically savvy and knew to port forward 6073 (that’s the port it used). And people who didn’t know what they were doing either quickly got ejected from games or learned to set up their routers.
Demigod
Demigod’s setup is similar to GPGNet with a couple critical differences. First, to get into the lobby you currently have to connect to everyone who is in the lobby before getting into the lobby. However, if you enter the lobby at the same time as someone else, you will get a yellow (or red 0) ping to them. If you can’t connect to them, someone will have to leave and try again or need to be booted out.
Super NAT
To improve connectivity we worked with RakNet to develop a kind of Super NAT Facilitator. The idea is that we would make it so that everyone could connect to each other and avoid the whole "people need to open their ports” thing entirely because we knew Demigod would be a multiplayer heavy game. Unfortunately, the system developed is resource intensive on the servers and when thousands of people showed up, the system started to fall apart.
The result is that people could not connect to people easily inside of the lobby because of the increasing lag (not ping lag but lag from the servers being overloaded) and users would just sit there waiting in frustration to get into a game.
During the first week, we basically lost out because of the well known warez users hitting validation and check for updates so we couldn’t even begin to dig into the issue of the NAT servers being overwhelmed until last week.
Super NAT fails
But we have encountered edge cases that have turned out to be catastrophic. Over the past year it seems, an increasing number of ISPs (we believe, we don’t have proof so I’m not naming names here) are trying to shape their bandwidth use and doing things that make peer-to-peer connections more problematic (bit torrent uses P2P).
The net effect is that some people can only literally connect to 1 or 2 people and are then blocked by their ISP. So what happens? Other people try to join a game and they cannot connect to that guy who is in the lobby because that guy can’t accept any more connections. So then the Super NAT goes into play to try to find a way which in turn takes more and more resources on the NAT. You get even a handful of those types of users and it gets to be a real problem.
Blocking Port 6000
Then we find out that some routers block incoming traffic to port 6000. If you very quickly get a “NAT connection failed” that is why. You will need to tell your router to knock it off – port forward UDP traffic from port 6000 to your IP (or just have it unblock that port). I only know of a few routers that do this (Some Dlinks for instance).
So why is this taking so long to fix for those people?
The reason we have to connect to players in the lobby before putting them into the lobby is because Demigod, not us, handle the in game connections. We hand off the connection (the socket) to Demigod once users are connected. So we’ve had to spend time developing something that will let us connect people who are in the lobby even which is some very specialized coding.
We have also had to work on setting up Proxy servers for people who just can’t connect and that’s been no trivial thing either.
The build we put up tomorrow is expected to let people get into the lobby as long as they can connect to the host and then connect people once they are in the lobby first by trying direct connect (that’s if you port forward 6000 to 6200 to your PC’s IP) and then if that doesn’t work to use NAT facilitation and if that doesn’t work Proxy servers. But it’s complex with a lot of moving parts being developed by a team that has been working non-stop for weeks.
Will everyone be happy?
No. Because there are people out there for whatever reason just can’t connect to other people on the Internet. There aren’t many of them but at least we can work with them and see what we can do without those users impacting everyone else.
So that’s where we’re at.
Personally, I think this kind of stuff should be built into the OS. As a game developer, I can’t even begin to express how frustrated I am that we have to do all this. If this were an Xbox game or a PS3 game, we wouldn’t have to do any of this. We’d simply hand the user off to the manufacturer’s already included super mega system and it would take care of it. I could rant for hours on (as you can imagine, I’m extremely tired) how ridiculous that our reputation, game reviews, and our technical competence are being brought down based on how quickly we can implement something that should already exist by the OS maker (maybe Games for Windows Live will eventually evolve into this I hope).
We expect to put up a new BETA of this tonight and if all goes well release it tomorrow afternoon. That’s the plan. It’s not a promise. Given what I’ve learned in the past 3 weeks, when it comes to Windows networking, router manufacturers, and ISPss never assume anything.
Before a hundred posts drown the forums:
The main build of Demigod (public) has been slightly updated to prepare for the Proxy server move that is scheduled for Thursday.
The beta build of Demigod (for those who turn on "show pre-release" in Impulse) will get a new Impulse Reactor that tests DIRECT CONNECT. This build is only useful for those who have proper port forwarding otherwise it'll cause you pain.
The "big day" is Thursday afternoon, EST.
Our story so far...
The initial release of Demigod was marred due to us not taking into account pirates trying to get validated when we set up our network infrastructure. This resulted in the multiplayer game being basically unplayable which resulted in some pretty negative first day reviews.
