Demigod Patch Released, Piracy Figures Revealed

Stardock and Gas Powered Games have pushed out a “day 2” v1.00.0093 update for Demigod, which addresses a few of the game’s pending issues.

Impulse Version: 1.0.48
Demigod EXE version: 1.00.0093

After a long night of connection server moving around along with a new ingame connection client, we are happy to release the day 2 update.

Change log:

+ Connection dialog now allows the host to eject players trying to connect.

+ New NAT Connection Server now isolated so not affected by general server load resulting in much faster, better connectivity.

+ Eliminated check for update on launching the game

+ CVP calls asynchronous (a server hicup on our side is a lot less likely to cause users to be disconnected)

Notes:

This isn’t a silver bullet. This is basically what Demigod would have been like on day 0 (minus the eject button) if the connection server wasn’t getting pounded.

That said, we’ve noticed some issues that you should be aware of that we plan to iron out this week including:

1. Because connections happen much faster in custom games, you can occasionally end up with players in the lobby that aren’t truly connected to everyone. Their ping will be yellow (or 0). The host will need to eject one of those players and have them rejoin.

2. This update does nothing for users who are behind a firewall or router that has ports locked. See http://forums.demigodthegame.com/345345 for tips in that area.

3. Obviously this is an update that we would normally want to run through a 2 or 3 limited beta since major surgery was done to the servers to reduce their load. But we felt strongly that we needed to get a release out that showed improvement for most people. We expect to release another update in the next few days once we can see the effect of the connection server in conditions we consider normal.

Good luck!

What’s really disturbing is that, according to a new status update, the game’s multiplayer issues literally wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for rampant piracy.

The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online at once. The system works.less well if there are tens of thousands of people online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, you get horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number of calls that are being made.

Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate. So anyway, we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly (ha ha pirate) message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy). Mind you, the game makes relatively few server calls, it’s just the sheer number of people.

And that’s why we see DRM in our PC games.