48 hours later, we set up an alternative network for legitimate players, released a Demigod update and most people were able to connect - but with a big catch:
Demigod also debuted with a technology internally referred to as "Super NAT". The idea was to let people be able to connect to other people without having to mess with routers or anything. And it worked great in theory. In the beta, we noticed that the connection servers required a lot of resources to do their thing quickly. No problem, we added more servers and added still more again for the release. But that turned out to have been a vast under-estimation still as it wasn't a linear progression but an exponential one.
So over the past 2 weeks, we ditched what we had and started from scratch. Late last week, because we realized that time is of the essence, the Impulse team at Stardock got assigned to the project and we began to use Impulse tech to build something new.
The new system supports Direct Connection (which is pretty traditional - port forwarding). If that fails, it will use NAT negotiation. And if that fails it'll hook up to a series of Proxy servers to handle it.
Tonight
The proxy services will not be in tonight's build because of the lateness and we don't want to put that up and then leave for the evening only to wake up in the morning, go over to Shack News or Voodoo Extreme and see a headline "Stardock's Network becomes sentient, begins world conquest!" or something. So we'll wait until Wednesday during the daylight hours to turn that part on.
We are marking this build as a BETA still since it's so late into the evening we don't want to take any chances.
Expected Results
This update isn't the end all, be all update. This week is the week of putting this pain behind us. Tonight's update is just the first step. Without the proxy, you'll still have people who will fail on the NAT and we are sure, given the sheer quantity of changes, that there will probably be some problem in there since we've had to take out most of the licensed code and replace it with Impulse code. But based on what we're seeing it should be much better for most people.
If you are one of the people who it doesn't work for, hang in there. If you are part of the majority who is having no problem with Demigod, I realize that we keep focusing on connectivity versus game enhancements or improving the Pantheon and such it's just that my first priority is to make sure everyone can play the game online as well as single player.
The team at GPG and at Stardock are already working on v1.01 which will have the kinds of new features and such our users are used to seeing in Stardock games. But we have felt it would be in bad taste to talk about new features while there are people who couldn't play online so I hope you understand why we've not been talking about that yet.
Testing
So now we’re testing it with people on the chat channels and learning lots of things that we can now pass on to you.
Below are some suggestions for connecting faster. You don't have to do them but they will make a huge difference in how fast you connect and how widely you can connect to other people.
First if your router has an SPI “firewall” you may find you have a better experience if you turn it off. SPI firewalls provide good protection against random packets coming in but the downside is that on some consumer routers, it will prevent you from directly connecting to another player forcing the NAT servers (which are far slower) to pick up the slack.
Next: You need to make sure your router is port forwarding to ports 6100 through 6200 to whatever IP address your computer is using. Don’t assume your machine is that IP address because there’s a good chance it’s not.
If you do these things right, you’ll be able to DIRECT-Connect with the new Impulse Reactor we’re releasing tonight. If you don’t, it will fail over to the new Impulse Reactor NAT negotiation system we’ve been working on the past 2 weeks which is a thousand times better than what we already have out but it will slow everyone down.
If THAT fails, then it really gets painful because then you’re going to be sent over to one of the Proxy servers. These sound great in theory and they have the nice advantage of working basically 100% of the time but it will probably take us weeks to set up enough of these to make everyone happy because we have to locate them near you otherwise lag will be high.
If you're afraid of port forwarding go here: http://www.portforward.com/
ONCE IN GAME
The next thing we’ve discovered: There is a lot of software out there now that packet sniffs. Anti-virus programs even Google Desktop. How do you know if something is sniffing packets on your system? The game will stutter – go for a couple seconds, then pause a bit, go for a couple seconds, pause, and so on. There’s not much we can do on our end to stop that. You can try lowering your graphics settings but odds are, someone you’re playing has something that’s sniffing through your packets and slowing things down. And it only takes one person in the game to have this to make it stutter for everyone.
BTW, in the 10 person game we were playing, *I* was the one with the firewall applet I had forgotten to turn off that was monitoring packets. So it can happen to the best of us.
The update status
So they’re putting it together now. It’ll still be a couple hours because of all the uploading that has to do. Everyone’s very excited.
Again: If there are any IT people hanging around reading this, I’m not a network guy but I am being told by people that the fact that the entire backend for this game has been completely re-designed and re-implemented in 2 weeks is super insane.
Once this is up, our team will be talking at length at what was learned. What I keep being told is this: What works fine for 500 people can totally fall apart for 5,000 people and that’s what we’ve run into in a nutshell for these past 2 weeks.
Known bugs
Tonight's build does have an annoying bug in that it says Sim speed is 0 for you so you can't tell how well you're running. We've informed GPG and it'll get fixed in an upcoming update.
Favor points should acrue without a problem with tonight's build as well.
Check it out:
Okay, I now feel confident in publicly saying that I think that the connectivity issues some have had is going to go away next week.
Here's what we've built:
1. If you open ports 6112 to 6200 and port forward them to your IP on your router (this is for people who are familiar with this stuff) you'll get what is called direct connect.
2. If you don't do this, we will try to do a quick NAT connect. This takes longer but works for most people.
3. If NAT fails, you will be connected to our Proxy server system. This is not going to be super desireable at first because the physical location of the Proxy server is going to make the difference between a good and a lagfest. When the proxy server is nearby (east coast US player for instance to the east cost proxy server) it's perfectly good. But, for instance, if you're in Japan and it uses a proxy server in Singapore, you're adding 200ms to your latency which can make the game a total lag nightmare. so this is clearly your last result.
...
Now, right now, the current version of Demigod uses a connectivity server that ONLY does option 2. That's because it was decided early on that users shouldn't have to open ports. This, IMO, should NEVER have been the first option because when you force even technically sophisticated users into this system, you end up having a LOT of unnecessary connections to these NAT servers.
...
So, I feel confident that this next week is going to be the turning point for those people who have had connectivity difficulties PLUS the whole range of stat stuff, pantheon stuff, etc. will all come into line as well because, as I've said elsewhere, because the connectivity thing was our #1 priority, everyone, including the people who would resolve favor items and favor points and accurate win/loss stuff have been pulled onto this.
Heck, this past week, I had the ART team from Elemental working on doing benchmarks for speeing up NAT (That's where we finally concluded that NAT, for P2P is just feasible when there's thousands of players, it would simply require so many NAT servers, located around the world, to make it not totally awful that it wasn't financially logical - we'd be better off just hosting all the traffic which is better anyway).
..
We absolutely do not want to do any more "betas". The betas don't really solve our problems. We're getting rave emails from people in support today saying how this beta "totally fixes connectivity". NO, it doesn't. The only reason it seems that way is because there's so fewer people using the beta servers. If you check impulsereactor.dll, it's still the same one from day 0. So the betas don't really help because it gives us the same false sense of success that the actual open beta had.
The other problem with the beta is that it splits the multiplayer community which is really a problem. Right now, the Demigod MP community is fragmented. You've got a ton of people on Game Ranger. a Bunch of people on Himachi, others on Demigod release and some on the beta. And you get some very poor results hwen you play Skirmish or Pantheon or just find games.
..
Now one of the things that I've always been painfully aware of in online games is that you need a critical mass of users to make it work. With Demigod, we have some plans on how to make sure there's always lots of people to play with once the MP is bullet proof both in terms of connectivity and stat tracking. As someone who has been ejected from a pantheon game during connection, I know we have to do some QUICK changes to some of this stuff in order for the MP experience to have any integrity.
First, one of the things we did is we have everyone's email address who has updated the game. When we start the next-gen pantheon with favor points, achievements, favor items, stat tracking, disconnects dealt with and of course bullet proof MP (all of which I expect to be done this week) we will email everyone letting them know where we are at.
Second, the Stardock marketing push will actually begin. After that day 0 debacle with the MP connectivity being so crummy, I made marketing halt all Demigod marketing efforts. Those will go into high gear probably in the third week of May.
Third, and this is where we need your help: The demo. We will be working with GPG on the demo but I was thinking of proposing that the demo for Demigod be multiplayer ONLY. Moreover, I would like the demo players to be able to play online with legitimate players. Here's where we need your help: What do you think would be a good way to limit this demo then in order to get people to still buy the game?
Fourth, we plan to start formal Demigod tournmants with cash and prizes for the winners.
Fifth, Stardock is working on an update to Impulse Reactor that will allow people to have more control over the types of people people are matched up with. Think of it being like eHarmony but for gaming. You'll be able to describe the type of gamer you are and the match making system will pick out people for you. This feature is actually being developed for Elemental but because Demigod uses Impulse Reactor, it'll get that for free.
Sixth, Stardock moderators will soon be introduced into the online community. This will probably happen in mid-May. The idea is, if we have forum moderators, why not multiplayer ones? Their job will be to provide enjoyable multiplayer experiences (i.e. good sports, skilled player, etc.) PLUS they will be able to add or subtract in-game karma from players. People who are just nasty or horrible to other players will lose karma points. People who are good sports and good citizens will get points. Those with higher karma will tend to get matched up. Yes, we know this is controversal. Players will see the karma as part of their account and there will be a way for users who feel they were unfairly negated to appeal.
Seventh, all people who have bought Demigod at retail or direct up May 10th (and didn't return the game obviously) will be getting a coupon that will let them purchase a second copy of Demigod for 50% off for a limited time as a way for us to show appreciation for this community that has put their faith and trust in us.
Thanks everyone!